1.
Intel
–
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. It is the worlds largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers based on revenue, and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, Intel supplies processors for computer system manufacturers such as Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel Corporation was founded on July 18,1968, by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the companys name was conceived as portmanteau of the words integrated and electronics. The fact that intel is the term for intelligence information made the name appropriate. Intel was a developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips. Although Intel created the worlds first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, during the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. The Open Source Technology Center at Intel hosts PowerTOP and LatencyTOP, and supports other projects such as Wayland, Intel Array Building Blocks, and Threading Building Blocks. Client Computing Group – 55% of 2016 revenues – produces hardware components used in desktop, data Center Group – 29% of 2016 revenues – produces hardware components used in server, network, and storage platforms. Internet of Things Group – 5% of 2016 revenues – offers platforms designed for retail, transportation, industrial, buildings, non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group – 4% of 2016 revenues – manufactures NAND flash memory products primarily used in solid-state drives. Intel Security Group – 4% of 2016 revenues – produces software, particularly security, programmable Solutions Group – 3% of 2016 revenues – manufactures programmable semiconductors. In 2016, Dell accounted for 15% of Intels total revenues, Lenovo accounted for 13% of total revenues, in the 1980s, Intel was among the top ten sellers of semiconductors in the world. In 1991, Intel became the biggest chip maker by revenue and has held the position ever since, other top semiconductor companies include TSMC, Advanced Micro Devices, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and STMicroelectronics. Competitors in PC chip sets include Advanced Micro Devices, VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, however, the cross-licensing agreement is canceled in the event of an AMD bankruptcy or takeover. Some smaller competitors such as VIA Technologies produce low-power x86 processors for small factor computers, however, the advent of such mobile computing devices, in particular, smartphones, has in recent years led to a decline in PC sales. Since over 95% of the worlds smartphones currently use processors designed by ARM Holdings, ARM is also planning to make inroads into the PC and server market. Intel has been involved in disputes regarding violation of antitrust laws. Intel was founded in Mountain View, California in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore, a chemist, and Robert Noyce, arthur Rock helped them find investors, while Max Palevsky was on the board from an early stage. Moore and Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel, Rock was not an employee, but he was an investor and was chairman of the board
2.
X86
–
X86 is a family of backward-compatible instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 CPU and its Intel 8088 variant. The term x86 came into being because the names of several successors to Intels 8086 processor end in 86, many additions and extensions have been added to the x86 instruction set over the years, almost consistently with full backward compatibility. The architecture has been implemented in processors from Intel, Cyrix, AMD, VIA and many companies, there are also open implementations. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the 8088 and 80286 were still in common use, today, however, x86 usually implies a binary compatibility also with the 32-bit instruction set of the 80386. An 8086 system, including such as 8087 and 8089. There were also terms iRMX, iSBC, and iSBX – all together under the heading Microsystem 80, however, this naming scheme was quite temporary, lasting for a few years during the early 1980s. Today, x86 is ubiquitous in both stationary and portable computers, and is also used in midrange computers, workstations, servers. A large amount of software, including operating systems such as DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS, functions with x86-based hardware. There have been attempts, including by Intel itself, to end the market dominance of the inelegant x86 architecture designed directly from the first simple 8-bit microprocessors. Examples of this are the iAPX432, the Intel 960, Intel 860, however, the continuous refinement of x86 microarchitectures, circuitry and semiconductor manufacturing would make it hard to replace x86 in many segments. The table below lists processor models and model series implementing variations of the x86 instruction set, each line item is characterized by significantly improved or commercially successful processor microarchitecture designs. Such x86 implementations are seldom simple copies but often employ different internal microarchitectures as well as different solutions at the electronic, quite naturally, early compatible microprocessors were 16-bit, while 32-bit designs were developed much later. For the personal computer market, real quantities started to appear around 1990 with i386 and i486 compatible processors, other companies, which designed or manufactured x86 or x87 processors, include ITT Corporation, National Semiconductor, ULSI System Technology, and Weitek. Some early versions of these microprocessors had heat dissipation problems, AMD later managed to establish itself as a serious contender with the K6 set of processors, which gave way to the very successful Athlon and Opteron. There were also other contenders, such as Centaur Technology, Rise Technology, VIA Technologies energy efficient C3 and C7 processors, which were designed by the Centaur company, have been sold for many years. Centaurs newest design, the VIA Nano, is their first processor with superscalar and it was, perhaps interestingly, introduced at about the same time as Intels first in-order processor since the P5 Pentium, the Intel Atom. The instruction set architecture has twice been extended to a word size. In 1999-2003, AMD extended this 32-bit architecture to 64 bits and referred to it as x86-64 in early documents, Intel soon adopted AMDs architectural extensions under the name IA-32e, later using the name EM64T and finally using Intel 64
3.
