Information of Computer Procesors

1. Modern CPUs

2. Processor Manufacturers
 4 major companies make microcomputer processor
Namely:
1. Intel
2. AMD(Advanced Micro Devices)
3. Freescale Semiconductors Inc.: a subsidiary of
Motorola Inc.
4.IBM

3. Intel
 Founded in 1968 by 3 engineers, Robert Noyce, Gordon
Moore and Andy Grove who left Fairchild Semiconductor.
 Both Intel and AMD were founded by engineers who left
Fairchild Semiconductor.
 Named from the words Integrated Electronics.
 1970s early developer of SRAM and DRAM products. Until
the IBM PC came in 1981, Intel heavily depended on
memory products.
 But due to Japanese practice undercutting competition by
underpricing same quality products at 10-20% lower prices,
In mid-1980s Intel under leadership of Andy Grove decided
to let go off memory business.

4. Intel cont.
 In the 1990s became household name due to Pentium
family of processors.
 Intel Inside ad campaign became textbook example of
Ingredient Marketing whereas a part or ingredient is
marketed rather than the whole products. Only artificial
sweetener NutraSweet did active ingredient marketing on
this scale before.
 2 other landmark decisions by Intel that propelled Intel
towards industry-leading position under the leadership of
Andy Grove:
 1. Single sourcing manufacturing. In the 1980s
semiconductor manufacturing was so unreliable that
vendors demanded multiple suppliers for a single products.

5. Intel cont.
 1st Landmark Decision: Single sourcing all processor starting
from 80386. Intel convinced customers i.e. PC clone
manufactures that it can provide the same reliability by
manufacturing at different locations rather than they going to
different processor suppliers. So Intel chose 3 locations: Santa
Clara, California, Hillsboro, Oregon and Chandler, a suburb of
Phoenix, Arizona for both design and manufacturing.
 2nd Landmark decision: Stop licensing products to
competitors such as AMD and Zilog.
 In the 1990s Apple also benefited from such practices. Apple made
300 different products and licensed products to other competitors.
But Steve Jobs came on board in 1997, he discontinued many
product lines such as camera, printer etc. and focused on few
product lines and discontinued the practice of licensing to
competitors

6. Intel cont.
 Other questionable practices that helped Intel gain its
monopolistic market position.
 1.Practice of spending huge sums on lawsuits even if Intel
loses. Intel burdens other parties with huge legal bills which
they seldom recovers from.
 2. practice of maintaining a list of PC manufacturers called
“list of Preferred Customers”: If you are a favored customer
by Intel, once a new processor is launched that customer
gets the first supply of processors. If he is not in the list, if he
is deemed to be antagonistic to Intel, then Intel delivers the
products in a delayed timing say 3 to 6 months later. As
product life cycle in computer industry is very short, when
the PC manufacturer gets the processor, its too late.

7. Notable processors by Intel
 Early processors 4004,8008,8080 were not major success.
 First processor 4004 was for Japanese calculator maker Busicom.
 Year 1978: 8086 processor saw the marketing campaign named
Operation Crush which wanted to grab as many customers as
possible. IBM was a notable win. IBM PC introduced in 1981 adopted
this processor.
 1982: Intel introduced 80286, IBM used it in IBM PC/AT.
 Compaq a successful PC Clone manufacturer adopted Intel
processors 80286,80386,
 Compaq’s successful product Desktop Pro386 was based on 80386.
 Compaq was a major revenue driver for both Intel and AMD.

8.  1989:80486 came, intended to bring a processor every 2
years.
 1993: rather than naming 80586, Pentium name was
introduced because numbers were difficult to trademark.
 Along with the Intel Inside campaign, the Incident called the
Intel Flaw when a professor found a floating point operation
flaw in Pentium processor. It was published in the
newspaper. Intel decided to replace all the purchased
processor. The recall cost $500 million to the balance sheet.
But people came to learn about the company.

9.  Intel’s Systems Group started making motherboard.
Intel quickly became 3rd largest motherboard maker
capturing 15% market share.
 Intel Architecture Lab group invented many of the
standards such as PCI,PCI Express, USB
 2001: Santa Clara facility collaborated with HP to bring
a 64 bit server processor named Itanium. Itanium is still
in the market today.
 2006: all Macs now will come with Intel processor.

10.  2008: Intel started to make solid state drive based on
flash memory.
 2013: moving away from WINTEL to open source
supporting all OS

11.  Vinod Dham was the designer behind Intel family. He
used a very practical approach to product design. He
approached software companies such as Microsoft and
Borland C++. what they needed in a processor. He
enlisted 147 features, few even Intel engineers did not
anticipate. This saved Intel from future revisions.
 This is the same practice applied by Boeing when It
designed the Boeing 777. Boeing took advice from all
the leading airlines asking them what are the features
they seek in a jet plane

12. AMD
 AMD was founded by Jerry Sanders who left Fairchild
Semiconductor in 1968. AMD was founded in 1969, 1 year
later Intel was founded in 1968.
 AMD grew by strategic partnerships such as alliances, joint
ventures with other companies for talent, money, marketing.
 In 1981, AMD had a deal with IBM to make processor for its
IBM PC as a second source to Intel. IBM wanted Intel’s x86
processor with the condition that AMD will also manufacture
the same processor.
 In the same year, Intel and AMD went into an agreement
that each company will make products designed by others,
by exchanging the technology of any other products of equal
complexity.

