The Complete History of the Home Microprocessor

we are living through a digital revolution a super connected world in which technology engulfs every aspect of our lives since the end of the second world war humanity has been on a relentless pursuit of innovation and technological progress the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from almost three quarters in 1950 to less than an eighth today of course this rapid advancement doesn't just come out of nowhere and one of the key drivers was the microprocessor [Music] the ability to shrink an entire computer to a chip the size of her finger has allowed

for the mass adoption of both home and mobile computers they've also had far reaching implications helping to advance every industry from manufacturing finance retail to healthcare the last 75 years has seen computer technology grow at a truly incredible rate we're going to look at the complete journey from early vacuum tube machines to the birth of home computers from the multimedia madness of the 1990s to the multi-core mindset of the 2000s and 2010s and finally what is ahead to understand how all this came about you need to go back to the very beginning of digital electronics

and look at how early post-war computers were designed [Music] in 1945 with allied victory imminent it could have easily been assumed that the militaries of computer technology would subside leaving the endeavour to have a purely academic role however the slow emergence of the bitter rivalry between the soviet union and the united states meant that this was far from the case [Music] indeed the first digital computer the electronic numerical integrator and computer or anyak for short was used by the united states army for calculating firing tables for artillery and later for research into the hydrogen bomb

outperforming mechanical computers by a factor of a thousand eniac was a revolution in computer technology press articles at the time reference how it could vastly outperform existing computers the us army was so proud of it they even used it in their own recruitment advertisements [Music] overall it was met with a huge critical acclaim despite being challenging to programme for the inventors of eniac john markley and john eckert proposed a successor shortly after called edvac or electronic discrete variable automatic computer unlike any anyak which used a decimal representation for numbers edvac used a binary representation making

data storage much more compact [Music] morky and eckhart were your mathematician john von neumann who wrote an influential report on the edvac detailing how the computer could be extended by storing the programs alongside the data rather than having the two in separate parts of memory this idea would be known as the von neumann architecture which virtually every microprocessor has since been built on britain's loss of superpower status in the early 20th century meant that its efforts were far more research focused than in america the manchester baby developed a couple of years after eniac was the

first computer to be equipped with random access memory meaning it could store programs alongside data this was achieved by using a modified set of four williams cv1131 crt monitors the baby was slow even for the time but its use of random access memory was pioneering and it would lay the groundwork for the ferranti mark 1 the world's first commercially available computer [Music] during development of the baby another computer called the edsack was being developed at the university of cambridge the edsac hardware was not as technologically advanced as the baby featuring only serial memory but nonetheless

correctly implemented the von neumann architecture and had a far more advanced instruction set featuring 14 instructions compared to the baby seven it allowed for easier software development particularly later in its life [Music] one such example was oxo an implementation of tic-tac-toe which is widely considered to be the first video game ever created it was becoming increasingly clear that the scientific and commercial applications of computers would far outstrip the military use of the mid to late 1940s by 1954 95 of computers were used for non-military purposes despite their increased use there were still limitations preventing wider

adoption of computers the defining characteristic for all these early machines was the use of vacuum tubes or valves for their main processing elements [Music] vacuum tubes were unreliable hot power hungry and heavy [Music] even a small computer like the manchester baby weighed in excess of a ton the solution was the transistor the first transistor was manufactured at the great bell labs in 1947 it performed the same job as a vacuum tube but could be smaller more reliable and less power hungry due to its lack of an electron beam the first computer to use these was

the manchester transistor computer the great grandson of the manchester baby it used 250 transistors consumed only 150 watts of power and in the shadow of vacuum tube domination seemed like a miracle there was a problem however these early transistors were simply too difficult to mass produce and scale limiting their potential there were attempts to rectify this problem using electric fields to control the current compared to the more traditional method of a direct terminal this proved difficult though and little success was made over several years this was until engineer mohamed italia proposed to cover the silicon

wafer with a thin layer of silicon dioxide which allowed the electric field to more easily pass through the silicon this process led to the creation of the metal oxide silicon field effect transistor or mosfet in 1959 a transistor with high manufacturability and extremely low power cost mosfets made it possible to develop high density integrated circuits which allow for cheaper and smaller systems thus drastically increasing adoption numbers early mosfet machines such as the ibm system 360 family used a hybrid interconnect circuit approach combining integrated circuits with traditional electronic components the system 360 was particularly influential due

to ibm's decision to separate the system architecture from the implementation this meant that all computers in the family from the cheap model 30 to the expensive model 75 could run the same software a concept that would become widely accepted in the industry [Music] its successor the system 370 made full use of monolithic integrated circuits the adoption of these integrated circuits created a new type of computer entirely the mini computer these systems were scaled down versions of large mainframe computers designed to provide computing power to organizations who wanted to use computers but couldn't afford or justify

a large mainframe largely accepted as the first commercial minicomputer the deck pdp-5 was one-fifth the price and one-quarter the weight of the pvp-1 released four years earlier it was less powerful featuring only 12-bit memory compared to the 18-bit larger pdp machines but it was hugely successful selling more than 1 000 units this entry point was continually lower throughout the early 70s allowing even more widespread adoption the data general nova with its 200 kilohertz clock speed and 8k of ram cost just eight thousand dollars and was one of the most popular mini computers of the decade

