Technology and business: forces driving microprocessor evolution

Abstract

High-end microprocessors are the epitome of integrated circuit technology. But it is low end microprocessors which fuel progress in microprocessors. More than 98% of the four billion microprocessors forecast to ship worldwide in 1995 will end up in low end embedded applications. The microprocessor industry spends most of its research dollars developing high-end microprocessors for CPU applications. Current high-end microprocessor implementations exploit most of the inherent parallelism in their instruction streams. Where does microprocessor development go from here? I give an overview of the development of the microprocessor industry and I show that to predict where the microprocessor is going one must first understand the industry's illogical behavior.