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🤖 Background of Computer CPUs 🤖 

The CPU that we’ve grown familiar with began it’s journey as an idea in 1958 with the invention of Jack Kilby’s ‘hybrid integrated circuit’. This laid the groundwork for Robert Noyce to build upon, he invented the monolithic integrated circuit otherwise known as the microchip. It’s success was due to its usage of silicon and it went on to lead a revolution in the industry. Noyce’s accomplishment allowed him to found a company called ‘Intel’ in 1968 leading it as the first CEO. The article today will focus mainly on Intel CPU’s however note that we will be covering other companies CPU’s in the future.

🧠 Intel’s Revolution

The company needed a flagship product for it’s launch as a producer. Research was to be pioneered in-house by Intel’s Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, Masatoshi Shima, and Stanley Mazor. The team began development on a industry breaking chip labeled ‘Intel 4004’ that is considered to be the start of the microprocessor revolution!

With the release of Intel 4004 occurring in the 1970’s, it quickly became known for being the first commercially available microprocessor. The company capitalized on its success in 1974 with the Intel 8080, an 8-bit processor. It was only a few years later the the trend of continued improvement began to take hold as Intel released their 8086 chip capable of 16-bits.

Intel’s rapid development carried onto the 21st century with it’s latest chips capable of feats thought impossible in the 1970s! Their most modern chip being the Intel Core i9-14900K, usually priced near $600. Subjectively affordable, these chips power everything from your common gaming system to the work computers of engineers.

💫 What’s a Processor?

A processor comes in various architectures and designs. These all still achieve the same goal of performing basic arithmetic, logical, control, and input/output (I/O) operations specified by those instructions. No matter the build, they will always be essentially the brain of the computer.

Despite the variety of designs of our processors come in, they all are built to concept of single or multi-core processing units. This helps us specialized certain chips for specific tasks or make them general purpose. It also allows us to scale the power of the chips by adding more parallel cores. Below are some examples of various processing methods we use in our chips today. To clarify, a core is essentially a processor unit.

Single-core processors: Single-core processors contain a single processing unit. They are remarkably much slower then most modern CPUs and is generally used in limited capacity today.

Dual-core processors: Dual-core processors are equipped with two processing units contained within one integrated circuit. Both cores run at the same time giving it greater speed.

Quad-core processors: Quad-core processors contain four processing units within a single integrated circuit. All cores run simultaneously allowing it to process vast amounts of instructions quickly.

Multi-core processors: Multi-core processors contain at least two processing units, you can group anything past a single core in this category.

🖖 The Future Of Processing

As time has proven that processors are in a state of constant evolution, many have asked what is next for the technology. Previously, we talked about neuromorphic processors where engineers took the human brain as inspiration for a CPU. This advancement is slowly being tested and fielded in AI development and may see commercial usage in the future.

Quantum Computing, another topic we’ve discussed in depth, is also seen as an alternative. Vastly superior in terms of data computing power. These marvels seem to be closer to reality then fiction every day. Unfortunately, this technology is still held back by power and cooling requirements as well as as combating quantum coherence.

We’ve also seen more focus on the cloud-computing space with the development of Edge Computing. This allows data computing to be done right at the source drastically cutting down on processing time. It’s a concept that is being heavily focus on in the domains of autonomous vehicles, IOT, and smart spaces. There will be way more processors in every day objects and they need to be faster and smaller than ever.