some however knew that the idea of miniaturization could be taken to even more extremes the first use of a microprocessor was in the f-14 tomcat fighter jet and was developed by garrett ai research the company was asked by the us navy to build a flight computer that could compete with the electromechanical system that was being used during development the processor created to do this took up 120 at the space of the existing system and was much more reliable impressed by its capabilities the navy used this chip in all early f-14s but all information regarding its

development was classified until 1997 so its effects on the wider industry are little if any the story of the first commercial microprocessor involved japanese company buzzer com who are developing a range of programmable calculators but were struggling to produce the chipset required the company contacted intel who were large producers of computer memory for mainframe and mini computers and asked whether they could produce a 7-chip design for their calculator intel accepted and project engineered ted hoff proposed that this could be reduced to four chips to lower costs hoff not being a chip designer moved on to

other projects and was succeeded by italian engineer federico fagin whom intel had hired from fairchild semiconductor while working at fairchild fagin invented a new transistor technology called a self-aligned gate this allows for the gate of the transistor to have a much smaller overlap with the source and drain regions by automatically generating it within the mask process removing the spot on neck and transistor design meant the performance could easily be increased when moving to a smaller lithography fairchild were reluctant to adopt this technology so when fagin moved to intel he immediately put it to use in

the buzzercon project this led to the creation of the intel 4004 which was delivered to buzzercom in 1971. the company would go on to sell more than 100 000 for w4 powered calculators the world's first commercial microprocessor was born a new era of computing was about to begin [Music] so the year is 1971. [Music] well microprocessors were starting to be seen in calculators many had seen how mosfets had given rise to the mini computer and wondered whether microprocessors could be used to make an all-new type of computer a home computer one such person was former

nasa engineer gus roach who set up a company in 1968 called computer terminal corporation ctc to manufacture terminals for mainframes and mini computers roach was determined to produce a personal computer one that was small enough to fit on a desk but could perform more work than acting just as a terminal [Music] his designs highlighted the need of a single 8-bit microprocessor the ctc1201 rather than the more traditional approach of a collection of ttl logic chips that was just one problem at the time no one had ever manufactured one [Music] merch knew this so i approached

two chipmakers to ask if they could manufacture the microprocessor one of these was texas instruments who were a large producer of integrated circuits and logic chips [Music] the other was intel who mainly produced memory chips texas instruments attempted to produce the chip but it suffered from reliability problems and mass development was not continued intel who are in the early days of developing the 404 didn't see much point to the project for them memory was a far bigger priority nonetheless they decided to take on the project and got to work implementing ctc's design initial progress was

good but it suffered delays and intel could not meet ctc's time schedules as a result ctc decided to abandon the single process design in favor of a multiple chip approach intel continued working on the chip however and a year later released it as the intel 8008 the world's first 8-bit microprocessor since the 808 design was based off of ctc specifications their computer that the data point 2200 was completely instruction compatible with the intel awa despite not using the processor the 8008 was soon replaced with the 8080 which improved compatibility with existing ttl chips had a

much higher clock speed and included a larger 16-bit address bus this caught the attention of calculator manufacturer mits who would use the 404 processor in some of its designs ed roberts the company's founder knew that the 8080 was powerful enough to be used in home computer but the chip's high price meant that it wasn't commercially viable to do so as one of intel's largest customers roberts was able to negotiate the price down from 350 to 75 dollars per unit this led to the creation of the altair 8800 generally considered the first commercially successful personal computer

the 8800 was popular with a generation of computer scientists and engineers who had learned computer programming at college but no longer had any hardware to use several other home computers followed suit and the ship also appeared in early arcade games such as tato's space invaders [Music] soon after more designs appeared on the market the motorola 6800 was released just four months after the 8080 and saw used in several early home computers motorola had been a huge player in developing transistor powered electronics and were confident that their chip would be successful [Music] however poor decisions by

management led most of the design team to walk out around the time of its release the team led by engineers chuck peddle and bill mensch would join a small semiconductor company called moss technology who are best known for creating the processor for atari's pong they got to work by taking the 6800 design and removing the features that were deemed unnecessary in order to drive cost down they removed one of the accumulators simplified the memory bus and tracked the instruction set by 25 another dramatic cost saving was achieved by modifying the masking process in the silicon

to significantly improve yields [Music] this allows moss to have a defect rate of less than 30 percent compared to the 70 rate of compared to foundries [Music] the result was the moss technology 6501 and 6502 first shown at the westcon 75 trade show in san francisco [Music] the 6501 was pin compatible with the motorola 6800 whereas the 6502 was a modification of the 6500 while design with an on-chip clog oscillator [Music] the result of the cost saving meant that the 6502 could be sold for just 25 compared to the 175 of the 6800 and the

