Vol 16, Issue 39

September 30, 2002

Fifteen Years of Microprocessor Forum

By Peter N. Glaskowsky

October will see the fifteenth annual Microprocessor Forum, something of a milestone for us at Microprocessor Report. None of us now at MDR attended the first Forum, but many members of our editorial board were there. Board member Nick Tredennick has presented at every Forum, and he'll be there again this year. Nick graciously lent us his collection of Microprocessor Forum proceedings—oddly, we didn't have a full set here in the office—and it makes interesting reading.

While preparing for this special anniversary, I learned that the first MDR conference—held in November 1988—was Microprocessors '89, a naming strategy that the following year gave way to the now-familiar Microprocessor Forum <year> scheme. Most presenters at that first conference returned for later events. Over the years, Forum has achieved a high degree of continuity in its speakers. We are pleased that so many speakers and panelists at MPF2002 have participated in previous forums. Such experience helps us develop and present long-term perspectives on industry trends.

One such trend is the victory of RISC principles over the CISC implementations that dominated the industry until the 1990s. The RISC proponents who spoke at Forums over the years were absolutely correct: RISC is the best foundation for combining a fast, efficient CPU with advanced compiler technology. The RISC philosophy has achieved tremendous success, although it hasn't exactly been the irresistible force its advocates hoped it would be.

In particular, Intel's success in the PC processor market allowed it to spend billions to adapt RISC technology to its CISC architecture. Year by year, Microprocessor Forum documented this process. The Forum made it much easier for attendees to understand the way the processor market developed in the 1990s.

As important as the RISC vs. CISC battle was, the overall growth of the market led to an even more important development. Market segments that were once too small to support their own processor architectures—such as data communications, multimedia, and laptop computers—may now choose from several optimized alternatives. I attended my first Microprocessor Forum in 1995. That was the first Forum to devote so much time to application-specific processing. MPF95 had presentations from several vendors of media- and communications-oriented processors, including John Moussouris of MicroUnity, which trademarked the term MediaProcessor for its CPU.

Since then, instruction-set complexity has become almost irrelevant. Not only are the fastest clock rates on the market achieved by x86 chips, but some of the most interesting CPUs in the world have instruction sets of unbounded complexity: almost any logic function a customer can specify can be built into an ARC or Tensilica core and given its own opcode.

Microprocessors have evolved to take advantage of the parallelism inherent in almost any algorithm, whether that parallelism exists in data, instructions, threads, or processes. Because some algorithms possess some types of parallelism but not others, we'll probably never see a CPU that outperforms every other processor on all applications.

Future Microprocessor Forums will document this evolution. Dozens of processor architectures were on the market in 1988, and hundreds are available today. I'm convinced that thousands of distinct designs will exist fifteen years from now, most of them proprietary implementations created for specific products. The details of so many designs will be outside the scope of Forum, but their common foundations—the science and engineering that makes them possible—will remain Microprocessor Forum's central focus.