Writing
Tagged “hardware”
4 articles
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The Legacy of Early Microprocessors
Last month Zilog took its last orders for the standalone Z80, a chip designed in 1976 and still in production nearly fifty years later. The Z80, the 6502, the 8086 and 8088, and the Motorola 68000 built the personal…
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The History of AMD64 aka x86-64
Intel planned to take the PC to 64 bits with Itanium, a clean break from x86. AMD bolted 64 bits onto x86 instead, and won so completely that Intel had to license its rival's design. How that happened, what AMD64…
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The History of ARM Architecture
A two-person design team at a British home computer maker built a processor so frugal it ran on leakage current. Forty years later its descendants are in nearly every phone on Earth, Amazon's data centers and, as of…
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The History of x86 Architecture
The 8086 was meant to be a stopgap. Forty-six years later its instruction set runs most of the world's servers and PCs, carrying every decision ever made about it. How a rushed 16-bit chip outlived everything designed…