350 of the intel 8080 [Music] the news was covered in great detail by the technology press and the product was soon in high demand [Music] however motorola were furious with the 651's compatibility with its pin layout and sued most technology citing patent infringement [Music] moss being a small company settled with motorola and stopped selling the 6501 but this wasn't an issue since the 6502 was far more popular and motorola made no such demands regarding that chip in fact motorola knew that the 6502 would be successful regardless two months after the chip was released they reduced

the cost of the 6800 from 175 to 69 nine months later it was dropped again to 35 but it was too late everyone knew the 6502 was king the chip was used in a whole host of early home computers including the apple ii commodore pet and vic-20 atari 400 and 800 and the bbc micro it also found success in the emerging home video game market powering the atari 2600 the atari lynx the turbo graphics and the nes despite the success the legal battles with motorola had bled the company of funds and so they were taken

over by commodore in late 1976 commodore would fully utilize mass technology's expertise with the commodore 64 which used a lightly modified 6502 chip the 6510 the 6502 had massively disrupted the market with its high performance and low cost but it soon faced competition of its own the head engineer of the intel 8080 project federico fashion soon left the company after its completion and started dialogue microcomputers with fellow intel engineers the team took the 8080 design and added several improvements a whole host of new instructions the number of support chips required and introduce new indexing registers

that made repeated execution faster this chip was released as the zylok z80 and while its intended use was in embedded systems it was soon widely adopted in the home computer market the chip was featured in the amstrad cpc various msx computers the radio shack trs-80 and the sinclair zx80 81 and spectrum like the 6502 the z80 also found its fair share of success in the video game industry powering the calico vision sega master system and sega gengar in addition to home systems the z80 was the go-to processor for the emerging video arcades it was the

chip that powered donkey kong galaxian gallagher pac-man mario brothers frogger and berserk but this was just the tip of the iceberg the z80 success would not come from its use in home computers or video games it would come from software the z80 was a de facto processor to run cpm the world's first successful cross-platform operating system cpm was originally built for the intel 8080 but being fully compatible and cheaper the z80 was the obvious choice due to the cross-platform nature cpm quickly gained a large software library which made it the dominant operating system in the

late 1970s and early 1980s one such example was word star one of the earliest word processors to gain commercial success it's what you see is what you get interface gave it a clear advantage over existing fully text-based word processes another example was microsoft's multi-plan an early spreadsheet application that would become microsoft excel three years later in fact microsoft were a key developer of cpm software and recommended using the cpm operating system to partner ibm who were in the process of developing their own home computer however digital research the company who created cpm were not happy

with ibm's contract leading microsoft to abandon this plan they instead purchased 86 dos an imitation of cpm that had been designed to take advantage of intel's new 16-bit 8086 processor and renamed it to ms-dos this was then licensed to ibm who used it in their 1981 product the ibm pc powered by a cheaper version of the 8086 the 8088 it was an instant success and the ms-dos operating system quickly overtook cpm in market share the proliferation of different microprocessors and architectures created a golden age of home computer technology in the early 1980s the adoption of

computers rapidly increased in both home education and in the workplace however by 1985 ibm were clearly ahead more than half of the home computers in america were ibm's [Music] the original ibm pc has solved well but the recently released pcat led the industry with its blazing fast intel 8286 cpu the pcat was so fast that ibm had to purposely slow down the chip to not cannibalize its mini computer line faced with dwindling sales of 8-bit computers others in the industry needed a microprocessor that could keep up thankfully this already existed introduced in 1980 the motorola

68k was first used in high performance systems such as the hp 9000 series and silicon graphics iris workstations however by the middle of the decade prices had become low enough the use in a personal computer would be cost effective the 68k was perfect for the next generation of home computers it's forward-thinking 32-bit design and high clock speed meant that it was suited to graphics heavy workloads [Music] it would be the chip to power the apple macintosh the commodore amiga and atari st home computers with ibm pc compatibles dominating the office space these new machines would

position themselves as creative workstations [Music] the macintosh by far the most popular of the three had oldest page maker a desktop publishing application which allowed the mac to rule the desktop publishing space [Music] the amiga had deluxe paint a digital graphics editor and the video toaster a video production suite and the atari with its built-in midi thoughts was a music production powerhouse with software such as cubase and logic by the late 1980s the market was made up almost entirely of pc compatibles and 68k powered machines ibm who had led the market with the pc and

pcat did not want to lose its influence so released a new lineup of computers in 1987 called the ps2 series the more powerful ps2 machines use the new intel 8386 cpu and offered a range of new features [Music] one such feature was a new expansion bus called micro channel architecture which was designed to replace the existing isa bus that had been used on previous ibm machines and pc compatibles ibm had patented the new bus and charged license fees to companies who wanted to use it [Music] the move was met with poor reception though it was

seen as a desperate attempt to regain control of standards during a time when ibm's grip on the personal computer market had been ever slipping ps2 machines sold poorly and pc vendors worked together in a consortium to create standards outside ibm's influence by 1990 it was clear that ibm had lost control of the industry [Music] management issues at atari and commodore had meant that both companies struggled in the early 1990s effectively ending support for the amiga and st computer lines this led to a bloom of mac adoption with apple becoming america's number one computer manufacturer during