Xeon
–
The Xeon /ˈziːɒn/ is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel Corporation, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. Despite such disadvantages, Xeon processors have always had popularity among users, mainly due to higher core count potential. Because most Intel Xeon CPUs lack an integrated GPU, systems built with such integrated GPU lacking processors require a discrete graphics card if a VDU output is desired, the Xeon brand has been maintained over several generations of x86 and x86-64 processors. Older models added the Xeon moniker to the end of the name of their corresponding desktop processor, the Xeon CPUs generally have more cache than their desktop counterparts in addition to multiprocessing capabilities. The first Xeon-branded processor was the Pentium II Xeon and it was released in 1998, replacing the Pentium Pro in Intels server lineup. The Pentium II Xeon was a Deschutes Pentium II with a full-speed 512 kB,1 MB, the L2 cache was implemented with custom 512 kB SRAMs developed by Intel. The number of SRAMs depended on the amount of cache, a 512 kB configuration required one SRAM, a 1 MB configuration, two SRAMs, and a 2 MB configuration, four SRAMs on both sides of the PCB. Each SRAM was a 12.90 mm by 17.23 mm die fabricated in a 0.35 µm four-layer metal CMOS process, the additional cache required a larger module and thus the Pentium II Xeon used a larger slot, Slot 2. It was supported by the 440GX dual-processor workstation chipset and the 450NX quad- or octo-processor chipset, in 1999, the Pentium II Xeon was replaced by the Pentium III Xeon. The product codes for Tanner mirrored that of Katmai,80525, the second version, named Cascades, was based on the Pentium III Coppermine core. To improve this situation, Intel released another version, officially also named Cascades and that came in two variants, with 1 MB or 2 MB of L2 cache. Its bus speed was fixed at 100 MHz, though in practice the cache was able to offset this, the product code for Cascades mirrored that of Coppermine,80526. In mid-2001, the Xeon brand was introduced, the initial variant that used the new NetBurst microarchitecture, Foster, was slightly different from the desktop Pentium 4. It was a decent chip for workstations, but for server applications it was almost always outperformed by the older Cascades cores with a 2 MB L2 cache, combined with the need to use expensive Rambus Dynamic RAM, the Fosters sales were somewhat unimpressive. This improved performance slightly, but not enough to lift it out of third place and it was also priced much higher than the dual-processor versions. The Foster shared the 80528 product code with Willamette, in 2002 Intel released a 130 nm version of Xeon branded CPU, codenamed Prestonia. It supported Intels new Hyper-Threading technology and had a 512 kB L2 cache and this was based on the Northwood Pentium 4 core. A new server chipset, E7500, was released to support this processor in servers, the Prestonia performed much better than its predecessor and noticeably better than Athlon MP
4.
Central processing unit
–
The computer industry has used the term central processing unit at least since the early 1960s. The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, most modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning they are contained on a single integrated circuit chip. An IC that contains a CPU may also contain memory, peripheral interfaces, some computers employ a multi-core processor, which is a single chip containing two or more CPUs called cores, in that context, one can speak of such single chips as sockets. Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, there also exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources. Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be rewired to perform different tasks. Since the term CPU is generally defined as a device for software execution, the idea of a stored-program computer was already present in the design of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchlys ENIAC, but was initially omitted so that it could be finished sooner. On June 30,1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and it was the outline of a stored-program computer that would eventually be completed in August 1949. EDVAC was designed to perform a number of instructions of various types. Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the wiring of the computer. This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the considerable time, with von Neumanns design, the program that EDVAC ran could be changed simply by changing the contents of the memory. Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a larger, however, this method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of multi-purpose processors produced in large quantities. This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit. The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers, both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles to cellphones, the so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before EDVAC, also utilized a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory. Relays and vacuum tubes were used as switching elements, a useful computer requires thousands or tens of thousands of switching devices. The overall speed of a system is dependent on the speed of the switches, tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the Harvard Mark I failed very rarely. In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed advantages afforded generally outweighed the reliability problems, most of these early synchronous CPUs ran at low clock rates compared to modern microelectronic designs. Clock signal frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 4 MHz were very common at this time, the design complexity of CPUs increased as various technologies facilitated building smaller and more reliable electronic devices
5.
