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The Intel 8080 ("eighty-eighty") is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility. Although earlier microprocessors were commonly used in mass-produced devices such as calculators, cash registers, computer terminals, industrial robots, and other applications, the 8080 saw greater success in a wider set of applications, and is largely credited with starting the microcomputer industry.
The Pentium is a microprocessor introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993. It is the first CPU using the Pentium brand. Considered the fifth generation in the x86 (8086) compatible line of processors, succeeding the i486, its implementation and microarchitecture was internally called P5.
x86 is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of 8-bit Intel's 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486".
In computing, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in its Pentium III series of central processing units (CPUs) shortly after the appearance of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD's) 3DNow!. SSE contains 70 new instructions, most of which work on single precision floating-point data. SIMD instructions can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. Typical applications are digital signal processing and graphics processing.
The Motorola 68000 series is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and were the primary competitors of Intel's x86 microprocessors. They were best known as the processors used in the early Apple Macintosh, the Sharp X68000, the Commodore Amiga, the Sinclair QL, the Atari ST and Falcon, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega Genesis and Sega CD, the Philips CD-i, the Capcom System I (Arcade), the AT&T UNIX PC, the Tandy Model 16/16B/6000, the Sun Microsystems Sun-1, Sun-2 and Sun-3, the NeXT Computer, NeXTcube, NeXTstation, and NeXTcube Turbo, early Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations, the Aesthedes, computers from MASSCOMP, the Texas Instruments TI-89/TI-92 calculators, the Palm Pilot, the Control Data Corporation CDCNET Device Interface, the VTech Precomputer Unlimited and the Space Shuttle. Although no modern desktop computers are based on processors in the 680x0 series, derivative processors are still widely used in embedded systems.
A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture; commands or functions in the language are structurally similar to a processor's instructions. Generally, this refers to either machine code or assembly language. Because of the low abstraction between the language and machine language, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware". Programs written in low-level languages tend to be relatively non-portable, due to being optimized for a certain type of system architecture.
x86 assembly language is a family of low-level programming languages that are used to produce object code for the x86 class of processors. These languages provide backward compatibility with CPUs dating back to the Intel 8008 microprocessor, introduced in April 1972. As assembly languages, they are closely tied to the architecture's machine code instructions, allowing for precise control over hardware.
x86-64 is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture first announced in 1999. It introduces two new operating modes: 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new four-level paging mechanism.
SSE2 is one of the Intel SIMD processor supplementary instruction sets introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. SSE2 instructions allow the use of XMM (SIMD) registers on x86 instruction set architecture processors. These registers can load up to 128 bits of data and perform instructions, such as vector addition and multiplication, simultaneously.
The NEC V20 is a microprocessor that was designed and produced by NEC. It is both pin compatible and object-code compatible with the Intel 8088, with an instruction set architecture (ISA) similar to that of the Intel 80188 with some extensions. The V20 was introduced in March 1984.
The x86 instruction set refers to the set of instructions that x86-compatible microprocessors support. The instructions are usually part of an executable program, often stored as a computer file and executed on the processor.
In computer programming, an inline assembler is a feature of some compilers that allows low-level code written in assembly language to be embedded within a program, among code that otherwise has been compiled from a higher-level language such as C or Ada.
The Clipper architecture is a 32-bit RISC-like instruction set architecture designed by Fairchild Semiconductor. The architecture never enjoyed much market success, and the only computer manufacturers to create major product lines using Clipper processors were Intergraph and High Level Hardware, although Opus Systems offered a product based on the Clipper as part of its Personal Mainframe range. The first processors using the Clipper architecture were designed and sold by Fairchild, but the division responsible for them was subsequently sold to Intergraph in 1987; Intergraph continued work on Clipper processors for use in its own systems.
The Intel BCD opcodes are a set of six x86 instructions that operate with binary-coded decimal numbers. The radix used for the representation of numbers in the x86 processors is 2. This is called a binary numeral system. However, the x86 processors do have limited support for the decimal numeral system.
x87 is a floating-point-related subset of the x86 architecture instruction set. It originated as an extension of the 8086 instruction set in the form of optional floating-point coprocessors that work in tandem with corresponding x86 CPUs. These microchips have names ending in "87". This is also known as the NPX. Like other extensions to the basic instruction set, x87 instructions are not strictly needed to construct working programs, but provide hardware and microcode implementations of common numerical tasks, allowing these tasks to be performed much faster than corresponding machine code routines can. The x87 instruction set includes instructions for basic floating-point operations such as addition, subtraction and comparison, but also for more complex numerical operations, such as the computation of the tangent function and its inverse, for example.
In the x86 architecture, the CPUID instruction is a processor supplementary instruction allowing software to discover details of the processor. It was introduced by Intel in 1993 with the launch of the Pentium and SL-enhanced 486 processors.
The FLAGS register is the status register that contains the current state of an x86 CPU. The size and meanings of the flag bits are architecture dependent. It usually reflects the result of arithmetic operations as well as information about restrictions placed on the CPU operation at the current time. Some of those restrictions may include preventing some interrupts from triggering, prohibition of execution of a class of "privileged" instructions. Additional status flags may bypass memory mapping and define what action the CPU should take on arithmetic overflow.
In computer processors, the carry flag is a single bit in a system status register/flag register used to indicate when an arithmetic carry or borrow has been generated out of the most significant arithmetic logic unit (ALU) bit position. The carry flag enables numbers larger than a single ALU width to be added/subtracted by carrying (adding) a binary digit from a partial addition/subtraction to the least significant bit position of a more significant word. This is typically programmed by the user of the processor on the assembly or machine code level, but can also happen internally in certain processors, via digital logic or microcode, where some processors have wider registers and arithmetic instructions than ALU. It is also used to extend bit shifts and rotates in a similar manner on many processors. For subtractive operations, two (opposite) conventions are employed as most machines set the carry flag on borrow while some machines instead reset the carry flag on borrow.
In a computer processor the negative flag or sign flag is a single bit in a system status (flag) register used to indicate whether the result of the last mathematical operation produced a value in which the most significant bit was set. In a two's complement interpretation of the result, the negative flag is set if the result was negative.
References
- ↑ "Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual Volume 1: Basic Architecture". January 2011. pp. 97–98.