this time however even the newest apple machines could not compete with the latest pc technology the intel 8046 released in 1990 was twice as fast the outgoing 386 this was achieved by using an inbuilt floating point unit an on-chip l1 cache an advanced pipelining the motorola 68040 which drove the most powerful mac systems could beat the 46 clock for clock but simply couldn't get to the clock speeds without reaching furnace-like heat output [Music] the market was now segregated into two sectors the more niche motorola powered macintosh and the widespread intel-powered pc one thing was for

certain though the pc was winning as computing power increased throughout the late 80s and early 90s the potential use cases of home computers grew at a similar rate the 1990s saw an explosion multimedia software and hardware which took advantage of the new technology at the heart of it was the cd-rom packing huge amounts of data into a single optical disk software titles such as microsoft and carter and mist made full use of the storage the cd-roms offered to power these a fast processor was a must it was an age of multimedia madness intel by far

the mark leader in the pc space knew that they would need to continue their advancements in order to power this new multimedia age by late 1992 the company had spent three years developing the 486 successor and didn't want anyone else to profit off it up until this point second sourcing was an almost universal staple of the industry [Music] multiple manufacturers would produce variants of a company's micro processor such that supply was always ensured however as intel entered near monopoly levels of market share the chipmaker did not want other companies to profit off its new products

and cut all second sourcing agreements [Music] in addition it also didn't want other cpu manufacturers to use its branding for their advantage [Music] other companies such as cyrix and amd the created products which use the 386 and 486 tagline in their brand names [Music] the result of this meant that intel's new chip would have a new name the intel pentium [Music] the pentium was launched in early 1993 and was an immediate hit the chip was blazing fast and blew the doors off anything else on the market its dual pipeline design allowed the chip to process

simple and complex instructions simultaneously known as a super scalar architecture the chip also benefited from a turbocharged floating point unit which was up to 15 times faster than the one used in the 486 my magazine had it best when they ran a double page spread saying pentium changes the pc indicating that the pentium was so fast it would be bottlenecked by other system components in fact this was the pentium's biggest problem the other components ram storage display adapter weren't ready to take advantage of the pentium's true performance and the need for the latest hardware meant

the cost of pentium machines was prohibitively expensive this created heightened demand for 486 machines and allowed intel's competition to flourish [Music] the amd am486 and cyrex cx486 were two micro processors that had been reverse engineered from intel's path these processors performed at roughly the same level as intel's 486 but was cheaper for example a 40 megahertz am486 cost the same as a 33 megahertz intel 486 this competition continued and although it would take several years both amd and cyrex came up with pentium competitors the amd k5 and cyrex 6x86 were both released in 1996 delivering

pentium performance at a lower price [Music] things were looking good for the market until one application changed everything quake was the hottest pc game of 1996 and was a visual marvel quake's levels guided players through a fully textured map 3d world rendered in real time to power such a feat a pentium processor was a must its software had taken maximum advantage of pentium specific optimizations and the game heavily relied on floating point calculations up until this time almost all applications relied exclusively on integer maths where the 686 and k5 could beat the pentium in quake

however they couldn't come close cyrix was hit particularly hard as its floating point performance was extremely weak in comparison to intel's the chipmaker was soon relegated to producing low-cost products for entry-level machines and the company merged with national semiconductor in 1997 ending its x86 development this issue didn't hurt amd in anywhere near the same extent though this was due to the chip maker acquiring nextgen another semiconductor company who produced 486 class cpus for pcs nextgen had been working on the successor to their own pentium competitor the nx586 and this design would become the basis for

amd's new processor the result was the amd k6 which would release in 1997. despite launching four years after the pentium the chip could match the very best on the market to keep on top of the industry intel had intended the pentium to be replaced with the pentium pro in 1995 thus extending their performance lead the pentium pro used an advanced architecture called p6 which put heavy emphasis on improved 32-bit performance but suffered in 16-bit applications this was a problem since intel had over estimated the amount of 32-bit code that would be used in windows 95

and its applications resulting in the pentium pro delivering no real performance gain over the pentium this meant that by 1997 four years after the pen team had launched it was still the company's fastest chip [Music] the bad news for intel was the amd's k6 was fast faster than an equivalent pentium and cost less [Music] the kasich's architecture was vastly superior to the k5s and the chip was a huge success [Music] feeling the heat intel released the pentium 2 the same year which used the same architecture as the pentium pro but with a number of improvements

and cost reductions [Music] the pentium 2 was vast but it wasn't a leap forward that the pentium had been while the chip was faster than floating point applications amd's k6 and its successor the k62 were faster in initiative performance [Music] this moment for gaming intel was ahead but for everyone else you could just save the money and get a k6 intel's competition was not limited to the x86 space however apple who were the last remaining manufacturer of 68k computers in the early 90s saw the rapid performance increases of wintel pcs and knew that they had

to look to a new architecture in order to keep up motorola who had built the 68k also knew that their architecture would not last the next 10 years to combat intel apple motorola teamed up with ibm to produce a brand new risk-based micro architecture called power pc the risk philosophy standing for reduced instruction set computing aimed to simplify the low level micro operations the made up computer programs [Music] the risk construction set had far fewer instructions than the cis construction set found in x86 machines meaning that in theory architectural improvements would be easier to design

