The history of Computer Organization

Computer architecture has progressed four generation: vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, and VLSI. Computer organization has also made its historic progression accordingly.

The advance of microprocessor   ( Intel)

• 1977:   8080   - the first general purpose microprocessor, 8 bit data path, used in first personal computer
• 1978:   8086   - with 16 bit, 1MB addressable, instruction cache, prefetch few instructions
• 1980:   80186  - identical to 8086 widh additional reserved interrupt vectors and some very powerful buli-in
                                     I/O functions.
• 1982:   80286 - 24 Mbyte addressable memory space, plus instructions
• 1985:   80386 - 32 bit, new addressing modes and support for multitasking
• 1989 -- 1995:
  • 80486    -  25, 33, MHz, 1.2 M transistors, 5 stage pipeline, sophisticated powerful cache and
                     instruction pipelining, built in math co-processor.
  • Pentium -  60, 66 MHz, 3.1 M transistor, branch predictor, pipelined floating point, multiple instructions
                     executed in parallel, first superscalar IA-32.
  • PentiumPro - Increased superscalar, register renaming, branch prediction, data flow analysis,
                     and speculative execution
• 1995 -- 1997: Pentium II - 233, 166, 300 MHz, 7.5 M transistors, first compaction of micro- architecture,
                                           MMX technology, graphics video and audio processing.
• 1999: Pentium III - additional floating point instructions for 3D graphics
• 2000: Pentium IV - Further floating point and multimedia enhancements