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The history of the microprocessor
A presentation by HARDWARECOP
All contents of the video are for educational and entertaining purposes only. Hardwarecop does not take any responsibility of the contents. All (listed) trademarks and logos are property of their respective owners
What is a microprocessor?
The word microprocessor is a composite of micro and processor
Micro is greek and means small
So it is a processor in a very small scale
Because once processors and computers filled entire rooms
Today they perfectly fit in our hands
while the performance increased million times
Some might not even know that his computer power on his desk
is higher than the fastest super computer 20 years ago.
Behind every mouse movement and every click, millions of calculations go through the processor
that you could't imagine 20 years ago
The constant development has become a power struggle
Every few years, the performance dobles and multiplies
But how did it all began?
THE BEGINNING
1958, Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit (IC)
Thus was laid the foundation for the microprocessor
The first processor sold in the open market since 1971 was the 4004 made by Intel
It's also known for the world's first microprocessor
The 4004 is a 4 Bit processor clocked at 500 to 740 kilohertz (KHz)
Actually, Intel had to develop a chip for a calculator
when it 1969 recieved the task by a japanese company called Busicom
But Intel designed a versatile and programmable microchip
Today, the 4004 has become a popular item among CPU collectors
With the 8086 from the late 70s Intel ushered a new era unconsciously
Developed 1979, the 8086 has become an forefather of all x86 microprocessors
On which the most recent microarchitectures are based on
The 8086 was a 16 bit microprocessor
and was used in the Space Shuttle, NASA, military and various medical devices.
About 1981, IBM built their first personal computer
A PC design that we are familiar to.
The centerpiece was the 8086
At the same time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built their first PC, LISA
Shortly after, they called their company Apple
But in LISA, a Motorola chip was installed instead
But in LISA, a Motorola chip was installed instead
1986 Intel launched the first wholesome 32 bit CPU, the 80386
The i386 DX was able to address 4 Gigabytes of memory
His castrated version, the i386 SX could only address 16 MB memory because of the 24 bit address bus
AMD completely copied the i386 and distributed it as the Am386
Because of the low price, the Am386 was commercially successful and was very widespread
THE 486
Then, a milestone came in the processor history:
Intel introduced the 80486
The special about the 486:
The cache controller migrates into the CPU. Also the FPU (Floating Point Unit)
A math coprocessor, that could only be installed externally in previous generations
The 486 was released 1989 and dominated the PC market from 1992 to 1995
Because at first, the 486 cost about 6000 dollars
In those days, a typical system had
4 megs of memory
a VGA graphics card
120 Megabytes hard disk storage
and Windows 3.1 as the operating system
The fastest 486 reached 100 Megahertz
Now, there's a small preview of the content to be presented soon
In this presentation, a new part begins with the Intel Pentium
Here you can see the Intel codenames and the technical progress in the die shrink
The Intel Pentium and the AMD K5
Actually, the successor of the 80486 excepted to be named 80586
But since Intel tried in vain to register 80586 as a trademark,
Intel changed the number scheme naming in favor of a protectable trademark name.
The 586 got the name Pentium
Pent is greece and means five
The biggest news is that the Pentium is the first superscalar CISC processor
That means: It integrates the RISC technology
without loosing it's backward compatibility to their predecessor, the 486
so that made the biggest technical change
in the 8086 history
It took AMD several years to develop a new processor
the AMD K5
1996 the AMD K5 was sent into race
and represented a direct competitor to Intel Pentium
But the K5 never gained commercial success
1995 the Intel Pentium Pro based on the new P6 architecture should be the successor to the P5 Pentium
The Pentium Pro was optimized for executing 32 bit program code
and achieved bad performance in 16 bit programs
that dominated the consumer market at that time
So the Pentium Pro became a high end processor
The successor of the Pentium Pro for servers and workstations got the name Xeon
Only the Pentium 2 of 1997 managed
to conquer the world of home users
The Pentium II was built into a circuit board
that fit into a motherboard with a slot
On the circuit board you can find the Pentium II chip
and the Level 2 cache running with half processor frequency
This saved costs at the expense of performance
Since 1998 Intel also offers a castrated version of the Pentium 2, the Celeron