Chips - Various Flavours

A Brief History Of

Semiconductors

Foundry industry - part 1

Foundry industry - part 2

The foundry transition

Fabless industry

FPGA & PLD's

ASIC's - part 1

ASIC's - part 2

EDA

Semiconductor IP

SoC's

Moore's Law

Mobile - Generations 1 & 2

Mobile Generations - 3 & 4

HowStuffWorks "10 Important Photography Terms"

Tech Fight

LED LCD vs. plasma vs. LCD - CNET Mobile

Intel Outside

More Memories

Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Module (SODIMM)
Dual Data Rate Synchronous RAM (DDR SDRAM)
Single data rate Synchronous RAM (SDRAM)
Proprietary memory modules
L1 cache - Memory accesses at full microprocessor speed (10 nanoseconds, 4 kilobytes to 16 kilobytes in size)
L2 cache - Memory access of type SRAM (around 20 to 30 nanoseconds, 128 kilobytes to 512 kilobytes in size)
Main memory - Memory access of type RAM (around 60 nanoseconds, 32 megabytes to 128 megabytes in size)
Hard disk - Mechanical, slow (around 12 milliseconds, 1 gigabyte to 10 gigabytes in size)
Internet - Incredibly slow (between 1 second and 3 days, unlimited size)

Courtesy of HSW: "http://www.howstuffworks.com/"

Memories

Courtesy of Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

uP Timeline

1971 Intel 4004 Developed to drive calculators, the 4004 was a 4-bit chip with 2,300 transistors and clocked at 740KHz

1972 Intel 8008 The first 8-bit processor, the 8008 had an address space of 16KB and was clocked at 500KHz up to 800KHz

1974 Intel 8080 The 8080 was a significant step up, boasting a clock speed of 2MHz and able to address 64KB memory. Early desktop computers used this chip and the CP/M operating system

1976 Zilog Z80 Zilog was founded by ex-Intel engineers who created a compatible but superior chip to the 8080. The Z80 powered many CP/M machines, plus home computers like the ZX Spectrum

1978 Intel 8086 Famous as the first x86 chip, the 8086 was also Intel’s first 16-bit chip with about 29,000 transistors and was clocked initially at 4.77MHz

1982 Intel 80286 The 80286 was a high-performance upgrade of the 8086, and used by IBM in the PC-AT. First clocked at 6MHz, later versions ran up to 25MHz. The 286 had a 16MB address space and 134,000 transistors. 1985 Intel 80386 Intel’s first 32-bit chip, the 386 had 275,000 transistors – over 100 times that of the 4004. Versions of the 386 eventually reached 40MHz
1985 Acorn ARM produced as co-processor for BBC Micro Seeking a new chip to power future business computers, the makers of the BBC Micro decided to build their own, calling it the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM)
1987 Sun SPARC Like Acorn, Sun was looking for a new chip and decided to create its own. The Sparc architecture is still used today in Sun (now Oracle) systems, and supercomputers
1989 Intel 80486 A higher performance version of the 386, Intel’s 486 was the first x86 chip with over 1 million transistors (1.2 million). It was also the first with an on-chip cache and floating point unit

1990 IBM RS/6000 introduces Power chips IBM experimented with RISC chips in the 1970s, and this bore fruit with the RS/6000 workstation in 1990. The processor later developed into the Power chip used by IBM and Apple
1993 Intel Pentium The Pentium was a radical overhaul of Intel’s x86 line, introducing superscalar processing. Starting at 60MHz but eventually reaching 300MHz, the Pentium had 3,100,000 transistors
1995 Intel Pentium Pro Developed as a high-performance chip, the Pentium Pro introduced out-of-order execution and L2 cache inside the same package. This line later morphed into the Xeon line
1996 AMD K5 AMD had been manufacturing Intel chips under licence for years, but the K5 was its first in-house design, intended to compete with the Pentium
1999 AMD Athlon The AMD Athlon was the firm’s first processor that could beat Intel on performance. Starting at 500MHz, a later version was the first x86 chip to hit 1GHz and had 22 million transistors

2000 Intel Pentium 4 Another major redesign, the Pentium 4 introduced Intel’s Netburst architecture. It was clocked at 1.4GHz initially, rising to 3.8GHz, and had 42 million transistors

2001 Intel Itanium Developed by Intel and HP, Itanium is a 64-bit non-x86 architecture developed for parallelism and aimed at enterprise servers. The Itanium family has not been a great success
2002 TI Omap ARM TI became one of the largest makers of system-on-a-chip devices for smartphones and PDAs with the Omap family, combining an ARM CPU with circuitry such as GSM processors
2003 Intel Pentium-M (Centrino) The Pentium-M was designed specifically for laptops, and formed the core of Intel’s first Centrino platform. It had 77 million transistors and was clocked from 900MHz
2003 AMD Opteron While Intel laboured with Itanium, AMD introduced the first 64-bit x86 chips with the Opteron, which proved popular in workstations and servers. It had over 105 million transistors
2005 Intel Pentium-D Intel introduced its first dual-core chips in 2005, starting with the Pentium Extreme Edition. The Pentium D was the first mainstream desktop chip to follow suit
2006 AMD acquires ATI AMD bought up ATI, announcing ambitious plans to combine its x86 processors with ATI’s graphics processors
2006 Intel Xeon 5300 Intel‘s first quad-core chips were the Xeon 5300 line for workstations and servers. Actually two dual-core dies joined together, these have a total of 582 million transistors
2008 Qualcomm SnapDragon ARM Wireless technology firm Qualcomm started producing highperformance smartphone chips based on the ARM architecture. SnapDragon is clocked at 1GHz and has 200 million transistors
2011 Intel Core i3,i5, i7 Intel’s latest chips, based on the Sandy Bridge architecture. The desktop processors have up to eight cores on a single chip and up to 995 million transistors
2011 AMD Fusion chips The Fusion line combines multiple CPU cores on a single chip along with ATI GPU cores, with the first chips having up to 1.45 billion transistors
2011 ARM announces ARMv8 64-bit architecture ARM unveils its specifications for future 64-bit chips. Although some years away, products based on ARMv8 could have as many as 128 cores
-excerpted from "40 years of the microprocessor" published in the Inquirer http://www.theinquirer.net/