Essay about Integrated Circuit Technology

Kevin Nelson
6/16/2015
NT1110
Unit 1 Assignment 1: Integrated Circuit Technology
An integrated circuit which is also known as (microchip, chip, IC) placed transistors, capacitors, resistors, and wiring circuitry, which was separated previously, onto the semiconductor material of a single chip (Germanium or Silicon). The cost of making electronics was greatly reduced due to the integrated circuit, which impacted the designs of all future computers and other electronics.
AMD and Intel, two major microprocessor companies, dominate computers of today. The latest available offerings from Intel as an example contains transistors into the billions and compare this to the 1971 Intel 4004 chip, it contained 2,300 transistors. The Pentium chip which is the most common 1993 chip from Intel contained 3,100,000 transistors. The technology behind transistors over the years has changed, they are made smaller so that microprocessors could be fitted with more, which gives faster processors.

The co-founder of Intel, Gordon E. Moore in 1965 described how the amount of transistors for integrated circuits which had doubled every year, Moore predicted that for at least the next ten years the trend would continue. Now more than forty five years later this prediction is still somewhat correct. Moore stated that this could continue another decade or two, but would eventually reach its limits at atomic levels of miniaturization.

Processor | Transistor Count | Date of Introduction |
Intel 4004 | 2,300 | | 1971 |
Intel 8008 | 3,500 | | 1972 |
Intel 8080 | 4,500 | | 1974 |
Intel 8085 | 6,500 | | 1976 |
Intel 8086 | 29,000 | | 1978 |
Intel 8088 | 29,000 | | 1979 |
Intel 80186 | 55,000 | | 1982 |
Intel 80286 | 134,000 | | 1982 |
Intel 80386 | 275,000 | | 1985 |
Intel 80486 | 1,180,235| | 1989 |
Pentium | 3,100,000 | | 1993 |
Pentium Pro | 5,500,000 | | 1995 |
Pentium II | 7,500,000 | | 1997 |
Pentium III | 9,500,000 | | 1999 |
Pentium 4 | 42,000,000 | | 2000 |
Itanium 2 McKinley | 220,000,000 | | 2002 |
Core 2 Duo | 291,000,000 | | 2008 |
Itanium 2 Madison 6M | 410,000,000 | | 2003 |
Itanium 2 with 9MB cache | 592,000,000 | | 2004 |
Core i7 (Quad) | 731,000,000 | | 2008 |
Quad-Core + GPU Core i7 | 1,160,000,000 | | 2011 |
Six-Core Core i7 (Gulftown) | 1,170,000,000 | | 2010 |
Quad-Core + GPU Core i7 | 1,140,000,000 | | 2012 |
Dual-Core Itanium 2 | 1,170,000,000 | | 2006 |
Six-Core Xeon 7400 | 1,900,000,000 | | 2008 |
Quad-Core Itanium Tukwila | 2,000,000,000 | | 2010 |  First 2B transistor chip
Six-Core Core i7/8 Core Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge-E/EP) | 2,270,000,000 | 2011 |
8-Core Xeon Nehalem-EX | 2,300,000,000 | | 2010 |
10-Core Xeon Westmere-EX | 2,600,000,000| | 2011 |
8-Core Itanium Poulson | 3,100,000,000 | | 2012 |
62-Core Xeon Phi | 5,000,000,000 | | 2012 | http://www.wagnercg.com/Portals/0/FunStuff/AHistoryofMicroprocessorTransistorCount.pdf The first electromechanical general purpose computer, the Z3 operated at a frequency of about 5–10 Hz. The first electronic general purpose computer, the ENIAC, used a 100 kHz clock in its cycling unit. As each instruction took 20 cycles, it had an instruction rate of 5 kHz.
The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800 (by MITS), used an Intel 8080 CPU with a clock rate

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