Pentium Evolution

• 8080
— first general purpose microprocessor
— 8 bit data path
— Used in first personal computer – Altair
• 8086
— much more powerful
— 16 bit
— instruction cache, prefetch few instructions
— 8088 (8 bit external bus) used in first IBM PC
• 80286
— 16 Mbyte memory addressable
— up from 1Mb
• 80386
— 32 bit
— Support for multitasking
• 80486
— sophisticated powerful cache and instruction pipelining
— built in maths co-processor
• Pentium
— Superscalar
— Multiple instructions executed in parallel
• Pentium Pro
— Increased superscalar organization
— Aggressive register renaming
— branch prediction
— data flow analysis
— speculative execution
• Pentium II
— MMX technology
— graphics, video & audio processing
• Pentium III
— Additional floating point instructions for 3D graphics
• Pentium 4
— Note Arabic rather than Roman numerals
— Further floating point and multimedia enhancements
• Itanium
— 64 bit
— see chapter 15
• See Intel web pages for detailed information on processors