01Overview
In 1971 Intel released the 4004, a 4-bit microprocessor designed for calculators. The 8080 of 1974 and the 8086 of 1978 carried it into personal computers; the 1981 IBM PC used the 8088 and established an open architecture with a clone ecosystem.
The microprocessor compressed a computer from a building into a chip and moved competition from system integration to process and architecture. Dennard scaling kept shrinking transistors until the power wall arrived in the 2000s; clock speeds stopped climbing and multicore plus dedicated accelerators became the new growth path.
02History
- 1971
Intel 4004
The first commercial microprocessor.
- 1974
Intel 8080
It fuels the personal-computer wave.
- 1978
Intel 8086
The starting point of x86.
- 1981
The IBM PC
An open architecture creates the clone industry.
- 2005
Multicore becomes mainstream
Clock speeds stall and parallelism becomes the main road.
03Core concepts
Instruction cycle
Fetch, decode, execute, memory access, write back.
Pipeline
Overlapping several instructions to raise throughput.
Power wall
The thermal and energy limits that stopped frequency scaling.
04Hands-on
Do it once — it beats reading it ten times
Simulate a 5-stage pipeline on paper and count the penalty of a branch misprediction
05Self-check
Say it in your own words first, then open the answer. Whatever you cannot explain is what to review next.
Can you explain "Instruction cycle"?
Fetch, decode, execute, memory access, write back.
Can you explain "Pipeline"?
Overlapping several instructions to raise throughput.
Can you explain "Power wall"?
The thermal and energy limits that stopped frequency scaling.
What problem did it solve, and why was there nothing better at the time?
Go back to the history section: how was this done before, and what did it cost?
If you had to build it today, how would you break it down?
Use the hands-on task above: write a plan of at most three steps before you start.
06Key people
Federico Faggin
1941 –
Designer of the Intel 4004.
Gordon Moore
1929 – 2023
Formulated Moore’s law; co-founder of Intel.
07Further reading
- A Brief History of the Microprocessor
- Computer Organization and Design