Chip History from 1970 to Today - The Age of the Wintel Duopoly
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But, as was often the case, Intel was often "the first with the worst" and when IBM was ready to choose a 16 bit processor for its entry into the Personal Computer field, Intel's 8088 beat out Motorola's arguably superior 68000. Apple chose the 68000 for its groundbreaking Lisa and more commercially successful Macintosh (later versions of which used follow-on Motorola 68000 family microprocessors before switching to IBM's Power PC, and then finally Intel processors). Unfortunately for Apple, the open system philosophy of the IBM PC (and clones) eventually relegated its closed systems to a niche market.
As Intel grew into minicomputer territory, various minicomputer makers designed single chip versions of their proprietary minicomputer architectures. Perhaps the best known of these at the time was the Data General NOVA. At IBM I worked on a single chip version of our Series/1 minicomputer and another division produced ROMP (an early RISC architecture based on IBM's 801 minicomputer) for its low end AIX (IBM's version of UNIX) workstations.
None of the minicomputer architectures were really very successful at competing with Intel's roadmap as it progressed on to higher and higher performance processors. In rapid succession, Intel released the 80286 (added a Memory Management Unit), 80386 (added 32 bit data path, virtual memory support, and a flat memory model), 80486 (on-chip instruction/data cache and pipelining), various PENTIUM (superscalar architecture and 64 bit data path) which differentiated into CELERON (low end brand) and XEON (high end brand) versions, PENTIUM PRO (on-package L2 cache), PENTIUM II, PENTIUM III, PENTIUM 4, PENTIUM D (dual core), and so on.
For awhile, the IBM/Motorola PowerPC architecture threatened to give Intel a run for its money, and in fact IBM has currently captured the gaming machine CPU market with chips in the Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii, and Sony PlayStation 3 (though with the PS3, the new Cell processor is the star with the PowerPC playing a supporting role). In the embedded processor arena the ARM processor design has captured a dominant share of the cell phone market. AMD has also given Intel a run for its money from time to time in the Windows (and Linux) market with its own line of architecturally compatible processors. Still, wherever the Windows operating system dominates the market, Intel chips also dominate.
During this progression, memory density kept pace with increasing microprocessor performance and complexity, but memory speed improved at a slower pace. This led to a memory bottleneck as processors struggled to access enough instructions and data to keep their CPUs doing useful work all the time. Wider memory buses, faster memory buses, on-chip cache memory, additional off-chip cache memory (L2 cache), and separation of instruction cache and data cache, and backside buses between L2 cache and main memory were among the mechanisms used to mitigate this bottleneck. Eventually multiple processors, either with their own caches and/or shared caches, were used as well.
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