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40 years of microprocessor development
Timeline
As Intel celebrates the 40th birthday of the 4004 chip, The INQUIRER looks at the key landmarks
Tue Nov 15 2011, 08:00
ON THE OCCASION of the 40th anniversary of Intel's 4004 chip, The INQUIRER believes we have mapped the most significant PC microprocessor developments that have shaped our information technology landscape over the last four decades. The timeline we've come up with is below. µ
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You have also missed out the 6800 (and later derivatives (6801, 6803 and the Hitachi HD63xx variants), as well as the 8/16 bit 6809.
The Epson HX-20 portable was unusual in that it used two HD6301 processors, one to control many peripherals, and the other as the main CPU - with a serial link between them.
Conroe was the first major redesign after the Netburst design. Conroe was not introduced until the Core 2 series which is when Intel stopped it's years of ass kicking from AMD. The original Core series was just more of a brand renaming because Intel decided to ditch the Celeron name, move the Pentium line to a budget line and move the Core series into the High performance category. The real party didn't start until the Core 2 series when some serious performance benefits came after the switch from Netburst to Conroe.
At the moment, the consumer line consists of the Pentium, Core i3, i5 and i7 which is currently 2 Cores, 2 cores with HT (not all of them though) and the performance series with 4 or more cores with HT.
Surprised Alpha wasn't mentioned in this article, even Microsoft were betting some money on Alpha when they were playing with early versions of NT on the platform.
Should have mentioned the Core series starting with Conroe. The Core 2 Duo series replaced the Pentium line and represented a huge step forward for Intel, as did the first Core i7's.
The early days where exciting, you could go from 200 to 400 mhz and you could see the difference. Sadly they hit the wall and now it's just more cores. The low end is improving and someday cpu's again will speed up. But right now we need better software if we want more speed.
Hey... What about the 80186 or the i486SX? Did you forget those? I just took a picture and can send you a JPEG if you want.
The article talks about AMD's introduction of it's K5 chip, but doesn't say a word about the fact that because the chip underperformed, AMD purchased then rival NexGen and their Nx586 architecture for their very successful K6 chip.
Shame on you.
Beautiful page of history. But... you write about "the most significant PC microprocessor developments" and include Sparc and Power (which are not exactly PC processors), so why did you forget Alpha who played in the same category ?
It ran at 150MHz in 1992, when all the others were at 30-50MHz.
Seems pretty important, it was the resurgence of Intel and the end of performance at any (energy) cost.
TDP and performance per Watt came into it.
Some bright spark make a motherboard that could take Dothan CPUs and it turned out they were faster than every CPU on the planet.
Shortly after, Intel ditches NetBurst and bases all it's stuff on Pentium M, which was in turn an evolved Pentium 3.
Conroe - Aug 2006.