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Let's begin today's video at the beginning

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by talking about the Intel 8086. Released on June 8th, 1978,

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it wasn't Intel's first CPU.

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That distinction goes to the 4004, but the 8086 was the front runner of the CPU

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that sits inside your desktop or laptop PC right now,

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unless you want a Mac, a newer Mac anyway.

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You see the 8086 introduced the x86 architecture,

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the dominant design scheme for the past 40-ish years

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that underpinned almost every consumer CPU from Intel to AMD.

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Now that could be shifting nowadays with the growth of non-x86 designs

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like Apple's new M1 chip, but x86 still dominates the PC market,

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and it all started with the 8086. Of course, it originally only ran at a clock speed

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of five megahertz, which is about 1,000 times slower than a modern CPU before you even consider

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like all the architectural improvements since then.

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But nonetheless, the x86 architecture became a mainstay,

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the large part because the original IBM PC used the Intel 8088, a slightly modified 8086

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that IBM was able to get in large quantities for a relatively low price.

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As the IBM PC became an industry standard, the x86 architecture took off

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and was eventually licensed out to other chip makers, including AMD.

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Speaking of AMD, let's move on to our next featured CPU,

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the AMD Athlon 64. Although it was Intel that created

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the original 16-bit x86 architecture and refined it into a 32-bit platform,

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AMD was the first to develop a 64-bit version of x86,

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which they released for the consumer market in 2003.

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Athlon 64 was quite ahead of its time, considering that in 2003, Windows XP ruled the world,

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and most people were still using 32-bit platforms. However, 64-bit computing quickly became popular

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toward the end of the 2000s, which was very important as it allowed systems

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to access more than four gigabytes of memory at once without trickery.

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With even low-ran systems today, typically having at least eight gigs of RAM,

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staying on 32-bit platforms would seriously hamper the experience for many users.

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Athlon 64 was still on the shelves until 2009, but during that time,

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another big-time innovation came onto the scene that was just as important as the transition to 64-bit.

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I'm talking about dual-core processing, and we're actually gonna mention two chips in this section,

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the Intel Pentium Xtreme 840, which came out in April 2005,

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and the AMD Athlon 64X2, which debuted the next month.

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The Xtreme Edition 840 actually wasn't even that complicated of a design.

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It was really just two Xeon cores from Intel's server lineup, just mashed onto one chip,

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or glued together, as you might call them.

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AMD, meanwhile, was a little bit more forward-thinking, as the Athlon 64X2 had a direct link

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between its two cores to speed things up, where Intel cores had to pass information

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through the front-side bus in order to coordinate their activity.

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Whoa, that's bafflingly slow, trust me. AMD's offering also had the advantages

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of being more power-efficient, and it didn't even need a brand-new motherboard.

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It could just work on existing boards with a BIOS update, so Team Red, or Green back then,

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was actually ahead of Team Blue in the multi-core CPU game for a while,

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even though Intel pulled way ahead in the market share a few years later.

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But we'd be remiss if we only talked about desktop and laptop CPUs.

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What about the chips that live inside of our phones? These were developed very incrementally,

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but arguably the most important one was the ARM Cortex-A8, released in 2005.

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Now, the Cortex-A8 isn't just one chip.

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ARM doesn't actually manufacture chips, but rather they license out the designs to third parties.

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Although the Cortex-A8 was far from ARM's first chip,

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it was probably the first that became broadly popular in consumer gadgets.

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Cortex-A8 cores were featured in the first ever Samsung Exynos mobile CPU, as well as the Apple A4,

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which powered the iPhone 4 and the original iPad. Cortex-A8 also featured super-scaler technology,

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meaning it could execute more than one instruction per clock cycle, as well as a branch predictor

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that was much more advanced than preceding designs.

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The cement that the chip could anticipate system needs ahead of time more effectively,

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representing a significantly forward in performance. Although ARM chips were already popular on smartphones,

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the A8 really cemented ARM's design as a go-to for mobile devices.

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As subsequent Cortex models enabled many of the features we've come to expect on modern smartphones,

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as well as performance that has closed the gap significantly between PCs and mobile devices.

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In 2005, there were fewer than two billion ARM-based chips sold.

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This jumped to over 21 billion in the year 2017.

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Of course, there are plenty of notable chips that we didn't have time to cover today,

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so let us know down in the comments which ones you'd like to see in a future episode.

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Maybe we'll get to do those a little bit later on.

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Thanks for watching this Techquickie. Like, dislike, and maybe check out our other videos.

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Comment with some video suggestions, as I said before, and don't forget to subscribe and follow.