Once upon a time, there was this little grain of sand. Being so tiny, it often got pushed around. One day, it decided to go to the market to discover its value. Luckily, it was picked up by a creature called Man, and from then onwards, there was no stopping it. The little grain changed its appearance to become a beautiful, well-polished disc, and it dressed up with all sorts of etchings. It started living with other prosperous grains within Integrated Circuits (IC). They got together in larger, more complex ICs, and even formed colonies called microprocessors.

The grains prospered within the microprocessor colonies, and more and more of them managed to live happily within the same microprocessor. The microprocessors were placed within devices like PCs, notebooks, handhelds, cellphones, and Internet appliances, all of which were of immense use to Man.

Today, the little grain of sand has everything it could ask for—fame, fortune, and a great place to live in.

This in short is the making of a microprocessor, and in general the evolution of semiconductor-based circuits. This year, microprocessors have achieved remarkable feats which hold immense promise for the future.

The biggest breakthrough in microprocessors this year is that they achieved and went beyond the 1 GHz clock frequency. On March 6, AMD announced the release of its 1 GHz Athlon processor, and two days later Intel did the same for its PIII. One GHz processors were made possible by reducing the size of the chip and packing more but smaller transistors in the same space. The initial 1 GHz processors from both companies were based on the slot architecture. These required extensive cooling facilities, such as large heat sinks and lots of fans inside a system housing the processors. However, they’re now available in a socket design—a change in the processor packaging. As the magazine goes to press, the market for 1 GHz systems is yet to take off in India. Possibly, the high prices of these systems are responsible.

Speaking of processor packaging, the other achievement in microprocessors was that both Athlon and PIII moved from the slot-based architecture to a socket-based one. Intel moved from Slot 1 to Socket 370 in FCPGA packaging, while AMD moved Athlon from Slot A to Socket A. The new design reduced the size of the chip considerably, thereby reducing costs and improving performance. It also improved heat dissipation. Moreover, the same Socket 370 can be used for Intel’s Celeron processor too, while the Socket A can also accommodate AMD’s Duron.

Another major player in the microprocessor market this year was MIPS. But you can’t buy MIPS chips directly. The company is into designing microprocessor cores and licensing them out to other companies. MIPS processors have been extremely successful, and you’ll find them in devices as varied as the Sony PlayStation2 (the game console that created waves in the gaming industry this year), handhelds (both Palm and PocketPC), and Aibo—(Sony’s highly popular robotic pet dog).

Transmeta’s Crusoe processor was another significant breakthrough in processor technology. The processor uses a new design that allows size reduction and well as more efficient power consumption, which makes it suitable for use in mobile devices, Internet appliances, etc. The processor is part software and part hardware. The hardware part understands a new kind of instruction set called VLIW. The software—also called Code Morphing software—translates x86 instructions into VLIW. This way, Crusoe remains compatible with most applications and operating systems on Intel and AMD platforms. Though the processor was launched in January this year, it hasn’t made any significant market strides so far. There’s only one known product using the processor—the Sony VAIO C1 PictureBook notebook computer.

The Cyrix processor made a comeback this year, thanks to VIA. VIA has been in the news this year, having brought out some very good chipsets, giving strong competition to Intel. Gradually, however, VIA is also moving into the processor market. Last year, it took over the Cyrix processor business from National Semiconductor, and soon afterwards also took over IDT’s Centaur processor design subsidiary. This year, it combined the two and reintroduced the Cyrix processor with a different design altogether. The new processor, called the VIA Cyrix III, is fully compatible with Socket 370 motherboards, has a 256 kB L2 cache, and supports 133 MHz FSB. Though we didn’t hear much about the processor after its launch this year, it could give Intel’s Celeron and AMD’s Duron healthy competition in future. And that’s good news for PC buyers.

Intel had its share of bad news this year. First, it had to recall 820 chipset based SDRAM motherboards. Then it had to recall its 1.13 GHz PIII processors. On the upside, the latest news is that Intel has achieved 0.13 micron circuitry in integrated circuits. To explain this further, one micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter, and is used for measuring line width of circuitry in microchips. To give you a realistic picture, a human hair is said to be about 50 microns wide. Most modern microprocessors are built using 0.18 micron technology. By making the width smaller, more circuitry can be built in the same area, and processor speeds will zip into multi-gigahertz as an outcome. Looks like this technology establishes the continuing validity of Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors per square inch of ICs doubles every year.

More good news comes with Intel’s new Pentium 4 processor that has a 400 MHz FSB and runs at 1.4 GHz onwards. The first Itanium processor—the 64-bit processor codenamed Merced—is also getting ready for commercial release. Merced has been under development for around five years. Hopefully, we’ll see it in the market next year. Intel’s biggest rival in processors—AMD—also plans to bring out a similar processor, codenamed SledgeHammer. Unlike the Itanium, which will be pure 64-bit, this 64-bit processor will be backward compatible to 32-bit code.

We can’t end the discussion about processors without talking about the PowerPC. The latest PowerPC processor is the G4, which has been developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. G5 and G6, the future versions of the G4, —are currently in the pipeline.

The little grain of sand is surely doing wonders for Man.

Anil Chopra