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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (942077)	6/23/2016 6:52:22 AM
From: Taro	Respond to of 1573220

The CADC project kept secret until 1990 should now count as the first micro-processor? Not available to the general public, a myth or something dug out of it's virtual grave claimed to having been such a wonderful - but so secret - machine??? Deja-vu inventions, the world is full of them. Just like da Vinci's helicopter :) What a joke (the CADC, not da Vinci)! At the best Micro Chip Archeology, interesting stuff indeed and in particular so to fill the void of too much spare time on hand. I know and knew the technology used at AMI and no way they could have developed a practical processor with the ability of competing with the 8080 - or even with the 8008 - using their metal-gate MOS technology. Howard Bobb in person and thus AMI actually in public and during customers meetings rejected that "new fad" being Silicon-Gate MOS promoted by that irritating little start-up around the corner being Intel! This self-aligning technology was pioneered by Intel and first used for the highly commercially successful line of 1402/03/04 shift registers, the first real high volume mass production MOS standard products That said, at the best the CADC could have been manufactured on an enormous size metal-gate chip unfit for any kind of mass production with the availability limited to single units only. But then again, it was military with cost not counting at all, no doubt a profitable contract for AMI. As for the 6502, it had practical uses back then and it powered the "KIM-1", which some of the veteran posters here may well recall being a great "computer" toy. It was also used by Atari, BTW. Matt never claimed, that the 6502 was a great micro-processor, he said that it was a great micro-controller, which hardly could be said about the 6800, where Motorola aimed at the general processing market at a time, when 90% of the real world applications was as a central controller in instrumentation of different kinds. I think you may not have been hitting your Google hash hard enough this time either. Chip archeology, interesting, just dig on and you might un-earth some DBED stuff knocking the sox off your CADC, and why not, in some grave chamber around the pyramids?