In honor of Intel's 40th birthday, we've compiled a list of the
major dates in the history of the Intel chip. The company has helped
define the technopoly we live in today, and how we work and play with
our computers. From chips in a calculator, to 486 PCs, to the Pentium
era in which our computers are outdated every season, Intel chips have
been at the center of the personal computing world since its inception.
Read ahead and wax nostalgic with us.
1971:
4004 This 400-KHz chip was used in Busicom
calculators and arithmetic manipulation. It was the world's first
microprocessor, as well as the first semiconductor device that
provided, at the chip level, the functions of a computer.
1974:
8080 Found in traffic-light controllers, as
well as within the Altair computer (the legendary first PC), the 8080
was the first widely accepted microprocessor.
1979:
8088 Blistering 5-MHz and 8-MHz models of
this chip were the standard CPUs for all IBM PCs and PC clones at the
time. The 8088's success launched Intel into the ranks of the Fortune
500.
1982:
80286 With the introduction of the 286, a
processor family is born. The 286 was the first chip Intel released to
be backward-compatible with software written for the 8088.
1985:
386 DX The 386 was Intel's first 32-bit desktop chip, comprising 275,000 transistors.
1989:
486 DX The Intel 486 was the first CPU to
offer a built-in math coprocessor, speeding computing by offloading
complex math functions from the central processor.
1994:
Pentium Running at up to 100 MHz, the
Pentium processor let computers more easily incorporate real-world data
such as speech, sound, handwriting, and photographic images.
1995:
Pentium Pro Released in the fall of 1995,
the Intel Pentium Pro was designed to fuel 32-bit server and
workstation applications. Each chip was packaged together with a second
speed-enhancing cache memory chip. The Pentium Pro incorporated 5.5
million transistors.
1996:
Pentium II High-performance desktop and
servers came with the 7.5 million-transistor Intel Pentium II,
incorporating MMX technology—designed specifically to process video,
audio, and graphics data efficiently. It was introduced in a single
edge contact (SEC) cartridge that also had a high-speed cache memory
chip.
1998:
Pentium II Xeon The Intel Pentium II Xeon
was designed for workstations and servers; systems based on it could be
configured to scale to four or eight processors and beyond. This took
multitasking even further.
1999:
Pentium III Running as fast at 500 MHz, the
PIII featured 70 new instructions—including streaming SIMD
extensions—to enhanced performance, particularly the Internet
experience. The processor incorporates 9.5 million transistors, and was
introduced using 0.25-micron technology.
