On Monday, Jun 7, 2004, at 14:18 US/Pacific, Charles Craft wrote:

>
> I guess now that processors are chips instead of boards there isn't
> any microcode firmware.  It's all hardwired logic etched/plated into
> the silicon.
>
The vax postdated a lot of microprocessors, and a lot of micros had
microcode for quite some time.  The well-respected 68000 had both micro
and nanocode, IIRC.  Things based on bitslice components (with explicit
user-provided microcode) survived into the 90s, at which point they
started calling them "VLIW" and "reconfigurable core" machines instead.
Things like the motorola QUICC chips have "microcode" for their
auxilliary processors (comm, timer, etc.)

BillW

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