Subtitles of the Movie

The history of the CPU has been ah, quite colorful. It's, it's really is kind of confusing because there's just a vast array of processors that have been on the market at one time or another and the way these things have just exponentially ah gotten larger and faster, and stronger and shinier and all that stuff, so I want to go through the processor history here because you could see some things about the various processors on the exam, and you just need to know a little bit of basic information about them, and so I'm going to kind of go through it here from a 50,000 foot level and, and hit the high points. Ah, you probably, before you test, want to grab a book and read through ah just some, some referent information and refresh yourself about processors, just the rough history of processors. It all started ah back in the 1970s with the Intel 8088. Now this thing had a clock speed of 4.77 megahertz and it has 16-bit registers and an 8-bit data bus, external data bus; had a 20-bit address bus and ah, I can remember ah in the 80s when we got up to like 16 megahertz and I really thought we were flying, but ah, then, after the original 8088, then we came out with the ah 8286, 386 and 486, and the registers, address buses, and general buses began to grow in size and we started to pick up speed, and ah, a lot of things started to happen round about the time we got the Windows operating system and so forth. But then, between 1990 and 1995 is when the Pentium was introduced. Now this was a pivotal point in the whole processor ah, history. There were some drastic architectural changes and pipelining came in. Now pipelining is a process ah, if you'll think back to the processor and how it works with the clock ticks and so forth, what was happening was that you'd send a task to the processor and sometimes it would take more than one clock tick, often it'd take more than one clock tick to have that task completed and then passed back out. And so they started using the process called pipelining which would send more than one task in or it would rearrange the tasks and that sort of thing. And the secret to that was caching. They had to have a little waiting room outside the processor ah to put these things and so we ah started to see caching and pipelining show up ah in the Pentium. Now the external speed on this thing was 50 to 66 megahertz and basically that means the front side bus speed, so that was how fast data could move to the processor. However, the internal speed of the processor was 60 to 200 megahertz, and well, when we got 200 megahertz processors we really thought we were doing something. And again, think about that multiplier, I think I mentioned it in another video, ah, externally the processor's running 50 to 66 megahertz, and internally in the processor it's applying a multiplier to it, which is now up to like 23 or 30 or something to get the speeds that we have nowadays. So, anyway, the Pentium Pro came out in 1995 but the external speed was still 66, 60 to 66, the internal speed was now 166 to 200, but it had four pipelines, twice as many as the original Pentium, and it could run more than one process in a single clock cycle, so the, the processor was handling a lot more work a lot more efficiently and then, and the Pentium Pro used two caches. Now this is the first time we saw the caches like this, and they began to be used in the advertising ah medium. And one was onboard and one was off board, and this is where we saw the level, the L1 and L2 cache. The Pentium II expanded on that. Now the external speed's still 66 but it has jumped up to 100 megahertz now. Notice what happened to the internal speed. We're now up to 450 megahertz on the Pentium Pro. Now in the meantime, AMD, now AMD is a company that originally started working with Intel, learned how to build processors, this is, I'm, I'm ah, if any of you AMD folks hear this, ah excuse me for butchering this, but I've only got just a couple of minutes here. Anyway, AMD as it turned out separated from Intel, became a serious competitor to Intel's Pentium II. They had an external speed of 100 megahertz. Now this was huge, because the, this was the first big jump in the, in the front side bus, and then around 1997 to 2000 they introduced the K6, this maxed and even surpassed the Pentium II and this is when AMD really began to compete with Intel. It had a larger cache and more advanced pipelining than the Pentium II and they really started to get some attention in the marketplace. Then Intel came out with the Celeron. Now the Celeron was a low-cost, low-end processor. It didn't have a cache it just did all kinds of, you know, it, it was slow. However, there were a lot of people out there who just used their computer for, for basic tasks, word processing and so forth, and they didn't need all the ah, caches and stuff for graphics and so forth, and this thing was very well received in the market. This thing took over the market, as a matter of fact, you, you still see them out there in PCs. Ah, they were just a low-cost, not a blazingly fast processor, but it got the job done. Then we got into Pentium IIIs, external speed notice jumped to 133, internal speed, notice what happened here. Four hundred and fifty megahertz to 1.26 gigahertz, so we cracked the gigahertz barrier there. Then the Pentium IV and AMD's Athlon, and this is when the processor wars really began to heat up and new processors, it seemed like every two days if you went to the computer store there was a new processor out and it was being touted as a big thing, and that always had code names before but now the code names were about the only way you could keep them straight because they were coming out so fast. Things like William at Duran, Barton Athlon, all those sorts of things. With the Pentium IV there was a complete redesign of the architecture and notice there was up to four data transfers per clock cycle, and this allowed the external bus speed to jump up to 400 megahertz. And so we started to do all kinds of little tricks on, on how much information we were passing, ah, exactly how the processor was dealing with that. The internal speed jumped to 2 gigahertz. Around about this time you saw the Northwood and the Prescott, the external bus speed on these jumped to 800 megahertz. They were doing multiplier tricks. Hyperthreading, which caused the ah OS to see one processor as dual processors, and so forth. Just a lot of ah really serious advances. And then Intel came out with the Zeon and these are high end processors and they're designed to work in tandem, in sets of two, four or eight, and you normally see these in high-end expensive servers and so forth, but they're blazing fast. Intel's Itanium was the first 64-bit bus, ah, 64-bit processor; had massive architectural improvements. We could probably go an hour on what they did to that. In the meantime, AMD had 64-bit processors. I've got an AMD 64-bit processor in a laptop right now and actually love the thing. Then came the Pentium D and the AMD Athlon dual core, these are two processors in one, and in some cases there are actually two processors just basically attached to a, to the, to the same board. And these got around the 4 gigahertz clock limit that seemed to just get hit on the, the manufacturing process, and then Intel came out with a Core 2, again, redesigned the architecture and one of the big ones on that was a 40 percent energy saving. Processors use a lot of power, they get really hot, and a 40 percent energy savings was pretty huge. This thing also performs multiple tasks in a single clock cycle. So, again, you just want to review through this and look at some of the major changes. Some of the questions they may ask you on the exam, for example, well, you know, is, you know, should, somebody's doing high end graphics, can they use a Celeron? Well, no. They can't. It's going to be real slow, that sort of thing. So that's a real quick run-through on processor history, ah, so I, I hope that helps understand how we got where we are.