Pentium 4
–
Pentium 4 was a line of single-core central processing units for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers introduced by Intel on November 20,2000 and shipped through August 8,2008. They had a seventh-generation x86 microarchitecture, called NetBurst, which was the companys first all-new design since the introduction of the P6 microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro CPUs in 1995, NetBurst differed from P6 by featuring a very deep instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds. Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips, however. In 2004, the initial 32-bit x86 instruction set of the Pentium 4 microprocessors was extended by the 64-bit x86-64 set, the first Pentium 4 cores, codenamed Willamette, were clocked from 1.3 GHz to 2 GHz. They were released on November 20,2000, using the Socket 423 system, notable with the introduction of the Pentium 4 was the 400 MT/s FSB. It actually operated at 100 MHz, but the FSB was quad-pumped, meaning that the transfer rate was four times the base clock of the bus. The AMD Athlons double-pumped FSB was running at 100 or 133 MHz at that time, Pentium 4 CPUs introduced the SSE2 and, in the Prescott-based Pentium 4s, SSE3 instruction sets to accelerate calculations, transactions, media processing, 3D graphics, and games. Later versions featured Hyper-Threading Technology, a feature to one physical CPU work as two logical CPUs. Intel also marketed a version of their low-end Celeron processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture, in 2005, the Pentium 4 was complemented by the Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition dual-core CPUs. In benchmark evaluations, the advantages of the NetBurst microarchitecture were unclear, with carefully optimized application code, the first Pentium 4s outperformed Intels fastest Pentium III, as expected. But in legacy applications with many branching or x87 floating-point instructions and its main handicap was a shared unidirectional bus. Furthermore, the NetBurst microarchitecture consumed more power and emitted more heat than any previous Intel or AMD microarchitectures, as a result, the Pentium 4s introduction was met with mixed reviews, Developers disliked the Pentium 4, as it posed a new set of code optimization rules. For example, in applications, AMDs lower-clocked Athlon easily outperformed the Pentium 4. Tom Yager of Infoworld magazine called it the fastest CPU - for programs that fit entirely in cache, computer-savvy buyers avoided Pentium 4 PCs due to their price premium, questionable benefit, and initial restriction to Rambus RAM. In terms of marketing, the Pentium 4s singular emphasis on clock frequency made it a marketers dream. The result of this was that the NetBurst microarchitecture was often referred to as a marchitecture by various computing websites and it was also called NetBust, a term popular with reviewers who reflected negatively upon the processors performance. The two classical metrics of CPU performance are IPC and clock speed, while IPC is difficult to quantify due to dependence on the benchmark applications instruction mix, clock speed is a simple measurement yielding a single absolute number. Unsophisticated buyers would simply consider the processor with the highest clock speed to be the best product, because AMDs processors had slower clock speeds, it countered Intels marketing advantage with the megahertz myth campaign
6.