13. Major Intel processors
Processor Prodcution period Clock
speed
Pentium 1993-1999 60-200 MHz
Pentium MMX 1996-1999 120-300 MHz
Atom(low power
processor netbook)
2008-2009 800-2.13 GHz
Celeron(budget PC) 1998-present 266MHz-3.6GHz
Pentium Pro 1995-1998 150-200MHz
Pentium II 1997-1999 233-450 MHz
Pentium III 1999-2003 450MHz-1.4GHZ
Xeon-server processor 1998-present 400MHz-4.4GHZ
Pentium IV 2000-2008 1.3GHz-3.8GHz

14. Pentium Dual core 2006-2009 1.6-2.93 GHZ
Intel Core 2006-2011 1.06-2.33 GHZ
Core i3 2010-present 2.4-3.7 GHz
Core i5 2008- present 1.06-3.6 GHz
Core i7 2011-present 1.6-4.4 GHz

15.  Thus AMD became a second-source manufacturer to Intel’s x86
processor. It started making its own clone processor of Intel x86
and named them am286,am386
 Processors and graphics card are two large revenue drivers for
AMD. Graphics card business expanded after after the $5.4 billion
acquisition of ATI(Array Technologies Inc. in 2006, AMD has since
retired ATI brand in favor of AMD brand.
 Acquisition of ATI saw a new approach called integrating CPU and
GPU(Graphical Process Unit) into single chip called Fusion. CP
AMD called it APU(accelerated Graphics Unit). Some of the CPU
functions were transferred from CPU to GPU such as floating point
operations.
 AMD exited from its JV with Fujitsu to make flash memory in 2003.
The divested company is called Spansion today.

16. AMD
 AMD Divested its manufacturing which is called Global
Foundries( a semiconductor manufacturing plant is called a
foundry or a fabrication plant in short fab.
 So AMD is now a fabless semiconductor company. A fabless
firm is a virtual company which outsources its manufacturing
from other foundries.
 SO today AMD only designs processor does not
manufacture.
 Global Foundries is owned by Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Global
Foundries acquired Chartered Semiconductor Company of
Singapore for $3.9 billion, it received $1.5 billion from IBM to
run its New York plant.

17. Processors of AMD
 AMD makes GPU(Graphics Processor Unit) of all 3 top
gaming console brands, namely Xbox by Microsoft,
PlayStation by Sony and Wii 2 by Nintendo.
 Dell started making server with Opteron server
processor of AMD ending an exclusive deal with Intel
only server.
 Major processor:
 1.K5,K6,K7,K8, K10,K10.5 are families of processors
just like Intel’s Pentium I,II,III and IV.

18. Year 1996:AMD brought K5 as an answer to Pentium I but failed to
get market traction. K stands for Kryptonyte, the only substance that
can harm Superman, hinting at Intel as superman, 5 stands for 5th
generation of x86 processor
Year 1996: At this time AMD brought a company called NexGen for
$857 million which had a good product. Its COO was Vinod Dham
who was the designer of Pentium family. AMD introduced K6, which
was the fastest processor for a while. It is the first time someone
outside Intel made the fastest processor.
Success of K6 allowed AMD to bring down the price so that PC price
would come down below $1000. Until this period PC was priced at
around $1,500.
In reaction, Intel brought out a truncated version of Pentium named
Celeron Which is a budget PC processor.

19. Year 1999: After K6, AMD introduced Athlon as the brand name of K7
family. later referred to as Athlon classic, first processor to reach a
clock speed of 1 GHz. Athlon name was continued with Athlon-64 and
Athlon-II.
As a result, AMD also introduced a budget processor named Duron
as low cost version of Athlon to compete with Intel’s budget processor
Celeron.
Athlon comes from the Greek word Athlos meaning contest.
YEAR 2005:Opteron is the first processor to have 64 bit register. In
1995 first dual core Opteron was introduced. A month later Operon 64
X2 was the first dual core processor for consumers. Introduced dual
core Sempron for value based buyers. BEGINNING OF DUAL CORE
FOR ALL USER FAMILIES

20.  Year 2007: There was no K9 after K8,rather K10 was
introduced as quad-core Opteron processor for Servers.
Same yaer Phenom quad core processors was introduced
for desktop. K
 K10 processor came in dual core, triple core and quad core
 2007: AMD brought out Spider named architecture where
processor, graphics processor, and motherboard all came
from AMD.
 2010: Hexa-core Opteron processor named Thuban and
Istanbul. Turbo core feature: automatically shift from 3 core
to 6 core when more speed is required.

21.  Year 2011: Bulldozer processor is intruced for server as
HPC(High Performance Computing) but failed to
surpass Intel as expected.
 Hondo: Processor of tablets.
 Llano: APU for laptops.
 Jaguar: low power/low cost processor.

22. Freescale Semiconductor
 Freescale was originally Motorola’s Semiconductor division.
It was one of the earliest semiconductor company in the
world founded in 1948.
 Motorola divested the division into a private company called
Freescale semiconductor in 2004.
 Apple used Motorola processors until Apple collaborated
with IBM.
 Motorola’s MC68000 processor also also called 680x0
series revolutionized PC movement powering early
computer companies such as Apple, Sun Microsystems, H-
P, Atari, Commodore, etc.

23.  Apple PowerMac G4 processor was from Motorola but
Powermac G5 processor was from IBM.
 Motorola’ strength in communication and networking
sector such as wireless receiver, Automobile,
networking router, modem, TV set-top boxes, utilizes
processor from this company

24. IBM
 IBM collaborates with Apple and Motorola in a strategic
partnership called AIM(Apple, IBM, Motorola).
 AIM deveoped PowerPC architecture was behind all the
Apple processor in 1991 and 2006, when Apple switched to
Intel entirely.
 IBM provided processor Powermac G5 which was the most
powerful desktop PC when it was launched.
 IBM’s plant in East Fishkill,NY now owned by Global
Foundries( IBM paid Global Foundries $1.5 billion to take
over the facility) also makes powerful processor for its
workstation and mainframes.