Let's begin today's video at the beginning
by talking about the Intel 8086. Released on June 8th, 1978,
it wasn't Intel's first CPU.
That distinction goes to the 4004, but the 8086 was the front runner of the CPU
that sits inside your desktop or laptop PC right now,
unless you want a Mac, a newer Mac anyway.
You see the 8086 introduced the x86 architecture,
the dominant design scheme for the past 40-ish years
that underpinned almost every consumer CPU from Intel to AMD.
Now that could be shifting nowadays with the growth of non-x86 designs
like Apple's new M1 chip, but x86 still dominates the PC market,
and it all started with the 8086. Of course, it originally only ran at a clock speed
of five megahertz, which is about 1,000 times slower than a modern CPU before you even consider
like all the architectural improvements since then.
But nonetheless, the x86 architecture became a mainstay,
the large part because the original IBM PC used the Intel 8088, a slightly modified 8086
that IBM was able to get in large quantities for a relatively low price.
As the IBM PC became an industry standard, the x86 architecture took off
and was eventually licensed out to other chip makers, including AMD.
Speaking of AMD, let's move on to our next featured CPU,
the AMD Athlon 64. Although it was Intel that created
the original 16-bit x86 architecture and refined it into a 32-bit platform,
AMD was the first to develop a 64-bit version of x86,
which they released for the consumer market in 2003.
Athlon 64 was quite ahead of its time, considering that in 2003, Windows XP ruled the world,
and most people were still using 32-bit platforms. However, 64-bit computing quickly became popular
toward the end of the 2000s, which was very important as it allowed systems
to access more than four gigabytes of memory at once without trickery.
With even low-ran systems today, typically having at least eight gigs of RAM,
staying on 32-bit platforms would seriously hamper the experience for many users.
Athlon 64 was still on the shelves until 2009, but during that time,
another big-time innovation came onto the scene that was just as important as the transition to 64-bit.
I'm talking about dual-core processing, and we're actually gonna mention two chips in this section,
the Intel Pentium Xtreme 840, which came out in April 2005,
and the AMD Athlon 64X2, which debuted the next month.
The Xtreme Edition 840 actually wasn't even that complicated of a design.
It was really just two Xeon cores from Intel's server lineup, just mashed onto one chip,
or glued together, as you might call them.
AMD, meanwhile, was a little bit more forward-thinking, as the Athlon 64X2 had a direct link
between its two cores to speed things up, where Intel cores had to pass information
through the front-side bus in order to coordinate their activity.
Whoa, that's bafflingly slow, trust me. AMD's offering also had the advantages
of being more power-efficient, and it didn't even need a brand-new motherboard.
It could just work on existing boards with a BIOS update, so Team Red, or Green back then,
was actually ahead of Team Blue in the multi-core CPU game for a while,
even though Intel pulled way ahead in the market share a few years later.
But we'd be remiss if we only talked about desktop and laptop CPUs.
What about the chips that live inside of our phones? These were developed very incrementally,
but arguably the most important one was the ARM Cortex-A8, released in 2005.
Now, the Cortex-A8 isn't just one chip.
ARM doesn't actually manufacture chips, but rather they license out the designs to third parties.
Although the Cortex-A8 was far from ARM's first chip,
it was probably the first that became broadly popular in consumer gadgets.
Cortex-A8 cores were featured in the first ever Samsung Exynos mobile CPU, as well as the Apple A4,
which powered the iPhone 4 and the original iPad. Cortex-A8 also featured super-scaler technology,
meaning it could execute more than one instruction per clock cycle, as well as a branch predictor
that was much more advanced than preceding designs.
The cement that the chip could anticipate system needs ahead of time more effectively,
representing a significantly forward in performance. Although ARM chips were already popular on smartphones,
the A8 really cemented ARM's design as a go-to for mobile devices.
As subsequent Cortex models enabled many of the features we've come to expect on modern smartphones,
as well as performance that has closed the gap significantly between PCs and mobile devices.
In 2005, there were fewer than two billion ARM-based chips sold.
This jumped to over 21 billion in the year 2017.
Of course, there are plenty of notable chips that we didn't have time to cover today,
so let us know down in the comments which ones you'd like to see in a future episode.
Maybe we'll get to do those a little bit later on.
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