History Of Computer Processors

By Author: johan peter
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Moore's Law observes that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Based on this law, the development of the computer processors started in the year 1971. Let's take a look at the journey so far.
Today, computers are a part of our lifestyle, but the first computer that was used was developed at the University of Pennsylvania in the year 1946! It had an ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) processor. The reprogramming feature that is so extensively used today, was introduced by Alan Turing and John von Neumann with their teams. The von Neumann architecture is the basis of modern computers. From the development of the first microprocessor - Intel's 4004 to the latest ones – the microprocessors have come a long way. Here, we look into the story so far.

1971 - Intel 4004
» It was designed by Federico Faggin and Ted Hoff of Intel and Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, and it was launched on November 15,1971.
» It consisted of 2300 transistors with pMOS technology.
» The total number of instructions were 46. The designed clock speed was 1 MHz while only 740 kHz ...
... was achieved.
It was the first microprocessor and it was used in the Busicom 141-PF calculator.

1972 - Intel 8008
» Also known as MCS-8, it was launched in April 1972.
» It was developed by Victor Poor and Harry Pyle of CTC, and Ted Hoff, Faggin, Stanley Mazor and Hal Feeney from Intel.
» It was made up of 3500 transistors. However, it was slower than its predecessor 4004.
» The clock speed was 0.5 MHz with the total number of instructions being 48. For the first time it was used in personal computers, Micral and SCELBI.

1974 - Intel 8080
» Launched in April 1974, it was developed by Faggin, Mazor and Masatoshi Shima.
» The clock speed increased to 2 MHz, it was built on nMOS technology and used 6000 transistors.
» The major development was the separation of address (16-bit) and data (8-bit) bus. It also supported 256 I/Os.

It was used in the computers MITS Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080. Space Invaders (arcade video game) also used 8080 as the main processor.

1974 - Motorola 6800
» This processor developed by Motorola had no I/O ports.
» Memory-mapped input-output were used as I/Os.
» The clock speed was only 2 MHz with the instruction set consisting of 72 instructions.
» It was for the first time that HCF (Halt and Catch Fire) opcode was used, that made the processor unresponsive to any interrupts till it was reset.
HCF is a self-test feature developed for the first time by Motorola.

1977 - Intel 8085
» Unlike the other processors developed so far, this one was also used as a microcontroller working on +5V supply.
» It was the first time that von Neumann architecture was used.
» It was built with 6500 transistors and used nMOS technology.
» The instruction set consisted of 256 instructions. The radiation-hardened version was used in NASA and ESA space expeditions.

1978 - Intel 8086
» The designed clock speed was 10 MHz.
» The development team for architecture consisted of Stephen P. Morse and Bruce Ravenel. Logic was designed by Jim McKevitt, John Bayliss, and William Pohlman was the project manager. The excellent performance of AMD's floating point unit made it the second best choice (after Intel) for many manufacturers.

1993 - Pentium Processor
» The Pentium family started with the launch of the P5 processor.
» It came in two models - 510-pin version with 60 MHz clock speed and 567-pin version with a clock speed of 66 MHz.
» Launched on March 22, it was built with 3.1 million transistors.
» This 32-bit processor was the most advanced processor used in many computers that were manufactured at that time.
It was the first superscalar x86 microarchitecture that could execute two instructions simultaneously, thus speeding up the processor and reducing computing time.

1995 - Pentium Pro
» This was the first processor of the Pentium II series.
» This latest entrant came in an unconventional MCM (ceramic multi-chip module) 387 pins packaging.
» With a clock speed of 200 MHz, it was built to run in quad as well as dual processor configurations.
» About 5.5 million transistors were used to build this processor.
» It did not have an MMX instruction set.

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