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    Microprocessor Timeline INQ

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    Eko Teguh Triwisuda
    The document summarizes significant developments in microprocessors over the past 40 years, beginning with the 4-bit Intel 4004 in 1971 and covering the evolution of chips from Intel, AMD, ARM, and other companies. Key developments included Intel releasing the first 8-bit and 16-bit processors in the 1970s, the 68000 launching the 32-bit era in 1979, Intel's 32-bit 386 and 64-bit 486 in the 1980s, the Pentium bringing superscalar processing in 1993, AMD releasing the first 64-bit x86 Athlon chip in 1999, and Intel's latest multi-core Sandy Bridge and AMD's combination CPU/GPU Fusion chips from 2011.

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    Microprocessor Timeline INQ

    Uploaded by

    Eko Teguh Triwisuda
    1K views1 page
    The document summarizes significant developments in microprocessors over the past 40 years, beginning with the 4-bit Intel 4004 in 1971 and covering the evolution of chips from Intel, AMD, ARM, and other companies. Key developments included Intel releasing the first 8-bit and 16-bit processors in the 1970s, the 68000 launching the 32-bit era in 1979, Intel's 32-bit 386 and 64-bit 486 in the 1980s, the Pentium bringing superscalar processing in 1993, AMD releasing the first 64-bit x86 Athlon chip in 1999, and Intel's latest multi-core Sandy Bridge and AMD's combination CPU/GPU Fusion chips from 2011.

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    The document summarizes significant developments in microprocessors over the past 40 years, beginning with the 4-bit Intel 4004 in 1971 and covering the evolution of chips from Intel, AMD, ARM, and other companies. Key developments included Intel releasing the first 8-bit and 16-bit processors in the 1970s, the 68000 launching the 32-bit era in 1979, Intel's 32-bit 386 and 64-bit 486 in the 1980s, the Pentium bringing superscalar processing in 1993, AMD releasing the first 64-bit x86 Athlon chip in 1999, and Intel's latest multi-core Sandy Bridge and AMD's combination CPU/GPU Fusion chips from 2011.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    1K views1 page

    Microprocessor Timeline INQ

    Uploaded by

    Eko Teguh Triwisuda
    The document summarizes significant developments in microprocessors over the past 40 years, beginning with the 4-bit Intel 4004 in 1971 and covering the evolution of chips from Intel, AMD, ARM, and other companies. Key developments included Intel releasing the first 8-bit and 16-bit processors in the 1970s, the 68000 launching the 32-bit era in 1979, Intel's 32-bit 386 and 64-bit 486 in the 1980s, the Pentium bringing superscalar processing in 1993, AMD releasing the first 64-bit x86 Athlon chip in 1999, and Intel's latest multi-core Sandy Bridge and AMD's combination CPU/GPU Fusion chips from 2011.

    Copyright:

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    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 1

    40 years of the microprocessor

    The Inquirer looks back at the most significant microprocessor developments that have shaped the IT industry

    1970s
    1971 Intel 4004
    Developed to drive calculators, the 4004 was a 4-bit chip with 2,300 transistors and clocked at 740KHz

    1972 Intel 8008

    The first 8-bit processor, the 8008 had an address space of 16KB and was clocked at 500KHz up to 800KHz

    1974 Intel 8080

    The 8080 was a significant step up, boasting a clock speed of 2MHz and able to address 64KB memory. Early desktop computers used this chip and the CP/M operating system

    1975 MOS 6502

    MOS Technology introduced the 6502 as a rival chip to the 8080. It powered such notable systems as the Apple II, Commodore PET and BBC Micro

    1976 Zilog Z80

    Zilog was founded by ex-Intel engineers who created a compatible but superior chip to the 8080. The Z80 powered many CP/M machines, plus home computers like the ZX Spectrum

    1978 Intel 8086

    Famous as the first x86 chip, the 8086 was also Intels first 16-bit chip with about 29,000 transistors and was clocked initially at 4.77MHz

    1979 Intel 8088

    A less costly version of the 8086, the 8088 used an 8-bit data bus and was the chip used in the IBM PC, forerunner of todays PC industry

    1979 Motorola 68000

    Intended to leapfrog rival processors, the 68000 was a 16-bit design but with 32-bit expansion in mind. It powered early Apple Macs and the first Sun Unix workstations

    1980s
    1982 Intel 80286
    The 80286 was a high-performance upgrade of the 8086, and used by IBM in the PC-AT. First clocked at 6MHz, later versions ran up to 25MHz. The 286 had a 16MB address space and 134,000 transistors

    1985 Intel 80386

    Intels first 32-bit chip, the 386 had 275,000 transistors over 100 times that of the 4004. Versions of the 386 eventually reached 40MHz