Itanium
–
Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture. Intel markets the processors for servers and high-performance computing systems. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard, and was jointly developed by HP. Itanium-based systems have produced by HP and several other manufacturers. In 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, Power Architecture, the currently shipping Itanium processor generation, Poulson, was released on November 8,2012. In February 2017, Intel began releasing its successor, Kittson, to test customers, as Intel has not provided a roadmap beyond it and Hewlett-Packard is the only remaining major Itanium vendor, press and analysts have speculated that it will be the last Itanium generation. In 1989, HP determined that Reduced Instruction Set Computing architectures were approaching a processing limit at one instruction per cycle, HP researchers investigated a new architecture, later named Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, that allows the processor to execute multiple instructions in each clock cycle. EPIC implements a form of very long instruction word architecture, in which a single instruction word contains multiple instructions, Intel was willing to undertake a very large development effort on IA-64 in the expectation that the resulting microprocessor would be used by the majority of enterprise systems manufacturers. HP and Intel initiated a joint development effort with a goal of delivering the first product, Merced. Compaq and Silicon Graphics decided to further development of the Alpha. Several groups developed operating systems for the architecture, including Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, Linux, and UNIX variants such as HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, and Monterey/64. By 1997, it was apparent that the IA-64 architecture and the compiler were much more difficult to implement than originally thought, technical difficulties included the very high transistor counts needed to support the wide instruction words and the large caches. There were also structural problems within the project, as the two parts of the joint team used different methodologies and had different priorities. Since Merced was the first EPIC processor, the development effort encountered more unanticipated problems than the team was accustomed to, in addition, the EPIC concept depends on compiler capabilities that had never been implemented before, so more research was needed. Intel announced the name of the processor, Itanium, on October 4,1999. Within hours, the name Itanic had been coined on a Usenet newsgroup, a reference to Titanic, by the time Itanium was released in June 2001, its performance was not superior to competing RISC and CISC processors. Itanium competed at the low-end with servers based on x86 processors, Intel repositioned Itanium to focus on high-end business and HPC computing, attempting to duplicate x86s successful horizontal market. POWER and SPARC remained strong, while the 32-bit x86 architecture continued to grow into the enterprise space, only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability
7.
Sun Microsystems
–
Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24,1982, at its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. On January 27,2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun by for US$7.4 billion, other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, the initial design for what became Suns first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation and it was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanfords Department of Computer Science, on February 24,1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network, Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. By 1983 Sun was known for producing 68000-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DECs VAX to run 4. 2BSD and it licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Suns initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, the symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA, Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the companys current strategy. Suns logo, which features four interleaved copies of the sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple. In the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money. It also began spending more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. Sales in Suns important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop, several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies, a year later it had dipped below $10 but bounced back to $20
8.
Pentium Pro
–
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel introduced in November 1,1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture and was intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3.1 and 4.5 million transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5.5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor and was used in supercomputers like ASCI Red. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quad-processor configurations and it only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular Socket 8. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II Xeon in 1998, the lead architect of Pentium Pro was Fred Pollack who was specialized in superscalarity and had also worked as the lead engineer of Intel iAPX432. The Pentium Pro incorporated a new microarchitecture in a departure from the Pentium x86 architecture and it has a decoupled, 14-stage superpipelined architecture which used an instruction pool. The Pentium Pro featured many advanced concepts not found in the Pentium, the Pentium Pro thus featured out of order execution, including speculative execution via register renaming. It also had a wider 36-bit address bus, allowing it to access up to 64GB of memory, the Pentium Pro has an 8 KiB instruction cache, from which up to 16 bytes are fetched on each cycle and sent to the instruction decoders. The decoders are not equal in capability, only one can decode any x86 instruction and this restricts the Pentium Pros ability to decode multiple instructions simultaneously, limiting superscalar execution. X86 instructions are decoded into 118-bit micro-operations, the micro-ops are RISC-like, that is, they encode an operation, two sources, and a destination. The general decoder can generate up to four micro-ops per cycle, thus, x86 instructions that operate on the memory can only be processed by the general decoder, as this operation requires a minimum of three micro-ops. Likewise, the simple decoders are limited to instructions that can be translated into one micro-op, instructions that require more micro-ops than four are translated with the assistance of a sequencer, which generates the required micro-ops over multiple clock cycles. Micro-ops exit the re-order buffer and enter a station, where they await dispatch to the execution units. In each clock cycle, up to five micro-ops can be dispatched to five execution units, the Pentium Pro has a total of six execution units, two integer units, one floating-point unit, a load unit, store address unit, and a store data unit. Of the two units, only one has the full complement of functions such as a barrel shifter, multiplier and divider. The second integer unit, which shares paths with the FPU, does not have facilities and is limited to simple operations such as add, subtract. Addition and multiplication are pipelined and have a latency of three and five cycles, respectively, division and square-root are not pipelined and are executed in separate units that share the FPUs ports
9.
