Microprocessors

ARM7 is a group of older 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings for microcontroller use.
The ARM7 core family consists of ARM700, ARM710, ARM7DI, ARM710a, ARM720T, ARM740T, ARM710T, ARM7TDMI, ARM7TDMI-S, ARM7EJ-S. The ARM7TDMI and ARM7TDMI-S were the most popular cores of the family.

Since ARM7 cores were released from 1993 to 2001, they are no longer recommended for new IC designs; instead ARM Cortex-M or ARM Cortex-R cores are preferred.

1993 ARM700
1994 ARM710
1994 ARM7DI
1994 ARM7TDMI
1995 ARM710a
1997 ARM710T

In April 1975 Fairchild began sampling the F8 processor with production quantities available in the fall of 1975.

Fairchild knew the importance of having second sources available and in June 1975 reached an agreement with Mostek to allow Mostek to produce the F8 as well. The 10 year agreement with Mostek included complete mask set transfers as Mosteks NMOS isoplanar process was completely compatible with Fairchilds. The agreement also called for continuing development of the F8 processor system, allowing each company to develop F8 products independently of each other as well as together (this is important down the road).

Mostek was able to rapidly produce the F8 system, faster, cheaper, and more reliable than Fairchild. The F8 introduction price was $130 per unit. When Mostek began production in 1975 prices were down to $85 per unit. In February 1976 Mostek lowered prices to $55 per unit ($64 to $28 if you bought more than 100 pieces). The F8 was also licensed to SGS-Ates of Italy in 1976.

Also in February of 1976 Fairchild signed a agreement with Olympia Werke A.G., a German company, allowing production and sharing of information on the F8 processor. It also allowed Fairchild (and any of its second sources, including Mostek) to use any of Olympia’s processor technology and products. So why did Fairchild reach such an agreement with Olympia, a relatively small company? Because General Instruments was suing Fairchild at the time

The CP1600 is a 16-bit microprocessor created in a partnership between General Instrument and Honeywell in 1975.
The CP1600s design was based on the PDP-11, whose design also formed the basis of the Western Digital MCP-1600 and influenced others.
Honeywell used the CP1600 in a number of process control computers and related systems, but its most widespread use was the CP1610 version in the Intellivision video game console.

The SuperH processor core family was first developed by Hitachi in the early 1990s. Hitachi has developed a complete group of upward compatible instruction set CPU cores. The SH-1 and the SH-2 were used in the Sega Saturn, Sega 32X and Capcom CPS-3.[2] These cores have 16-bit instructions for better code density than 32-bit instructions, which was a great benefit at the time, due to the high cost of main memory.

The SH-4 is a 32-bit RISC CPU and was developed for primary use in multimedia applications, such as Segas Dreamcast and NAOMI game systems. It includes a much more powerful floating point unit[note] and additional built-in functions, along with the standard 32-bit integer processing and 16-bit instruction size.

SH-4 features include:

FPU with four floating point multipliers, supporting 32-bit single precision and 64-bit double precision floats
4D floating point dot-product operation
128-bit floating point bus allowing 3.2 GB/sec transfer rate from the data cache
64-bit external data bus with 32-bit memory addressing, allowing a maximum of 4 GB addressable memory with a transfer rate of 800 MB/sec
Built-in interrupt, DMA, and power management controllers

Broadway is the codename of the 32-bit Central Processing Unit (CPU) used in Nintendos Wii video game console. It was designed by IBM, and was initially produced using a 90nm SOI process and later produced with a 65nm SOI process.

According to IBM, the processor consumes 20% less power than its predecessor, the 180 nm Gekko used in the Nintendo GameCube video game console.[1]

Broadway was produced by IBM at their 300 mm semiconductor development and manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, New York. The bond, assembly, and test operation for the Broadway module is performed at the IBM facility in Bromont, Quebec. Very few official details have been released to the public by Nintendo or IBM. Unofficial reports claim it is derived from the 486 MHz Gekko architecture used in the GameCube and runs 50% faster at 729 MHz.[2]

The PowerPC 750CL, released in 2006, is a stock CPU offered by IBM and virtually identical to Broadway. The only difference is that the 750CL came in variants, ranging from 400 MHz up to 1000 MHz

Gekko is a superscalar out-of-order 32-bit PowerPC microprocessor custom-made by IBM in 2000 for Nintendo to use as the CPU in their sixth generation game console, the Nintendo GameCube, and later the Triforce Arcade Board.

Gekkos role in the game system was to facilitate game scripting, Artificial Intelligence, physics and collision detection, custom graphics lighting effects and geometry such as smooth transformations, and moving graphics data through the system.

The project was announced in 1999 when IBM and Nintendo agreed to a one billion dollar contract for a CPU running at approximately 400 MHz. IBM chose to modify their existing PowerPC 750CXe processor to suit Nintendos needs, such as tight and balanced operation alongside the Flipper graphics processor. The customization was to the bus architecture, DMA, compression and floating point unit which support a special set of SIMD instructions. The CPU made ground work for custom lighting and geometry effects and could burst compressed data directly to the GPU.[citation needed]

The Gekko is considered to be the direct ancestor to the Broadway processor, also designed and manufactured by IBM, that powers the Wii console.

MIPS (Microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages) is a RISC microprocessor architecture developed by MIPS Computer Systems Inc in the early eighties.
MIPS processors were used in high-end servers from Siemens and DEC and especially in SGIs computer product line, and have found broad application in embedded systems, Windows CE devices, and Cisco routers.
The Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation 2 consoles also use MIPS processors. The architecture was very successful, about one third of all RISC chips produced in mid 1990s were MIPS based designs.
In 1999 the ARM/StrongARM architecture took over rather decisively in thanks to cell phone and PDA usage.

