Developments in CPU over the past 20 years

Running head: COMPUTER HARDWARE
COMPUTER HARDWARE
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1COMPUTER HARDWARE
A.C:5.1
The developments in CPU over past 20 years
A particular central processing unit, is an electronic device that tends to execute
instruction of a specific computer program. This is done with the help of performing basic
arithmetic, control, logical, output or input operations (Hwang and Jotwani 2016). These
operations have been specified by numerous instructions in a particular computer. In past 20
years, technology has been through numerous developments in various devices including
CPU, this includes restructuring of ways by which processors function. One of the most
important development that had been noticeable as well include increase in processing power,
reduction in size, different types of CPU that are responsible for working in various kinds of
platform like laptops, tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles and many more (Yeo, Lee and
Lim 2015).
Image 1: The developments in CPU over past 20 years

2COMPUTER HARDWARE
Furthermore we would aim in discussing regarding the specifications of the processors,
some of the processors include Pentium III, Pentium 4, AMD-K6, AMD Athlon/Athlon XP,
Itanium and Itanium 2, 64 bit processors, Athlon 64 and 64FX, AMD Opteron, Dual core
processors- Intel and dual core processors- AMD (Shah 2018). The discussion is as follows
1. Pentium III: the Pentium III is mostly similar to Pentium II, but in this case it works
with the help of a high speed of clock. The very initial processors had been structured
in 0.25 micrometre technology and the final Pentium III had reached around 0.13
micrometres (Tanenbaum 2016). It contained a new set of numerous instructions
which is known as SSE-Streaming SIMD Extensions. It had provided with numerous
floating point versions of the MMX instructions and many more. It had also improved
the processing of multimedia (Bal and Bicen 2016). This requires support from
software that had packaged starting from the Windows 98 with its DirectX 6.1.
2. AMD- K6: AMD K6 had been based on the processors Nx686 which had been
designed by NexGen when AMD had needed it. This includes MMX instruction, it
might reach speeds of the 300 MHz, and the L1 cache usually has 64 Kb. It had been
PIN compatible along with Pentium of socket 7.
3. AMD Athlon/Athlon XP: the processors had used their own sockets for connecting
with the motherboard, they are not compatible along with Intel. The completely newly
introduced FPU- pipelined as well as triple issued (Raven, Qalawee and Atroshi
2016). This processors had contained Intel’s SSE as well, it had been released in a
particular economic version, this version had been distinguished in the namely of
Duron, this consists of limited memory that cache in nature.
4. Pentium 4: this Pentium 4 has been introduced in the year of 2000, this has started
from 0.18 micrometres at the 1.3GHz and had reached around 0.09 micrometres