Intel CPU for Desktop PC: Past, Present, Future Cheng-Han Du

Moore’s Law Proposed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore The number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. Similar phenomena can be observed in other computer-related technology.

Intel-Based CPU: The Past 80286 80386 80486 Pentium Pentium Pro, 2, III (Celeron) Pentium 4, Pentium D Pentium Dual-Core, Core 2

80286 Great performance improvement compared with its predecessor 16-bit architecture CPU clock: 6 ~ 25 MHz 1.5 micron process Milestone of personal computing

80386 32-bit architecture CPU clock: 16 ~ 40 MHz 1.5 ~ 1.0 micron process

80486 Pipelining Cache-in-chip CPU clock: 16 ~ 100 MHz 0.8 micron process

Pentium (P5) Superscalar – two pipes 64-bit data path U – Handle any instructions V – Handle the simplest and most common instructions 64-bit data path Not 64-bit instruction set CPU clock: 60 ~ 300 MHz 0.8 ~ 0.25 micron process MMX (later models)

Pentium Pro, 2, III (P6) Focus on enhancement of multimedia and gaming performance. CPU clock: 150 ~ 1400 MHz 0.5 ~ 0.13 micron process Competitor: AMD K5, K6, K6-2

Pentium 4, Pentium D (NetBurst) CPU clock: 1.3 ~ 3.8 GHz 0.18 ~ 0.065 micron process Fierce competition against AMD’s Athlon Focus on high clock rate Pentium D Dual-core (2X1) CPU clock: 2.66 ~ 3.73 GHz 90 ~ 65 nm process Hyperthreading

Pentium Dual-Core, Core 2 (Core) Dual-core or Quad-core CPU clock: 1.6 ~ 3.2 GHz 65 or 45 nm process Focus on performance per clock

Recent Problem on CPU Current leakage Heat and cooling Power consumption Process size and physical limit

Future Development Near-term Long-term More cores  parallelism Smaller size Long-term Optical bus Optical processor Clockless CPU

Other Possible Way? Next time: video card