This diagram is also in poster form: <a href="http://tcm.computerhistory.org/Timeline/25YearsMicroprocessor1996.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://tcm.computerhistory.org/Timeline/25YearsMicroprocesso...</a><p>I would quibble about a few things. It shows an architectural relationship between the 4004 and 8008, which isn't the case. It shows the almost-unknown TMC 1795, but doesn't show its architectural relation with the 8008. It shows the TMS 0100 and TMS 1000 microcontrollers but not other microcontrollers. Lots of early microprocessors are omitted, giving the impression that not much was happening back then. The lack of ARM1 is disappointing; it shows ARM starting with ARM6. But overall a very interesting diagram.
No Acorn ARM? (eg as used in Acorn Archimedes, 1987)<p>It turned out to be more important than any of these.<p>edit: ah they have the ARM, but not until 1991 for some reason.
You would never guess from this how successful ARM ended up being. Die size is going up and transistor size is going up. They aren't even in that race. It is a great example of a paradigm disruption.
Weird. I remember in 1988 that we had a Dell 286 that I rather thought was one of the fastest PC's around, and that the 386/486 etc., didn't show up on the street until well into the 90's.<p>We routed 6 layer PC cards on it ... all night.