Pentium III
–
The Pentium III brand refers to Intels 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile microprocessors based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 26,1999. The brands initial processors were very similar to the earlier Pentium II-branded microprocessors, the most notable differences were the addition of the SSE instruction set, and the introduction of a controversial serial number embedded in the chip during the manufacturing process. Similarly to the Pentium II it superseded, the Pentium III was also accompanied by the Celeron brand for lower-end versions, and the Xeon for high-end derivatives. The Pentium III was eventually superseded by the Pentium 4, but its Tualatin core also served as the basis for the Pentium M CPUs, the first Pentium III variant was the Katmai. It was a development of the Deschutes Pentium II. The Pentium III saw an increase of 2 million transistors over the Pentium II and it was first released at speeds of 450 and 500 MHz in February 1999. Two more versions were released,550 MHz on May 17,1999 and 600 MHz on August 2,1999, on September 27,1999 Intel released the 533B and 600B running at 533 &600 MHz respectively. The B suffix indicated that it featured a 133 MHz FSB, the Katmai contains 9.5 million transistors, not including the 512 Kbytes L2 cache, and has dimensions of 12.3 mm by 10.4 mm. It is fabricated in Intels P856.5 process, a 0.25 micrometre CMOS process with five levels of aluminum interconnect, the Katmai used the same slot-based design as the Pentium II but with the newer SECC2 cartridge that allowed direct CPU core contact with the heat sink. There have been some early models of the Pentium III with 450 and 500 MHz packaged in an older SECC cartridge intended for OEMs, a notable stepping for enthusiasts was SL35D. This version of Katmai was officially rated for 450 MHz, but often contained cache chips for the 600 MHz model and thus usually was capable of running at 600 MHz. The second version, codenamed Coppermine, was released on October 25,1999, running at 500,533,550,600,650,667,700, and 733 MHz. From December 1999 to May 2000, Intel released Pentium IIIs running at speeds of 750,800,850,866,900,933 and 1000 MHz, both 100 MHz FSB and 133 MHz FSB models were made. An E was appended to the name to indicate cores using the new 0.18 μm fabrication process. An additional B was later appended to designate 133 MHz FSB models, however, AMD were able to clock the Athlon higher, reaching speeds of 1.2 GHz before the launch of the Pentium 4. The Coppermine core was unable to reach the 1.13 GHz speed without various tweaks to the processors microcode, effective cooling, additional voltage. Intel only officially supported the processor on its own VC820 i820-based motherboard, in benchmarks that were stable, performance was shown to be sub-par, with the 1.13 GHz CPU equalling a 1.0 GHz model. Toms Hardware attributed this performance deficit to relaxed tuning of the CPU, Intel needed at least six months to resolve the problems using a new cD0 stepping and re-released 1.1 GHz and 1.13 GHz versions in 2001
10.
Celeron
–
Celeron is a brand name given by Intel Corp. to a number of different low end IA-32 and x86-64 computer microprocessor models targeted at budget personal computers. Celeron processors can run all IA-32 computer programs, but their performance is significantly lower when compared to similar CPUs with higher-priced Intel CPU brands. For example, the Celeron brand will often have less cache memory and these missing features can have a variable impact on performance, but is often very substantial. While a few of the Celeron designs have achieved surprising performance and this has been the primary justification for the higher cost of other Intel CPU brands versus the Celeron range. Introduced in April 1998, the first Celeron branded CPU was based on the Pentium II branded core, subsequent Celeron branded CPUs were based on the Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M, and Intel Core branded processors. The latest Celeron design is based on the sixth generation Core i3/i5/i7 series and this design features independent processing cores, but with only 66% as much cache memory as the comparable Core i3 offering. As a product concept, the Celeron was introduced in response to Intels loss of the market, in particular to the Cyrix 6x86, the AMD K6. Intels existing low-end product, the Pentium MMX, was no longer performance competitive at 233 MHz, instead, Intel pursued a budget part that was pin-compatible with their high-end Pentium II product, using the Pentium IIs Slot 1 interface. Intel hired marketing firm Lexicon Branding, which had come up with the name Pentium. The San Jose Mercury News described Lexicons reasoning behind the name they chose, Celeron is seven letters and three syllables, like Pentium. The Cel of Celeron rhymes with tel of Intel, the first Covington Celeron was essentially a 266 MHz Pentium II manufactured without any secondary cache at all. Covington also shared the 80523 product code of Deschutes, although