35 years of Intel chip design

The folks at ZNet have put together a nice piece showing how Intel's chip designs have evolved over the past three and one half decades.

35 years ago we had: The 4004 Microprocessor
This was Intel's first microprocessor. It sparked a technological revolution because it was the first product to fuse the essential elements of a programmable computer into a single chip.

The 4004 was designed to be a calculator component for a Japanese manufacturer, which initially owned all rights to the chip. At the time, most Intel executives saw little promise in the product. Since then, processors have allowed manufacturers to embed intelligence into PCs, elevators, air bags, cameras, cell phones, beepers, key chains and farm equipment, among other devices.

And tomorrow we will have:
A chip with 80 processing cores. The chip will be able to perform 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second, or 1 teraflop.


Check out the fascinating slideshow at link below.

http://content.zdnet.com/2346-9595_22-37087-1.html