50 years in electronics: Hall of Fame - Microprocessors
It took Intel three years to design its first microprocessor in 1971 and with its x86 architecture it has produced the world’s most commercially successful microprocessors. It developed other technologies including flash memory, SRAM and DRAM. But it has yet to make the same impact on wireless chip technologies.
Motorola (now Freescale) Semiconductor came into being in the 1950s and by the 1980s its 68000 microprocessors were competing with x86 processors in the personal computer market, being designed into Apple Macs. In 1991 it designed the PowerPC processor in collaboration with Apple and IBM. The chip business left Motorola and became Freescale in 2003.
The ARM microprocessor, or the Acorn RISC Machine, originated in 1983 as intellectual property (IP) owned by Cambridge computer firm Acorn, but licensed and made by other chip companies. Designed as a low power, low latency reduced instruction set (RISC) processor, ARM1 was made by VLSI Technology in 1985. ARM is now the most commonly used processor in mobile phones with billions of chips shipped by licensees each year.
The second British designed microprocessor of the 1980s, the transputer, was not as successful as the ARM despite its ground-breaking parallel processing architecture. The first devices, T212 and T414, where produced by Inmos in 1985. It proved to be an idea ahead of its time and struggled to win design-ins. Design work stopped and Inmos was sold to SGS-Thomson (now STMicroelectronics) in 1989.
In the 1980s IBM was the largest producer and purchaser of semiconductors in the world. Before 1992 all its chips were for its own use. The first processor it sold on the market was the PowerPC designed with Motorola and Apple. It repeated the collaborative approach in 2005 with Cell, one of the first highly parallel processors, designed with Toshiba and Sony for the games consoles market.