and implement many in the 1990s believed that risk construction sets were the future and that the complex nature of a cisc architecture would limit its potential it was during this time that many risk architectures were developed including power pc ultra spark from sun and intel's titanium [Music] power was first introduced on the desktop in 1994 with apple's power macintosh line and provided a much needed performance boost to apple's family the first power pc chip the 601 was up to three times faster than the motorola 68040 cpu that it replaced the performance improvements continued with the

power pc750 launching in 1997. the chip branded by apple as the g3 was the fastest cpu in the world and solidified the idea that risk was the architecture of the future [Music] the chip was up to 30 faster than the pentium 2 in some applications and due to its low power usage meant that apple's laptops would easily outperform intel equivalents intel was starting to feel pressure from competition on both the pc and mac side and by early 1999 amd had overtaken them in sales response the pentium 3. considered by many to be a rebrand early

pentium 3s were nothing more than pentium 2s but with a new cache controller and intel's new sse instructions sse allowed the cpu to drive the floating point unit as a vector processor allowing a program to do a calculation on four floating point numbers and the time it would take to do one this technology had been introduced by amd on the k62 called 3d now but it was not widely adopted and intel's adaptation would become the industry standard the pentium 3 was the fastest x86 cpu on release but only briefly amd would release the athlon in

late 1999 a chip that was definitively faster than the pentium 3. [Music] the athlon was ahead in integer calculations but even further ahead in floating point intel responded with a whole host of modifications to the pentium 3 core including introducing an on-board l2 cache [Music] these second generation pentium 3 cpus were known as copper mine and while they were not faster than the athlon plot for clock they had far better motherboard support and used less power they should have been big sellers [Music] but they weren't intel was in the process of transitioning from the 250

to 180 nanometer manufacturing nerd and this transition was fraught with problems [Music] a one gigahertz copper mine pentium 3 would just about outperform a first generation athlon but you just couldn't buy the intel part stock was severely limited and faced with no other choice retailers and oems were forced to build athlon pcs [Music] to further this performance amd refreshed the athlon by moving the cash to be on die like the copper 9 pentium 3s which allowed them to crank up the clock speeds all the way to 1.4 gigahertz with continued lack of supply of pentium

3s amd invested in another manufacturing plant in germany to keep up with demand the news got worse for intel because it was around this time that the power pc is 7400 more commonly known as the g4 was released the g4 was the first power pc chip to implement ssc-like features called ultravec and performance easily overtook x86 cpus in pcs even at low clock speeds intel released the pentium 4 in late 2000 but it was clear that the product had been rushed to market as it was power hungry hot and slow not only could the pentium

4 not match the athlons it couldn't even match amd's budget-friendly duron cpus in early 2002 the product was updated to include more cash support faster memory and included higher clock speeds using intel's new 130 nanometer process the chip can now clock fast enough to beat amd's flagship which had been renamed athlon xp [Music] however with upcoming launches from powerpc and amd it was clear that the performance crown would not be held for long [Music] [Music] the multimedia driven 1990s had seen a paradigm shift in the design of cpus an emphasis on floating point performance meant

that by the turn of the millennium processors were equipped to handle high-resolution displays complex creative applications and rich 3d graphics with a clock speed wall soon approaching the next 20 years will be defined by packaging multiple cpu cores onto a single die [Music] while the previous 25 years was based around ever-growing clock speeds these new designs would require a whole new way of thinking [Music] this was the era of the multi-core mindset [Music] the year is 2002 and with intel's mainstream and workstation performance behind its rival amd the company attempted to boost performance with a

new technology called hyper threading hyper threading was an implementation of smt or simultaneous multi-threading a technique that created an additional virtual processor which allowed applications to take advantage of underused parts of the processing pipeline this was first seen in new intel xeon workstation processors which replaced the pentium 3 zeons which occupied space the technology was used to close the performance gap to the amd athlon mp a dual socket version of the athlon xp the feature was brought to the desktop with the high-end pentium 4 cpus in may 2003 this combined with a super fast 800

megahertz front side bus meant that the pentium pulled ahead of the athlon xp amd responded by releasing the athlon 64 the first 64-bit x86 cpu the processor was based on amd's opteron server cpu which had been released earlier in the year at first the achievement didn't seem that impressive there were other 64-bit cpus around many risk architectures had reached the 64-bit milestone far earlier it wasn't even the first 64-bit desktop cpu the power mac g5 powered by the power pc 970 had been released three months prior but none of this mattered because amd's architecture could

do what no other architecture could run both 64 and 32-bit x86 applications at full speed there was another architecture that could run both intel's itanium which was a risk-based 64-bit cpu that featured a 32-bit x86 compatibility layer the titanium however suffered huge performance penalties and running 32-bit x86 code the athlon's architecture didn't intel tried to combat amd's press coverage by announcing a fully unlocked version of the pentium 4 the pentium 4 extreme edition this quickly gained the nickname emergency edition due to its sudden announcement but conveniently a week before the athlon 64's release the initial

launch of the athlon was somewhat mixed the chip was the fastest out there no question but it was expensive and the requirement to use buffered memory on high-end atlan 64 fx products added further costs there were also production issues launch amd could only produce 100 000 chips a month these problems eventually ironed out and the athon 64 sold well while the pentium 4 was fast for content creation workloads in gaming the athlon 64 and 64 fx were far ahead revisions of the pentium 4 and athlon 64 chips were rolled out throughout 2004 and early 2005.

