The last 30 years at a glance :
1971
At the end of 1960's, computers built from ICs already existed. It was only a question of when would a company make a microprocessor.
Two years earlier,
in 1961, a consortium of 2 Japanese companies asked Intel to develop a set
of chips for its Busicom calculator. The calculator's logic was complicated
and there were packaging issues with the use of 7 different large scale (LSI)
chips. In total, 12 chips are needed with the original design.
Intel was able to made a general purpose computing chips and used it in the calculator design instead of using several LSI chips. The 4004 was born. It used around 2,300 transistors and is a 4 bit device. And Busicom's actual calculator was made up of a 4004 CPU, four 4001 ROMs, two 4002 RAMs, and three 4003 shift registers.
The original rights over the 4004 chip was with Busicom, however, Intel was able to buy it back from the Japanese company.
The 4004 chip was designed by Intel's Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, and Federico Faggin, together with Busicom's Masatoshi Shima. The chip supported 45 instructions, and ran under 1 MHz.
1972
A year after the successful launch of its 4 bit device, Intel released another chip, the 8008 microprocessor. It had 3,500 transistors, and was the first 8 bit microprocessor. This allowed the chip to manage alphanumeric data. Although it was originally designed for cathode ray tubes (CRT) of Display Terminal Corporation, it didn't last for long, since it was relatively crude. It had a poorly implemented interrupt mechanism and multiplexed address and data buses.
Micral, the first ready made computer based on 8008, was launched. It was built in France, and was never successful in the U.S. market.
1974
Intel released
the first really popular 8 bit microprocessor at this year. The 8080 had
a separate 8 bit data bus and 16 bit address bus. It ran at 2 MHz with 6000
transistors. It can be said that this microprocessor was an improved 8008.
In fact, the first microcomputer, MITS Altair is based on 8080.
Shortly after the 8080's released, Motorola created the 6800, which
was also an 8 bit processor. Chuck Peddle and Charlie Melear designed the
4000 transistor processor, which was mainly used in automotive and small-business
machines.
1975
At this point, the world was divided into two : the Motorola 6800 supporters and the Intel 8080 supporters. When Federico Faggin left Intel, he joined with Ralph Ungerman in 1974. They found Zilog. The company created Z80, its first microprocessor. This was still an 8 bit, 8500 transistor processor with 16 bit address bus. It clocked at 2.5 MHz, and became the choice of many pioneer system vendors. This, in many ways, brought personal computers into business.
1976
MOS Technology introduced the 6502, an enhanced version of the Motorola 6800. It is an 8 bit microprocessor with 16 bit address bus. This is quite inexpensive and became the microprocessors for Apple II. Other popular PCs which used it include the Commodore Pet, the Commodore 64, and the early Atari machines.
At this same year, the Apple I was released in the market.
1978
The 16 bit microprocessor from Intel, the 8086, was released in this year. It had 29000 transistors and used the x86 instruction that's still present today.
At this same year, Zilog released its own 16 bit microprocessor, the Z8000.
1979
Intel made some improvements in its 8086 and called it 8088. It had the same architecture as the 8086, but communicates with memory via an 8 bit bus. IBM later chose this as the microprocessor for its first PC.
Motorola, at the same time, released to the market its 68000 transistor, 32 bit processor. It was appropriately called Motorola 68000The new 32 bit instruction set became the platform for some of the early Unix systems. Apple also chose it to implement the Lisa and later the Macintosh, the system that first featured the first successful graphical user interface.
1982
Intel introduced the 286, the first x86 microprocessor that make use of general protection and virtual memory. The IBM PC-AT used it. The processor ran from speed of 8 MHz up to 12 MHz, and was six times more powerful than the 8086. It was able to support 16 MB of physical memory and had 134000 transistors.
1983
National Semiconductor released its own version of 32 bit microprocesor, the 32032.
1985
When Intel released the 386, it provided the transition into the modern era of personal computing. This was the first mainstream Intel chip to support linear addressing, with its 32 bit design. On this platform, graphical operating environments such as MS Windows and OS/2 became possible. It had 275000 transistors.
1986
The first RISC microprocessor was released in the market. This was the MIPS R2000, a 185000 transistor chip.
1987
Sun released its first SPARC microprocessor. The chip and its derivatives defined the RISC-based workstations. It only had 50000 transistors.
1989
Intel shipped its 486, an enhancement of its 386 design. It has 1.2 million transistors includes a built-in floating point unit and 8 KB of internal RAM cache.
1993
The
first processor which deviated from the x86 naming scheme of Intel was released.
The Pentium incorporated a superscalar architecture whose dual pipeline could
execute two instructions at once. It became the platform of choice for running
Windows 95 and other applications. It used 3.1 million transistors.
At the same time, IBM and Motorola combined efforts to bring the RISC technology to the market with its Power PC 601. It was one of the first processors to implement out-of-order execution of instructions. This processor and its successor was adopted by Apple for its Macintosh computers. It used 2.8 million transistors.
1995
Intel used a aggressively superscalar design for its Pentium Pro. As such, it could execute up to three instructions simultaneously. Its core CPU had 5.5 million transistors and used an L2 cache.
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