INTEL

HISTORICAL

TIMELINE
by Myles White

4004 processor

Intel's first microprocessor. Developed for the Busicom calculator, it is credited with paving the way for embedding "intelligence" in inanimate objects. It became the first microprocessor to be sold commercially when Busicom decided it didn't want the device. It featured 2,300 transistors, 4-bit processing, 108KHz, 60,000 instructions per second (0.06 MIPs), and 10-micron technology.

Became the brains of the first PC: the MITS Altair, a $395 kit. Within months, it sold tens of thousands, creating the first PC back orders in history. The 8080 had a 2MHz internal speed, addressed 64KB of memory, and used a 6-micron fabrication process with 6,000 transistors. Produced 0.64 MIPs.

8080 processor

The 286 processor was still a 16-bit part, but it improved on the architecture, adding protected mode and keeping backward compatibility with software produced for the earlier 8088/86 CPUs. At launch, it ran at 20MHz and addressed up to 16MB of electronic memory (up to 1GB of "virtual memory" adding hard drive space).

1971

8008 processor
1972

1974

8086/8088 processor

80286 processor
1982

Twice as powerful as the 4004, the 8008 ran at 200KHz, featured 8-bit processing, and accessed 16KB of memory (instead of 4KB). It still used 10-micron technology but featured 3,500 transistors and produced 0.06 MIPs.

The 8086 was the first 16-bit 1978 processor, but it came too early (and was considered too expensive), so an 8-bit version of the chip was produced for the first IBM PC and early XTs. The 808x processors reached 10MHz and 29,000 transistors, produced upwards of 0.8 MIPs, and addressed up to 1MB of memory.

80386 processor

Until now, Intel has made one stream of processor (except for the Pentium Pro), while salesfolk bill the latest, fastest processor as "meant to be a server processor." With the release of the first Xeon, however, Intel began making products specifically for server use. Pentium II Xeon CPUs can also be scaled in 4- and 8-way applications (eight processors per computer, for instance). processor

Pentium II Xeon
1998

Built on the Pentium Pro core and including the MMX instruction set, the PII introduces the SECC and Slot 1. PII debuts at 233MHz on a 66MHz fsb (frontside bus) and finally retires as a 0.25-micron CPU, running at 450MHz on a 100MHz fsb.

The 486 came in several flavors: the DX series (with processor on-die math coprocessor), which ran at up to 50MHz; 1989 the SX series (with the math coprocessor removed to save cost); the SX2 series (with doubled internal clock speed but still no math coprocessor); and the DX2/DX4 series (with processors that ran at a faster internal speed than the main system bus on which they were installed).

80486

The AT-386 maintained backward compatibility with earlier software, enhanced protected mode, and introduced 386 1985 Enhanced Mode for Windows users. Its 32-bit flat memory addressing scheme was a major step in CPU development. It had 275,000 transistors, produced 6.0 MIPs, and addressed up to 4GB of memory with an internal clock speed of 33MHz.

Pentium II processor
1997

Pentium processor

Pentium Pro processor

Billed as a "corporate 1995 server" product, the Pentium Pro was designed primarily to handle 32-bit software and didn't run 16-bit products as well as the Pentium and Pentium MMX did. While the Pentium Pro was ultimately orphaned by Intel, it still comprised the core architecture of the company's next three generations of PC processors.

Billed as the processor that was "just good enough" for processor the average consumer to use 1999 for light word processing and to get on the Internet. Though the name has stayed the same, the Celeron line has evolved, always a few steps behind the leading architecture and speed and/or the latest instruction set. It's still regarded by Intel as an entrylevel CPU and is not recommended for corporate use.

Celeron
Despite appearing three generations later, the Pentium 4 is still an 80686 at heart, but there have been a lot of add-ons. The P4 is up to 42 million transistors on 0.18-micron lines (and soon down to 90 nanometers). The current P4 runs at 3.2GHz internally on an 800MHz main system bus. Intel admitted when the processor was released that it was not optimized for business applications but was instead primarily for Internet content creation.

The Pentium would have been the 80586 processor if Intel had kept its numbering scheme, but 1993 copyright issues forced a change in marketing strategy. Initially 3.3 million transistors in a 60MHz or 66MHz version, the Pentium eventually ran at internal speeds of 200MHz. The original Pentium was retired in 1997 with the release of the Pentium MMX. The Pentium MMX was short-lived, debuting at 160MHz and retiring at 233MHz in 1998.

Pentium 4 processor
2000

Although the original Itanium is still in stock, the company would much rather you chose the newer and more sophisticated Itanium 2, the second-generation 64-bit processor. Unlike the Xeon, with its miniscule applications with 32 processors, Intel reports at least one company (British Petroleum) using 1,000 Itaniums for its seismic mapping.

Intel processor 2 Itanium

2002

Still based on the Pentium Pro 1999 core, the PIII added 70 new Streaming SIMD multimedia instructions optimized for Internet content creation. At its debut, it used 9.5 million transistors on a 0.25-micron fab process with an internal speed of 450MHz on a 100MHz fsb. The final PIII reached 1.2GHz on a 133MHz fsb. The Xeon version also had Streaming SIMD instructions but much larger cache and multiprocessor capability.

Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon processor

Intel Xeonprocessor Xeon MP and

2001

Intelprocessor Itanium
2001

Current 2003 Xeons are Pentium 4-based CPUs but with much higher cache memory allotments. There are also two Xeon models: the Xeon and the Xeon MP. Although the Xeon MP is theoretically capable of 128-way processing, the largest anyone at Intel knows about uses 32 Xeon MP CPUs.

Itanium and its successor, the Itanium 2, are for applications that use huge amounts of memory (up to 1PB [petabyte; equal to 1 million GB]). The Itanium would have been the 80786, except that being built from the ground up, it bears little relationship to the company's previous x86 products. Itanium has an entirely new architecture based on Intel's EPIC design technology.

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