but while the pentium 4 remained competitive the product was suffering from high power draw and temperatures as intel cranked the clock speeds higher and higher the true step forward was met in 2005 with the release of the dual core pentium d and athlon 64 x2 the pentium d was essentially two pentium 4 processors on the same package whereas the athlon was a monolithic design again coming from amd's work in the server space the athlons just like their single core counterparts were faster out the box but amd charged a heavy price premium and with a good

overclock the pentium could trade blows for far less money it was clear by now however that the pentium 4 was not a smart design in an effort to try and continuously improve clock speeds questionable design decisions were made that would harm the architecture in the long run the p4 notoriously long 31-stage instruction pipeline made the processor inefficient and when it was clear that going beyond four gigahertz would be impossible intel knew that they had to change the architecture but things were already looking up for the company apple had transitioned away from power pc processors to

intel's making amd intel's only competitor in a desktop cpu space in addition amd has become complacent with their performance using revenue to buy graphics company ati rather than invest in r d decided to base their new architecture on the pentium m a mobile chip originally based on the pentium 3 design the pentium m was designed to be as power efficient as possible and while being based on the pentium 3 it took many of the improvements from the pentium 4 and incorporated them into the core to show that the company was moving away from the pentium

4 approach they created a brand new name for their processors intel core the first intel core product was the intel core solo and intel called duo in early 2006 these chips were laptop exclusives and were nothing more than pentium m processors with minor tweaks [Music] however ported to a new manufacturing process they provided class leading performance and was successful [Music] their biggest weakness was that they were still only 32-bit chips but intel knew this would be fixed in the next design and boy was it a big one the core 2 duo family released in july

2006 was nothing short of a game changer the chips based on intel's new conroe architecture were up to twice as fast as the pentium d's they replace and crush the performance of competing athlon 64 cpus [Music] the mid-range e6600 was a particular gem it cost around 320 but was faster than the 900 athlon fx 52 which was amd's flagship [Music] the chips received glowing reviews in the technology press citing the high performance low power consumption and great value the architecture had been given a wealth of upgrades which each gave small single-digit performance increases the chip

itself was given a huge four megabytes of l3 cache confused instructions together to decode more instructions per cycle and had beefy out of order instruction capabilities [Music] when combined together along with a whole host of other improvements the chip was a quantum leap in performance and crucially amd had nothing to match it the company refreshed his lineup with slightly faster athlons with much lower prices but they just weren't fast enough furthermore the launch of core2 quad a dual die version of the core 2 duo pushed intel's technology lead even further ahead in an age where

dual cores were only just being utilized most people had no need for a quad core processor and a launch price of 850 or dollars for the cheapest version the chip was a niche product but this didn't matter because the halo chip was a demonstration that intel was king the core two quads rapidly dropped in price throughout 2007. [Music] three months after release the q6600 the most popular call to quad part had its price reduced by three hundred dollars by july the price has dropped to just 266 dollars amd finally responded to intel's lineup in late

2007 with the launch of phenom but the chips were overpriced and hit with an architectural bug which dropped performance further the main problem with phenom was it simply couldn't clock fast enough the chips struggled to get past 2.5 gigahertz the product was relaunched six months later with the architectural bug fixed increased clock speeds and the lower price [Music] the feed on was now competitive but only just towards the end of 2008 and early 2009 successors from both companies were released the core i7 from intel was launched in late 2008 and offered noticeable performance gains over

the quality quad but the product was hampered by the requirement for expensive ddr3 memory and a reduction in l2 cache size meant that some software saw no performance gain amd released its new architecture the phenom 2 in january 2009 to warm reception the chip wasn't as fast as the core i7 but it was competitive with the call to quads and could be dropped into the now three-year-old am2 motherboards for a cost-effective upgrade six core cpus came in early 2010 with the core i7 980 x being released by intel and the phenom 2x6 being released by

amd the i7 was a chip that could do it all it had impressive multi-threaded performance when applications could use all six cores and blistering single core speed when they couldn't the phenom wasn't so impressive but thanks to its low price it was at least competitive [Music] going into 2011 both amd and intel had brand new micro architectures on the horizon with intel detailing its new sani bridge micro architecture in late 2010 from the surface sandy bridge was an evolution within the halim architecture of the previous core i7 but under the hood there were a variety

of improvements which gave it a boost of around 30 over the original core i7 this was impressive on its own but the biggest advantage with saudi bridge was the affordability the core i7 2600k could match the previous flagship the six core i7 980 x that was 700 cheaper at only 317 for the real star was the core i5 2500k delivering 90 of the performance of the 2600k at roughly half the price [Music] the chips were given glowing reviews in the tech press a nantech called them a no-brainer an amd would have to deliver something special

