Intel CPU History | Hacker News Reader

Intel CPU History

tomshardware.com

23 pointsnlolks10 comments

Intel’s CPUs are such and impressive and obvious showcase of the evolution of a product. The early chips like the 4004 are downright primitive, and each product leapfroggged and obsoleted the one before it, right up until the Pentium IV.

Each chip brought a huge new feature or performance gain. It’s also amazing how fast they went from a hobbyist chip to a full-feature chip that could do anything the rest of the market could.

I always thought that 80386DX was the first Intel's CPU with integrated FPU, yet the text says it's 80486...

The 80386DX never had a FPU integrated -- it required a second 387 coprocessor chip. You might be thinking of the 80486DX [1] also known as "RapidCAD" that included a dummy 387 FPU to place in that socket.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidCAD

You're absolutely right, thanks for the correction!

I actually hoped to see details about the instruction set changes and register changes between related CPUs. Oh well.

Reading the title, I thought it might be on some fancy debugging microcode!

Where's Itanium?

Or the iAPX 432.

Curiously, they left out the 8088, the processor chosen by IBM to be used in the IBM PC. It was designed in Israel having the 16-bit instruction architecture of the 8086, but with an 8-bit data bus, thus being able to use the cheaper, established chips used by the 8080. This effectively gave IBM an 16-bit machine to compete against Apple II 8-bit 6502 but at prices more consistent with an 8-bit processor.

It is mentioned under the 8086.

Intel also produced the 8088 around the same time. This processor was based on the 8086, but with half of the data bus disabled. This loss in bandwidth hurt performance, but as it still had access to up to 1MB of RAM and ran at higher frequencies, it was faster than Intel's previous eight-bit processors.

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