Thursday, August 13, 2009

Microprocessor Progression: Intel

The first microprocessor to make it into a home computer was the Intel 8080, a complete 8-bit computer on one chip, introduced in 1974. The first microprocessor to make a real splash in the market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and incorporated into the IBM PC (which first appeared around 1982). If you are familiar with the PC market and its history, you know that the PC market moved from the 8088 to the 80286 to the 80386 to the 80486 to the Pentium to the Pentium II to the Pentium III to the Pentium 4. All of these microprocessors are made by Intel and all of them are improvements on the basic design of the 8088. The Pentium 4 can execute any piece of code that ran on the original 8088, but it does it about 5,000 times faster!

The following table helps you to understand the differences between the different processors that Intel has introduced over the years.

Name

Date

Transistors

Microns

Clock speed

Data width

MIPS

8080

1974

6,000

6

2 MHz

8 bits

0.64

8088

1979

29,000

3

5 MHz

16 bits
8-bit bus

0.33

80286

1982

134,000

1.5

6 MHz

16 bits

1

80386

1985

275,000

1.5

16 MHz

32 bits

5

80486

1989

1,200,000

1

25 MHz

32 bits

20

Pentium

1993

3,100,000

0.8

60 MHz

32 bits
64-bit bus

100

Pentium II

1997

7,500,000

0.35

233 MHz

32 bits
64-bit bus

~300

Pentium III

1999

9,500,000

0.25

450 MHz

32 bits
64-bit bus

~510

Pentium 4

2000

42,000,000

0.18

1.5 GHz

32 bits
64-bit bus

~1,700

Pentium 4 "Prescott"

2004

125,000,000

0.09

3.6 GHz

32 bits
64-bit bus

~7,000



Information about this table:

What's a Chip?

A chip is also called an integrated circuit. Generally it is a small, thin piece of silicon onto which the transistors making up the microprocessor have been etched. A chip might be as large as an inch on a side and can contain tens of millions of transistors. Simpler processors might consist of a few thousand transistors etched onto a chip just a few millimeters square.

· The date is the year that the processor was first introduced. Many processors are re-introduced at higher clock speeds for many years after the original release date.

· Transistors is the number of transistors on the chip. You can see that the number of transistors on a single chip has risen steadily over the years.

· Microns is the width, in microns, of the smallest wire on the chip. For comparison, a human hair is 100 microns thick. As the feature size on the chip goes down, the number of transistors rises.

· Clock speed is the maximum rate that the chip can be clocked at. Clock speed will make more sense in the next section.

Data Width is the width of the ALU. An 8-bit ALU can add/subtract/multiply/etc. two 8-bit numbers, while a 32-bit ALU can manipulate 32-bit numbers. An 8-bit

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