The 6800 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System that also included serial and parallel interface ICs, RAM, ROM and other support chips. A significant design feature was that the M6800 family of ICs required only a single five-volt power supply at a time when most other microprocessors required three voltages. The M6800 Microcomputer System was announced in March 1974 and was in full production by the end of that year.
The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first commercially available microprocessor by Intel, and the first in a long line of Intel CPUs.
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel introduced in November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3.1 and 4.5 million transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5.5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor and was used in supercomputers like ASCI Red, the first computer to reach the teraFLOPS performance mark. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quad-processor configurations. It only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular Socket 8. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II Xeon in 1998.
Intel's i960 was a RISC-based microprocessor design that became popular during the early 1990s as an embedded microcontroller. It became a best-selling CPU in that segment, along with the competing AMD 29000. In spite of its success, Intel stopped marketing the i960 in the late 1990s, as a result of a settlement with DEC whereby Intel received the rights to produce the StrongARM CPU. The processor continues to be used for a few military applications.
Convergent Technologies was an American computer company formed by a small group of people who left Intel Corporation and Xerox PARC in 1979. Among the founders were CEO Allen Michels, VP Engineering Bob Garrow, head of marketing Kal Hubler, and operating system architect Ben Wegbreit. The company was purchased by Unisys in 1988.
Derrick R. "Dirk" Meyer was a former Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Micro Devices, serving in the position from July 18, 2008 to January 10, 2011.
Robert P. "Bob" Colwell is an electrical engineer who worked at Intel and later served as Director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA. He was the chief IA-32 architect on the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 microprocessors. Bob retired from Intel in 2000. He was an Intel Fellow from 1995 to 2000.
A microprocessor development board is a printed circuit board containing a microprocessor and the minimal support logic needed for a computer engineer to become acquainted with the microprocessor on the board and to learn to program it. It also served users of the microprocessor as a method to prototype applications in products.
The history of general-purpose CPUs is a continuation of the earlier history of computing hardware.
Pollack's Rule states that microprocessor "performance increase due to microarchitecture advances is roughly proportional to [the] square root of [the] increase in complexity". This contrasts with power consumption increase, which is roughly linearly proportional to the increase in complexity. Complexity in this context means processor logic, i.e. its area.
Stanley Mazor is an American microelectronics engineer who was born on 22 October 1941 in Chicago, Illinois. He is one of the co-inventors of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, together with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima, and Federico Faggin.
Avtar Saini is a microprocessor designer and developer. He holds some patents related to microprocessor design. He is also former director for Intel's South Asia division. He is best known for his leadership role in the design and development of Pentium processor at Intel.
Afara Websystems Inc. was a Sunnyvale, California, USA server company whose goal was to build servers surrounding a custom high-throughput CPU architecture, "developing IP traffic management systems that will bring quality-of-service to the next generation of IP access infrastructure." The word "Afara" means "bridge" in the West African Yoruba language.
John H. Crawford is an American computer engineer.
Victor "Vic" Poor was an American engineer and computer pioneer. At Computer Terminal Corporation, he co-created the architecture that was ultimately implemented in the first successful computer microprocessor, the Intel 8008. Subsequently, Computer Terminal Corporation created the first personal computer, the Datapoint 2200 programmable terminal.
Jim Keller is a microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD and Apple. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture and was involved in designing the Athlon (K7) and Apple A4/A5 processors. He was also the coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015, he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures.
John Harrison Wharton was an American engineer specializing in microprocessors and their applications. Wharton designed the Intel MCS-51, one of the most implemented instruction set architectures of all time.
