We all remember attending math classes in school where the
teachers would profoundly state that it was imperative that students learn how
to perform math manually rather than using a calculator. This statement was
quickly followed by “you won’t carry a calculator around with you in real
life!”
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Fast forward to today, we now have devices that fit into the
palm of our hands that not only run your average calculator, but in fact hold
enough processing power to do thousands of tasks rapidly, efficiently, and most
importantly, on demand.
Interestingly enough, the creation of the modern-day silicon
CPU was an accident, or more accurately, the use of it was never intended to be
leveraged in the way that it currently is.
The current CPU is made of silicon, the same material as its
1970s predecessors. A transistor is the essential building block of any
processor, and silicon is the major component that makes up a transistor.
Transistors are essentially “switches” that are activated
and deactivated by an electric current. The 1s and 0s that make up the language
that computers speak are fundamentally represented by this “on” and “off”
function (binary).
Today we’re going to go over the history of the CPU and in
what ways it has shaped the human experience over the last decade.
The company that started it all: Intel
Intel, at this point in time, is a household name.
Whether you’re a tech geek, an average Joe, or know next to
nothing about technology, at some point in your life, you have either heard of
Intel, recognized their logo, seen their ads, or all of the above.
In the 1970s, Intel partnered with a calculator
manufacturing company called
Nippon Machine Corporation (NMC) and promised to
develop the next generation of chips for their advanced calculators at the time.
After many trials and errors, they successfully developed
the 4004 Intel chip; an extraordinary, first-of-its-kind microprocessor that
would be sold for around $60 on the market for general use to the public.
This chip was revolutionary for its time, and it kick
started the technological boom in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Developed by Federico Faggin, Marcian Hoff, and Masatoshi
Shima, this processor would fit an entire general-purpose processor into a
single silicon chip. Around 2,300 random-logic transistors were present in this
version, and the chip boasted five times the speeds of other chips on the
market, all while being 50 percent cheaper than its alternatives.
Previously computers were bulky, incredibly expensive, and
almost entirely inaccessible to the general public. But, as a result of this
invention, along with their patented silicon gate technology, Intel was able to
launch an inquisitive research effort into making smaller, faster, and more
affordable chips to the general marketplace.
IBM, an American computer company, chose Intel’s 16-bit 8088
— a then highly-advanced chip — as the CPU for its first mass-produced
personal computer (PC) in 1981. Intel also supplied microprocessors to companies who
created PC “clones” that were compatible with IBM’s product, leading to a
significant spike in demand for laptops and portable devices.
The 80386 — a 32-bit chip introduced in 1985 — established
the company’s promise to make all future microprocessors backward-compatible
with earlier CPUs. This was possibly the most important of the numerous
microprocessors manufactured by Intel, as application developers and PC
customers could be confident that software designed for older Intel machines
will operate on the latest versions.
Fast forward to 1993, Intel outshined itself yet again by
developing the Pentium microprocessor of 1993.
New era of power
When Intel introduced the Pentium microprocessor, it
abandoned its number-oriented product naming practices in favor of trademarked
names. The Pentium was the first Intel processor for PCs to employ parallel, or
superscalar, processing, which enhanced its performance dramatically.
The Pentium had 3.1 million transistors, compared to the 1.2
million transistors of its predecessor, the 80486, which had 1.2 million.
In 23 years, Intel has managed to go from 2,300 transistors
to a staggering 3.1 million.
The substantially faster Pentium CPU, when combined with
Microsoft’s Windows 3.x operating system, aided in the monolithic rise of the
PC industry. Although most PCs were still purchased by companies, the
higher-performance Pentium computers enabled consumers to utilize PCs for
multimedia graphics programs such as games that required larger amounts of
processing power.
By the end of the century, Intel and similar processors from
firms such as AMD could be found in every PC except
Apple Inc.’s Macintosh,
which was using Motorola’s CPUs dating back to 1984.
However, Apple’s then CEO
Steve Jobs stunned the industry in
2005 when he stated that future Apple PCs will employ Intel CPUs.
Today, one of the most technologically advanced chips,
Apple’s M1, features over 60 billion transistors on its CPU unit. This rampant
growth in the scalability of transistor shrinkage is known as “Moore’s Law”
meaning it is believed that the number of transistors — and as a result, the
power — of CPUs will double every two years.
Thus far, we have been able to keep up with the law that was
ingeniously predicted in 1965; but we are now reaching a crossroads.
The atomic limit
Computer engineers around the globe are now beginning to
test the waters of what is thought to be possible. As it stands, adding
additional transistors to our modern-day CPUs is proving to be a challenge. In
fact, it is slowly becoming more mathematically impossible by the day. And as
we move along Moore’s parabola, it becomes more evident that the future of CPUs
is not microscopic in nature, but in fact atomic.
Whether we continue along the predicted path set out for us
by Gordon Moore, or if we begin to see stagnation in the growth of
micro-processing power, the CPU has undoubtedly been one of the most
revolutionary discoveries of man.
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