Maestro Technologies - Intelligent management software for the construction industry.

The evolution of processors

To properly understand the evolution of processors, you have to go back as far as 1965. At that time, transistors were not yet 20 years old, microprocessors were at the project stage and Intel didn’t exist yet.

That was when Gordon Moore, the young director at Fairchild Semiconductor, discovered an astonishing fact. After studying the evolution capacity of processors of that time, he noticed that their performance had doubled every year since 1959, the year in which it started storing data. He put forth the assumption that this exponential growth curve would continue at the same pace in the future. This appeared to be true. In fact the law was only revised once since then (in 1975) after new observations showed that the pace had slowed down a bit. The power of processors nevertheless continued to double, but over a period of 18 months, rather than 12. (1)

Today, Gordon Moore is chairman emeritus of Intel, which he cofounded in 1968, and his progression model continues to prevail, despite a slight hesitation towards 2001. The most recent data nevertheless indicates that the growth pace has been respected, as indicated in the following table:

Processor	Transistors	Year
4004	2,300	1971
8008	3,500	1972
8080	4,500	1974
8086	29,000	1978
80286	134,000	1982
80386	275,000	1985
80486	1,200,000	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	25,000,000	2001
Itanium 2	220,000,000	2002
Pentium D	376,000,000	2006
Core 2 Duo (Conroe, 65 nm)	291,000,000	2006
Core 2 Duo (Penryn, 45 nm)	410,000,000	2007
Core 2 Quad (Penryn, 45 nm)	820,000,000	2007

We do predict that this progression will stop around 2017 (2), when the physical limitations are reached. The increase in performance being primarily due to the miniaturization of equipment, the latter will have reached its limit, which may well be determined by the size of atoms.

Michel Fisette

References:

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
(2) http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33924/135/