CPUs have gone through many changes through the short years since Intel came out with the first one. IBM chose Intel’s 8088 processor for the brains of the first PC. This choice by IBM is what made Intel the de facto leader of the CPU market. It remains the leader of microprocessor development. It usually come out with the new ideas first. Then companies such as AMD and Cyrix come in with their versions, usually with some minor improvements, and slightly faster.<\/p>\n
Intel processors have gone through five generations. A sixth is taking hold. The first four generations took on the “8” as the series name, which is why the technical types refer to this family of chips as the 8088, 8086, and 80186. This goes right on up to the 80486, or just 486. Then came along the Pentium. Intel went off and changed the name on this one. Some guys, though, call it the P5, or a 80586. Anyway, the higher the chip number, the more powerful the chip is, and the more costly.<\/p>\n
Next is a list and brief description of the processors leading up to today’s fast computers. Knowing the internal workings of a CPU is pointless unless you plan on building one, so if you want more detailed info, download the data sheets on the processors. They’re in PDF format, so you’ll need the Acrobat Reader to read them.<\/p>\n
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The following chips are the dinosaurs of the computer world.<\/p>\n
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Intel brought the PC to the 64-bit level with the Pentium Processor in 1993. It has 3.3 million transistors and performs at 100 million instructions per second(MIPS).<\/p>\n
The Pentium family includes the 75\/90\/100\/120\/133\/150\/166\/200 clock speeds. It is compatible with all of the older OSes including DOS, Windows 3.1, Unix and OS\/2. Its superscalar design can execute two instructions per clock cycle. The separate caches and the pipelined floating point unit increase its performance beyond the x86 chips. It has SL power management features and has the ability to work as a team with another Pentium. The chip talks over a 64-bit bus to its cards. It has 273 pins connecting it to the motherboard. Internally, though, it’s really two 32-bit chips chained together that split the work. The chip comes with 16 K of built-in cache.<\/p>\n
This chip, although fast, gets really hot, so the use of a CPU fan is required. Rather recently, Intel has released more efficient versions of the chip that operate at 3.3 volts, rather than the usual 5 volts. This has reduced the heat somewhat.<\/p>\n
Here are some extra little things:<\/strong><\/p>\n The processor has a burst mode that loads 256-bit chunks of data into the data cache in a single clock cycle. It can transfer data to the memory at up to 528 MB\/Sec. Also, Intel took it upon themselves to hardwire several heavily used commands into the chip. This bypasses the typical microcode library of commands. It also has a built-in self-test that operates upon resetting.<\/p>\n For more information on the processor, consult the following links:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Overdrive chips are generally known as turbochargers for older chips. They can be a cost-effective upgrade between your old chip and the new-fangled stuff. Intel is really the king of overdrives, having produced a line of them for the 486 machines and some for the Pentiums.<\/p>\n These chips basically allow the CPU to work at double the clock speed. Intel estimates that their overdrives can increase performance by 70%. They are not complete magic, though. The CPU still talks to its external cards at the same speed. So, in essence, you can have a fast thinking computer that talks real slow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CPUs have gone through many changes through the short years since Intel came out with the first one. IBM chose Intel\u2019s 8088 processor for the brains of the first PC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwarecentral.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Overdrive Processors<\/h2>\n