    1985 Acorn ARM produced as co-processor for BBC Micro

    Seeking a new chip to power future business computers, the makers of the BBC Micro decided to build their own, calling it the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM)

    1987 Sun SPARC

    Like Acorn, Sun was looking for a new chip and decided to create its own. The Sparc architecture is still used today in Sun (now Oracle) systems, and supercomputers

    1989 Intel 80486

    A higher performance version of the 386, Intels 486 was the first x86 chip with over 1 million transistors (1.2 million). It was also the first with an on-chip cache and floating point unit

    1990s
    1990 IBM RS/6000 introduces Power chips
    IBM experimented with RISC chips in the 1970s, and this bore fruit with the RS/6000 workstation in 1990. The processor later developed into the Power chip used by IBM and Apple
    Acorn sets up ARM as a separate company to develop ARM chips

    1993 Intel Pentium

    The Pentium was a radical overhaul of Intels x86 line, introducing superscalar processing. Starting at 60MHz but eventually reaching 300MHz, the Pentium had 3,100,000 transistors

    1995 Intel Pentium Pro

    Developed as a high-performance chip, the Pentium Pro introduced out-of-order execution and L2 cache inside the same package. This line later morphed into the Xeon line

    1996 AMD K5

    AMD had been manufacturing Intel chips under licence for years, but the K5 was its first in-house design, intended to compete with the Pentium

    1996 DEC StrongARM

    Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) developed this family of ARM-based chips, which was used in several PDAs. StrongARM was later sold to Intel

    1997 Intel Pentium II

    Based on the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II had 7,500,000 transistors and shipped in a cartridge enclosure that also held L2 cache. Clock speed ranged from 233MHz up to 450MHz

    1999 Intel Pentium III

    An updated Pentium II, the Pentium III was the first to feature Intels SSE instructions and featured clock speeds from 400MHz up to 1.4GHz

    1999 AMD Athlon

    The AMD Athlon was the firms first processor that could beat Intel on performance. Starting at 500MHz, a later version was the first x86 chip to hit 1GHz and had 22 million transistors

    2000s
    2000 Intel Pentium 4
    Another major redesign, the Pentium 4 introduced Intels Netburst architecture. It was clocked at 1.4GHz initially, rising to 3.8GHz, and had 42 million transistors

    2001 Intel Itanium

    Developed by Intel and HP, Itanium is a 64-bit non-x86 architecture developed for parallelism and aimed at enterprise servers. The Itanium family has not been a great success

    2002 Intel XScale ARM

    To follow up the StrongARM line, Intel developed the XScale ARM chips, which powered many PDAs for years. However, Intel later sold off XScale to Marvell in 2006.

    2002 TI Omap ARM

    TI became one of the largest makers of system-on-a-chip devices for smartphones and PDAs with the Omap family, combining an ARM CPU with circuitry such as GSM processors

    2003 Intel Pentium-M (Centrino)

    The Pentium-M was designed specifically for laptops, and formed the core of Intels first Centrino platform. It had 77 million transistors and was clocked from 900MHz

    2003 AMD Opteron

    While Intel laboured with Itanium, AMD introduced the first 64-bit x86 chips with the Opteron, which proved popular in workstations and servers. It had over 105 million transistors

    2005 Intel Pentium-D

    Intel introduced its first dual-core chips in 2005, starting with the Pentium Extreme Edition. The Pentium D was the first mainstream desktop chip to follow suit

    2006 AMD acquires ATI

    AMD bought up ATI, announcing ambitious plans to combine its x86 processors with ATIs graphics processors

    2006 Intel Xeon 5300

    Intels first quad-core chips were the Xeon 5300 line for workstations and servers. Actually two dual-core dies joined together, these have a total of 582 million transistors

    2008 Qualcomm SnapDragon ARM

    Wireless technology firm Qualcomm started producing highperformance smartphone chips based on the ARM architecture. SnapDragon is clocked at 1GHz and has 200 million transistors

    2011 Intel Core i3,i5, i7

    Intels latest chips, based on the Sandy Bridge architecture. The desktop processors have up to eight cores on a single chip and up to 995 million transistors

    2011 AMD Fusion chips

    The Fusion line combines multiple CPU cores on a single chip along with ATI GPU cores, with the first chips having up to 1.45 billion transistors

    2011 ARM announces ARMv8 64-bit architecture


    ARM unveils its specifications for future 64-bit chips. Although some years away, products based on ARMv8 could have as many as 128 cores

    Image Credits: Denniss, Magnus Manske, Morkork, Konstantin Lanzet, Mike Lifeguard, Dirk Oppelt, Hellisp, Flibble, Gennadiy Shvets

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