to keep up early in development amd had reported that its upcoming bulldozer architecture was up to 50 faster than the original core i7 and many hoped for a return to top tier performance [Music] bulldozer was a radical departure from previous designs in prior architectures each core got its own caches units and interconnects and were largely independent with one another in bulldozer amd group two calls together into a module which shared some resources such as the level 2 cache and floating point unit [Music] this compromise was done to try and boost clock speed to the part

something which had always troubled amd with the original phenomena if clock speeds were high enough then the chip would easily outperform its predecessor there was just one problem they weren't the flagship fx 8150 was barely faster than the phenom 2x6 despite having eight cores compared to the phenom six in single threaded workloads the fx chips were slower than phenom and compared to sandy bridge they were hopeless [Music] because of the lackluster performance amd could only price their chips up to a certain point which meant the revenue started to decrease [Music] at first there wasn't a

problem with strong gpu sales and sales of phenom enabling the company to bring home a net income of 491 million dollars in 2011. but a year later the company made a net loss of 1.18 billion dollars amd were forced to sell its foundries lay off staff drastically cut down on r d and even sell its headquarters [Music] the company tried to fix the broken architecture first by cranking up the clock speed and then gradually modifying the core design but this did little to help because intel's architecture was so far ahead faced with no competition intel

spent almost all of its focus on the mobile market beefing up the integrated graphics and improving power consumption this was mainly achieved using the company's unmatched lead in silicon manufacturing even if amd could make a chip as powerful it would be slower due to intel's foundry advantage intel were dominant for the next five years and faced with no competition rolled out endless quad cores with slightly higher performance [Music] sandy bridge was followed by ivy bridge essentially a die shrink to the 22 nanometer platform [Music] this was followed by haswell broadwell and then skylake each being

minor improvements many people started to feel like these new chips were lazy upgrades but with amd so far behind people had no choice but to buy them faced with bankruptcy amd took drastic action first most resources were put behind developing a brand new cpu architecture called zen this left amd's graphics lineup vulnerable but amd had never really broke through with graphics and so this was deemed a necessary sacrifice they beefed up efforts with microsoft and sony to produce the hardware for the xbox one and playstation 4 consoles helping to diversify revenue streams the company also

gained a new ceo in late 2014 lisa sue could join the company in 2012 from hp enterprise restructuring a place and the company now stable amd went into 2017 with great hope their new cpu architecture was ready the zen core was far more traditional than the bulldozer concept reverting back to an independent core design over bulldozer's modules it brought new features such as some micro op cache simultaneous multi threading and a dramatically improved floating point engine the architecture was also built on the new 14 nanometer fin effect process which yielded further efficiency gains the biggest

advantage zen had however was its high core count featuring up to eight cores on a single zen die [Music] launched in early 2017 verizon which was the brand name of the zen product family was met with praise from the tech press the top-end chips were equal in performance the intel core i7 6900k but the horizons were a third the price while single threaded performance and clocks were still behind intel's latest architecture kaby lake you got twice the cause for the same price consumers who have been stuck with a maximum of four cores for the last

11 years are suddenly shown just how dangerous a monopoly could be intel quickly responded releasing a six core mainstream processor the i7 8700k six months later [Music] the ryzen family was refreshed in april 2018 with minor tweaks and higher clock speeds being released as the ryzen 2000 series and in october intel further increased core count with the core i9 at 9900k which brought eight cores to intel's mainstream platform [Music] intel had hoped to transition products across to their new 10 nanometer node in 2015 but it had been plagued with problems and even five years later

it still wasn't ready for the desktop the company mitigated this by making continuous improvements to its 14 nanometer process but amd who used tsmc and samsung foundries could leap ahead and gain a node advantage while tsmc's 7 nanometer was only slightly better than intel 10 nanometer process it had great yields and could be used for a desktop size die in july 2019 amd fully utilized the new node with their ryzen 3000 family based on the zen 2 architecture the core design was the same as the original ryzen with an improved memory controller and doubled the

l3 cache significantly improving gaming performance the zen 2 architecture also innovated by using a chiplet design which separated the i o and compute portions of the chip into two distinct dies this was done because the compute portion gained large benefit when moving to the new expensive process whereas moving the i o die saw little benefit thus by separating the dies the i o could be manufactured using older and cheaper lithographies without impacting performance this chiplet design allowed amd to double the core count bringing 16 calls to the mainstream desktop [Music] stuck on its 14 nanometer

process intel could only increase core count by 25 losing its 10 core i9 10 900k in may 2020 so what's next since 2005 we've hit a wall with clock speeds being limited by power jaw and heat dissipation furthermore as the process nodes shrink the cost to develop new chips is growing at an exponential rate in 2001 when the pentium 4 was first introduced there are 23 foundries who are manufacturing the bleeding edge 130 nanometer process with the latest seven nanometer node only three are left intel samsung and tsmz with these limitations the future of x86

looks underwhelming more cores bigger caches minor architectural improvements but 50 increases in performance you can forget it [Music] keep pushing boundaries it will require truly groundbreaking innovation but that's exactly how we got here in the first place today the pc processor industry is dominated by amd and intel with essentially 100 market share in laptops home computers and servers but in televisions infotainment systems smart devices and particularly in smartphones they have almost zero market influence so why is there such a divide between these two markets it's not performance modern smartphones are just as powerful as home

