A Brief History of Intel CPU Microarchitectures (2013) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

A Brief History of Intel CPU Microarchitectures (2013) [pdf]

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123 pointsmajke11 comments

I went to visit my dad one day and he brought out a laptop to show me. Said he found it at the local car wash sitting next to the vacuum pillars. This was in 1996 or so. It was a Sceptre brand with an integrated trackball instead of a trackpad. I asked him if I could borrow it. I never gave it back.

I went back to see him again and he had bought a Compaq desktop system. Intel 266Mhz ... it was crazy fast ... compared to the laptop. It was so fast it could play Delphine Moto Racer. I remember feeling totally overwhelmed as each month (it seemed) that Intel was upping speeds in 33Mhz increments.

I started buying "Computer World" magazines to keep up with the speed of innovation. Soon I was a computer expert and Dad made sure to tell his friends that.

He let me use his desktop whenever I came over to visit. It was too big to carry out to the car, which I think he was glad about. I used Laplink and a null-printer cable to try and siphon off his files so I could get Windows 98 to run on my laptop. Eventually, I started a software company and today Dad is using a custom PC I put together for him.

:-)

Exciting times indeed, every new generation run rings around the previous! I feel bad that I'm still running an i7 2600k (@ 4.6ghz) from late 2010, but there hasn't been much need to upgrade. Maybe Skylake-E in about a years time..

I guess CPU's have reached the same point as the car industry, while they're been able to make cars that can do 200mph+ for decades. The mass market wants fual efficient cars.

That's actually a good point. CPUs have been getting more and more low power too.

I guess that's how we do things, make 'em fast, then make 'em efficient.

I find it interesting the number of times they attempted a new ground-breaking architecture, only to continually fall back on good ol' trusty x86.

(Also, I wonder what the morale is like within the Itanium team.)

What Itanium team? They haven't released a new chip since Poulson, which came out in 2012. Kittson was supposed to be released this year (and last year, and the year before), on the same process as Poulson, in a package that's supposedly more compatible with the Xeon line.

The one that's supposed to be (as in, contractually obliged to be) making processors :-)

Fighting the network effects of compatibility is very punishing in computing. I'd feel bad for Intel but that's helped them quite a bit with x86.

The slideshow fails to mention X86_64 (or, let's be honest, AMD64), which is at least as important as Itanium.

Well it's not exactly an Intel micro architecture.

EM64T then.

Ugh, the clumsy/non-standard naming of the 64-bit variant irritates me. AMD64, x86_64, x64, EM64, "Intel 64" (not Intel Architecture 64, although x86 is Intel Architecture 32), etc. And ARM have now done something similar for "AArch64".

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