Thursday, March 25, 2010

Speaking of microprocessors…

The world’s first microprocessor was fabricated by Intel in 1971…Other companies like AMD cloned this processor and it debuted in early video games and small control systems…Compilers were written using the instruction set of this processor but one should note that it is only a 4 bit processor…

Motorola and Texas Instruments also introduced their own processors around this time…Around 1983 Intel introduced the 80286 processor and in 1986 released the 80386 processor…These chips were used mainly on Microsoft Windows based systems…In 1993 the Pentium was released by Intel…The processor’s name Pentium became a household term…

In 1996 Advanced Micro Devices changed it’s direction in cloning Intel chips and started to make their own Windows compatible x86 processors…The instruction set was the same as the Intel line up…

In 2000 AMD shocked the World and Intel by releasing the Athlon processor with a clock speed of 1 GHz…However Intel overtook AMD in terms of clock speed…The release of Pentium 4 processor by Intel in 2000 started a fierce competition between the two companies…

All this time Apple was using Motorola and IBM fabricated processors called PowerPC…It is Reduced Instruction Set Computer ( RISC ) processor…IBM was fabricating their own processors called POWER and made the first innovative dual core processor with the release of the POWER4 processor in 2002…Sun Microsystems with Texas Instruments and AMD and Intel soon began shifting their architectures to multi core processor technology…

Intel from 2005 began to restructure the company and shortened the chip release lifecycle from 4 years to every 2 years…The latest released called Core i7 , Core i5, and Core i3 has over performed substantially against  AMD’s Phenom II line up…

By their very nature, processors are heat emanating and power hungry chips…Almost all the companies are shifting their focus to low power but high performance chips and to achieve this the clock speed should have to be reduced in most cases…IBM using a combination of 65 and 45 nano meter technology solved this problem and in their POWER6 processors the clock speeds achieved a remarkable 6 GHz…

Well that’s it for now…Cheers…