computers discovering the answer is critical in understanding why the home computer industry is becoming armed and dangerous to find it we need to go back to 1981. this was at the beginning of the home computer revolution and acorn computers were a key player in the uk their first computer the atom was a minor hit but the real success came with the follow-up the company had signed a deal with the bbc to produce a computer for a series of educational programs as part of the broadcasters computer literacy program the computer was developed quickly and was released

as the bbc micro which went on to become one of the best selling home computers of the period its success was linked to the education market as part of the program the government subsidized computers in schools by offering 50 off provided that they chose one of three models the bbc micro sinclair zx spectrum or rm380z from oxford company research machines micro was the obvious choice however since it was the machine that was featured in the bbc television programs to capitalize on their success and to address the low end of the market being dominated by sinclair

products acorn released the electron a cost reduced version of the bbc micro during this time acorn engineers began to think about the next generation machine but found existing 16-bit microchips such as the motorola 68k to be lacking the company therefore decided to start development on an in-house solution called the acorn risk machine which was based on the reduced instruction set idea that would become popular in the late 1990s [Music] the project resulted in the arm 1 microprocessor which was mainly used as a coprocessor to speed up the development of the arm 2 the arm 2

would be used in the acorn archimedes the successor to the bbc master a more powerful version of the bbc micro the machines saw success in education but most people chose to upgrade their 8-bit machines with either an amiga or an atari st and the archimedes never saw mainstream success acorn partnered with semiconductor manufacturer vlsi and faced with poor sales of the archimedes they were asked to find partners to use the arm chip this led to the venture being spun off as a separate company arm holdings [Music] the venture was split three ways one third was

controlled by acorn another third by blsi and the final third by apple who wanted to use the chip in its upcoming newton message pad pda despite the venture sales of the armed ships were initially poor with manufacturers hesitant to use its expensive 32-bit design in 1993 the company was approached by texas instruments who wanted to license their instruction set and produce their own version all accepted and this idea led the company to create its licensing business model where the company would produce the instruction set and core designs but let other companies produce the final hardware

the business model turned out to be a smart move as the company was able to capitalize on the emerging mobile phone market in 1998 the company was floated on the stock market and were generating a net income of 3 million pounds a year despite a dip in the dot-com crash the company continued to grow the advantage of the licensing model was the companies would modify the architecture to suit particular products allowing a huge amount of flexibility for device manufacturers the rise of the early smartphone market led by devices such the blackberry quark the palm treo

further grew arms market share the launch of the apple iphone in 2007 and the android operating system in 2008 led to an explosion in the smartphone market which dramatically improved the company's profit by 2012 the company had a 96 share of their mobile phone market so in the mobile space you've got a familiar architecture instruction set improvements and cheap licensing costs on the desktop an x86 duopoly where the market leader has a broken 10 nanometer process and its competitor having an inconsistent record and delivering performance if you want to develop a new in-house processor for

a smartphone the only cost is licensing the architecture and modifying the chip if you want a new processor for a laptop you've got to pay a hefty price for the newest intel chip which is slow and suffers from high power draw compared to the arm designs it's unsurprising then to learn that the home and server markets are slowly moving to arm cost is not the only advantage arm has been a pioneer of heterogeneous computing the idea that different types of processor cores should be used for different purposes the big little concept which has been widely

adopted in smartphones splits the cpu into two or more clusters which scale from low power to high performance additionally the flexibility of the arm instruction set means that manufacturers can tailor chips from device to device buying an intel cpu means you get a pre-determined amount of compute performance power consumption simply capabilities and graphics horsepower with arm all of these can be easily modified moving from x86 to arm won't be easy the instruction sets are not compatible with each other and software will need to be recompiled or run in software emulation where performance can be dramatically

reduced but many manufacturers of computers also have strong mobile divisions which will aid this transition apple lg microsoft samsung and lenovo all have strong experience developing for arm platforms making the transition easier unpowered laptops have been an emerging market for several years particularly spurred on by microsoft support of windows 10 to the arm platform the surface pro x powered by the microsoft sq1 soc is a notable example however the desktop landscape has been void of arm-powered systems since acorn's death in the late 1990s but even this is changing in june 2020 apple announced that it

would be moving its entire mac family away from intel to apple designed arm silicon the a12z which powers the developer transition kit is the first desktop arm cpu in the modern era furthermore all new apple computers will be running arm chips by 2022 the significance of this event combined with the advantages of using the arm instruction sets means that it is likely more and more vendors will start transitioning across the sisk x86 instruction set may have killed off its risk competition 20 years prior but now is it's time to be retired it may seem like

a drastic move but as micro process development costs increase and progress becomes ever more certain big changes are needed arm may be what the industry needs we've experienced 75 years of rapid technological development and the progress of the microprocessor has changed the world while companies have come and gone the pace of innovation has been relentless from the dawn of post-war computing to a home computer revolution a multimedia frenzy followed by an explosion of multi-core computing but with cost spiraling and facing a brick wall of power consumption we must ask is this it thank you very

much for watching you