clocked at 266 or 300 MHz, the cacheless Celerons were a good deal slower than the parts they were designed to replace. Substantial numbers were sold on first release, largely on the strength of the Intel name, but the Celeron quickly achieved a poor reputation both in the trade press and among computer professionals. The initial market interest faded rapidly in the face of its poor performance, nevertheless, the first Celerons were quite popular among some overclockers, for their flexible overclockability and reasonable price. Covington was only manufactured in Slot 1 SEPP format, the Mendocino Celeron, launched 24 August 1998, was the first retail CPU to use on-die L2 cache. Whereas Covington had no secondary cache at all, Mendocino included 128 KB of L2 cache running at full clock rate, the first Mendocino-core Celeron was clocked at a then-modest 300 MHz but offered almost twice the performance of the old cacheless Covington Celeron at the same clock rate. To distinguish it from the older Covington 300 MHz, Intel called the Mendocino core Celeron 300A, although the other Mendocino Celerons did not have an A appended, some people call all Mendocino processors Celeron-A regardless of clock rate. The new Mendocino-core Celeron was a performer from the outset
11.
Die (integrated circuit)
–
A die in the context of integrated circuits is a small block of semiconducting material, on which a given functional circuit is fabricated. Typically, integrated circuits are produced in batches on a single wafer of electronic-grade silicon or other semiconductor through processes such as photolithography. The wafer is cut into pieces, each containing one copy of the circuit. Each of these pieces is called a die, there are three commonly used plural forms, dice, dies, and die
12.
Network interface controller
–
A network interface controller is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Early network interface controllers were commonly implemented on expansion cards that plugged into a computer bus, the low cost and ubiquity of the Ethernet standard means that most newer computers have a network interface built into the motherboard. The network controller implements the electronic circuitry required to communicate using a physical layer and data link layer standard such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel. The NIC allows computers to communicate over a network, either by using cables or wirelessly. Although other network technologies exist, IEEE802 networks including the Ethernet variants have achieved near-ubiquity since the mid-1990s, newer server motherboards may even have dual network interfaces built-in. The Ethernet capabilities are integrated into the motherboard chipset or implemented via a low-cost dedicated Ethernet chip. A separate network card is not required unless additional interfaces are needed or some type of network is used. The NIC may use one or more of the techniques to indicate the availability of packets to transfer. Interrupt-driven I/O is where the peripheral alerts the CPU that it is ready to transfer data, also, NICs may use one or more of the following techniques to transfer packet data, Programmed input/output is where the CPU moves the data to or from the NIC to memory. Direct memory access is where some other device other than the CPU assumes control of the bus to move data to or from the NIC to memory. This removes load from the CPU but requires more logic on the card, in addition, a packet buffer on the NIC may not be required and latency can be reduced. There are two types of DMA, third-party DMA in which a DMA controller other than the NIC performs transfers, an Ethernet network controller typically has an 8P8C socket where the network cable is connected. Older NICs also supplied BNC, or AUI connections, a few LEDs inform the user of whether the network is active, and whether or not data transmission occurs. Ethernet network controllers typically support 10 Mbit/s Ethernet,100 Mbit/s Ethernet, such controllers are designated as 10/100/1000, meaning that they can support a notional maximum transfer rate of 10,100 or 1000 Mbit/s. 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs are also available, and, as of November 2014, are beginning to be available on computer motherboards, multiqueue NICs provide multiple transmit and receive queues, allowing packets received by the NIC to be assigned to one of its receive queues. The hardware-based distribution of the interrupts, described above, is referred to as receive-side scaling, purely software implementations also exist, such as the receive packet steering and receive flow steering. Examples of such implementations are the RFS and Intel Flow Director, with multiqueue NICs, additional performance improvements can be achieved by distributing outgoing traffic among different transmit queues. By assigning different transmit queues to different CPUs/cores, various operating systems internal contentions can be avoided and those NICs support, Accessing local and remote memory without involving the remote CPU
Media related to