Welcome to 2013!  2012, was a busy year here at the CPU Shack Museum. We added 716 new processors/EPROMs/MCUs, which works out to an average of 2 new chips per day.  This includes 16 New in Box Processors. We also added 53 new Graphics Processors, which isn’t bad for something we only collect on the side.

Some processor highlights (in no particular order, click to enlarge):

Here is a HP/Compaq 21364 1300MHz, this was the end of the road for the DEC Alpha architecture.  It was killed off in favor of the Itanium, for better or for worse.

The IBM POWER5+ MCM is a stunning chip to look at, clocked at 1.9GHz its a dual core with on package L3 cache

An Intel MG80387-16 SM156 US Military MIL-STD-883B spec math co processor for the 80386 processor.  Made in 1990

Going back in time further is this East German (MME) 80A CPU, a clone of  the Zilog Z80 made in 1991 (copied before unification, produced after, for this example).  Its always neat to see the white ceramic package, even well into the 1990’s.

NexGen was a company that became victim of the wild processor wars of the 1990’s.  It was bought out by AMD which used its designs as the basis of the very popular and successful AMD K6.  Here is a very uncommon 133 (rated) without FPU.  Later they made a version with an integrated FPU.

And to get all the way to ‘Z’ we shall go to the Zoran ZR36762.  Its a DVD controller SoC, with Dolby Digital support.  Not something one sees and thinks of as a processor.  However at its core, even in 2004, it is not an ARM, its not a MIPs, its a high speed (67MHz) Turbo186, the same 186 architecture Intel released in 1982, still being used, albeit in CMOS.

In the next few days I’ll post some EPROM highlights, then some GPU highlights.  2013 is already off to a great start with new chips coming in each week.

z12 MCM Layout

“We are hitting the limits of physics in many cases”  These words, spoken by an IBM engineer about the new zEnterprise EC15 mainframe do well to describe the processor that runs it.  The z12, as we’ll refer to this processor, replaces the z196 as IBM’s top performer.  The z196 ran at a slothly 5.2GHz, the fastest commercial processor in the world until now.  The z12 runs at 5.5GHz and was designed to be clocked up to 6GHz.  It is made on a 13layer 32 nm High-K process (the z196 was made on a 45nm process).  This allowed a doubling of logic and cache density.

The EC12 is designed  with single thread performance in mind.  While many systems today focus on massive parallelism, and optimizing code for multi-threading, some tasks do not work well that way, data analytics, batch processing etc, are fundamentally serial processes, so less cores, and more speed per core is far more important.  The z12 is based on a MCM (Multi-chip module) that contains 6 Processing Units (PUs) and 2 Storage Controllers (SC, which contain 196MB of L4 cache each) for a total of 8 dies on each MCM.  Each PU contains 4, 5 or 6 active cores.  The MCM is a 103-layer glass ceramic substrate (size is 96 x 96 mm) containing eight chip sites and 7356 land grid array (LGA) connections.

IBM zEC12 6-core PU – 2.75 Billion Transitors – 5.5GHz

Each PU chip has 2.75 billion transistors. Each one of the six cores has its own L1 cache with 64 KB for instructions and 96 KB for data. Next to each core resides its private L2 cache, with 1 MB for instructions and 1 MB for data respectively.

Read More »

Intel D8088 - 1981 Production

Hard to imagine its been 30 years since IBM released the 5150 Personal Computer for the grand sum of $1265 thus starting the flood of PCs.  Build with generic hardware, and MS-DOS from Bill Gates and crew (itself only released a month prior), the 5150 did away with proprietary, the MS-DOS OS was not exclusive to IBM, and the hardware was essentially off the shelf, using Intel’s 4.77MHz 8088 (cut down version of the 8086) processor and a discrete 256k of RAM.  Other companies, could, and did, in mass, replicate and add to the 5150 making the 8088, and with it the x86 instruction set the de facto standard even to today. (though ARM has been making a large impact as of late due to the rise of mobile computing)

Here is an early add for the 5150, not only have we come a long ways in computers, but advertising as well.