The calculator that changed the world
Japanese company Busicom ordered a chipset for a calculator from Intel. Ted Hoff proposed one programmable processor instead of many specialised circuits. Federico Faggin made it work. Intel bought back the rights from Busicom and began selling it as a general-purpose product.
The x86 family
- 1971Intel 4004
- 1974Intel 8080, heart of the first home computers
- 1978Intel 8086, the start of x86
- 1993Pentium
- 2006Intel Core and multi-core processors in ordinary PCs
- 2017AMD Ryzen brings AMD back into the game
What a processor does
A processor loops: it fetches an instruction from memory, decodes it, executes it (adds, compares, moves data) and moves on. Modern processors do this billions of times a second on multiple cores. The main alternative to x86 today is ARM.