The 6502 is an 8-bit processor designed by MOS Technology in 1975, based on the design of the Motorola 6800. When it was introduced it was the least expensive full featured CPU on the market by far, at about 1/6th the price, or less, of competing designs from larger companies such as Motorola and Intel. It was nevertheless faster than most of them, and, along with the Zilog Z80, sparked off a series of computer projects that would eventually result in the home computer revolution of the 1980s. The 6502 design was originally second-sourced by Rockwell and Synertek and later licensed to a number of companies; it is still made for embedded systems.

Unlike the Intel 8080 and its kind, the 6502 had very few registers. It was an 8-bit processor with 16-bit address bus. Inside was one 8-bit data register (accumulator), two 8-bit index registers and an 8-bit stack pointer. When the 6502 was introduced, RAM was actually faster than CPUs, so it made sense to optimize for RAM access rather than increase the number of registers on a chip.

6502 processors were used in a variety of home computers of the early 80s, for example in:
Commodore PET and VC20
Apple I, II and III
Atari 400, 800, 600/800XL
Acorn Atom and Electron

The 6507 is an 8-bit microprocessor from MOS Technology, Inc. It is a version of their 6502 packaged in a 28-pin DIP, which makes it cheaper to package and integrate in systems. The reduction in pin count is achieved by reducing the address bus from 16 bits to 13 (limiting memory from 64 kB to only 8 kB), and removing a number of other pins only needed in certain applications.

The Motorola 68000 (sixty-eight-thousand; also called the m68k or Motorola 68k, sixty-eight-kay) is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector.

Nintendo Game Boy, based on Z80

NEC were known for cloning other CPUS; The D780C was a clone of the Z80. The D779C appears to be more a system chip, like a microcontroller. It may be a custom-made Z80 MCU with certain features removed for cost.

Unfortunately, as there is no information available I can not confirm this, so this is a best educated guess.

The Nintendo 64s central processing unit (CPU) is the NEC VR4300,a cost-reduced derivative of the 64-bit MIPS Technologies R4300i.

The SCC68070 is a Philips Semiconductors-branded, Motorola 68000-based 16/32-bit processor produced under license.
While marketed externally as a high-performance microcontroller, it has been almost exclusively used combined with the Philips SCC66470 VSC (Video- and Systems Controller) in the Philips CD-i interactive entertainment product line.

The COSMAC is an 8-bit microprocessor family introduced by RCA. It is historically notable as the first CMOS microprocessor.
The first production model was the two-chip CDP1801R and CDP1801U, which were later combined into the single-chip CDP1802.
The 1802 represented the majority of COSMAC production, and today the entire line is known simply as the RCA 1802.

The Ricoh 2A03 or RP2A03 (NTSC version) / Ricoh 2A07 or RP2A07 (PAL version) is an 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Ricoh for the Nintendo Entertainment System video game console. It was also used as a sound chip and secondary CPU by Nintendos arcade games Punch-Out!! and Donkey Kong 3.

The Emotion Engine is the CPU for Sonys PlayStation 2, developed in a Sony - Toshiba cooperation and introduced in 1999.
Data bus, cache memory as well as all registers are implemented in 128 bit technology, integrated on a single 0.18 micron process technology chip, making it the first commercial 128 bit CPU.
The Emotion Engine, based on the MIPS R5900, is sort of a combination CPU and DSP processor, whose main function is simulating 3D worlds.
It integrated all necessary units on the die: The MIPS III CPU core, 2 vector units, FPU, image processing unit (basically an MPEG2 decoder with some other capabilities), 10-channel DMA controller, graphics interface unit, RDRAM and I/O interfaces, all connected via a shared 128-bit internal bus.

There is one Chinese company with several names that makes chips that you could probably find in devices you already own: SunPlus.

The SPG2xx series use a custom instruction set (“u’nSP”), and are designed for something like the TV Plug-n-Play games; they are used in most (if not all) of those, as well as the Vii and the V.smile (if nothing else). Segher took our dumped ROM and scant documentation and built a disassembler, and then a mostly-working emulator for this architecture (more on this below). The top of the line SPG290 uses a different “s+core” architecture, and is used in the Mattel Hyperscan.

Jakks Pacific TV Plug’n’Play games also use SPG chips

SPMP
The SPMP series chips are ARM-based SoCs that are used in cheap Chinese “Personal Media Players” that also generally come bundled with NES or GameBoy emulators.

ZiLOG is a manufacturer of 8-bit CPUs, and is most famous for its Z80 series. Zilog was incorporated in California in 1974 by Federico Faggin, who left Intel after working on the 8080, and the Z80 shared many features with it.

After the Z80 Zilog introduced 16-bit and 32-bit processors, but these were not particularly successful, and the company refocused on the microcontroller market, producing both basic CPUs and application-specific integrated circuits/standard products (ASICs/ASSPs) built around a CPU core. As well as producing processors, Zilog have produced several other components. One of the most famous was the Z8530 serial communications controller as found on Sun SPARCstations and SPARCservers up to the SPARCstation 20.

The company became a subsidiary of Exxon in 1980, but the management and employees bought it back in 1989. It went public in 1991, but was acquired in 1998 by Texas Pacific Group, who, after chip prices plummeted, reorganized the company in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2001.