Gadgetory

way way back in the ancient 1970s specifically 1971 a little company called Intel introduced their first microprocessor to the world the 4000 for a 4-bit microprocessor that ran at a blistering 740 thousand cycles per second or kilo Hertz and while that's pretty cool by today's standards that processor would not only be uselessly slow it actually wouldn't be able to communicate with modern computer operating systems and programs at all it wasn't until the release of the 8086 processor seven years later that the groundwork was really laid for the next forty or so years the 8086 was a 16-bit which by the way served us quite nicely through most of the DOS operating system days chip clocked it up to 10 million Hertz or mega Hertz and capable of accessing one megabyte of memory but more importantly than that it introduced the x86 instruction set that remains with us as the intermediary between the CPU hardware and the rest of the system I'll be it with a few additions bolted on to it today this is what set us down a long road of Intel rolling out processors in accordance with Moore's law not a law per se but more of an observation that every year the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated circuit had doubled and that an end to that trend would take a long time before it stopped so let's have a look at some of the notable milestones along the road the 386 DX in 1985 was Intel's first 32-bit x86 processor clocked it up to 33 million Hertz or mega Hertz and capable of addressing up to 4 gigabytes of system ram a limitation that actually wasn't lifted until almost 20 years later the pentium generation also added the MMX or multimedia extension to x86 a couple of years later the Celeron 300 a was notable for its easy and incredible overclocking abilities according to a non Tex 1998 article it could perform pretty much on par with a much more expensive four hundred and fifty megahertz Pentium 2 but Pentium three generation introduced speedstep the ability to run at a lower clock speed and power state when idle was the first CPU from Intel anyway to include an on die level two cache for lightning fast access to frequently use data and the first again from Intel there's some dispute about who was actually first to break the one gigahertz barrier that's 1 billion Hertz from there on throughout the early part of the Pentium 4 era it was pretty much business as usual clock speed boosts faster ran faster frontside bus speeds with hyper-threading technology which you can learn more about here showing up in 2002 and LGA type sockets that put the contact pins on the motherboard instead of on the CPU arriving in 2004 around which time a fundamental change occurred Intel's desktop team continued to chase clock speeds in excess of 4 gigahertz with ludicrously priced Extreme Edition chips but in spite of modern features like PCI Express for higher bandwidth to graphics cards and even multiple graphics cards working in tandem for better 3d gaming performance they struggled to compete with AMD 64-bit Athlon 64 lineup even after adding support for AMD 64-bit x86 extension allowing a theoretical 64 exabytes of system memory and after releasing the pentium d dual-core lineup with two physical CPU cores on a single chip assuring in the era of true multitasking while the mobile unit quietly released a little product codenamed Banyas an efficiency minded laptop CPU that was the beating heart of those Centrino laptops that you probably remember seeing and that eventually inspired Intel's return to performance dominance on the desktop with the core 2 lineup of dual and quad core processors in 2006 that marked officially the end of the gigahertz war because thanks to greater emphasis on efficiency a lower clock port who could smoke a much more power hungry and higher clocked Pentium series oh yeah and this is where virtualization the ability to run multiple operating systems with necks no performance hit more about it there on a single CPU hit the main stream Conroe was sort of a big deal the very next cpu socket 1366 for the high end and 11:56 for the main stream also kind of a big deal the quickpath interconnect or qpi and slower direct media interface or DM I replaced the frontside bus for communicating between the CPU and the rest of the system with the most important change here being at the memory controller that used to sit on the Northbridge moves to the CPU itself for much lower latency access to system ram turbo boost momentary clock speed increases when the workload power and thermals allow also showed up here you can learn more about that in the link up there and on the mainstream dual-core models the idea of putting the onboard graphics core on the cpu package was first introduced here and it's a trend that continues today with Intel touting powerful onboard graphics as an important part of overall system performance with supported workloads video encoding for example potentially performing better on the GPU than on the CPU itself and honestly even though that last thing I just said happened back in the 2008-2009 timeframe whether it's because AMD has been largely uncompetitive for the better part of the last decade or because Intel arbitrarily decided that average Joe has all the performance he needs not a whole lot has happened since then with each new generation bringing small improvements updated i/o options USB 3 m2 and thunderbolt being notable ones cool features like improved system sleep and wake times improved power efficiency and with that comes more processing cores per CPU on the enthusiast and server platforms and finally consistent but fairly unexcited 10 to 15% generational performance improvements with each passing year speaking of improving performance lynda.com improves the performance of your brain on lynda.com you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching they've got thousands of video courses across a wide variety of different topics from business to productivity software to video editing to photography and what's cool about it is you can either stream the I wanted to call them episodes but the more like lessons you can stream the lessons or you can download them to your device and watch them on the bus you can take notes as you go you can browse the course transcripts to follow along or search for an answer and skip to that point in the video you can create and save playlists of courses that you want to watch or you can you know share that with your friends and colleagues to learn together basically awesome stuff so all that's left to do is head over to lynda.com and get a free 10 day trial today we've got a link in the video description and then if you decide you like it it all starts have just 25 bucks a month flat rate whether you're looking to become an industry expert you're passionate about a new hobby or you just want to learn something new so check it out guys so that's pretty much it thanks for watching if you like this video do that thing if you just like to do the other thing if you want to check out some of the cool videos we have on our other channels man we've got a great one on Channel super-fun right now where we get on those like hoverboards swegway things and joust with each other so check that out up there and as always leave comments if you have suggestions for future fast as possible videos