Sunday, November 14, 2010

Intel Processors General Knowledge Quiz

Intel Processors


Intel 4004: Intel designed 4004 in 1971, the first microprocessor having all CPU components on one chip which is the base for the modern computers.

Intel 8008: In 1972, Intel developed the first 8 bit microprocessor 8008 which is more complex than the Intel 4004.

Intel 8080: In 1974, Intel released first 8-bit general purpose microprocessor.

Intel 8086: In 1978, the 16-bit microprocessor 8086 was released. Both Motorola MC 68000 and Intel 8086 were developed almost simultaneously.

Intel 8088: In 1979, 8088 was released which was used in IBM’s first personal computer.

Intel 80386: In 1985, Intel released first 32-bit microprocessor 80386 that supports the multitasking but it has no on chip cache.

Intel 80486: In 1989, Intel released 80486 which used more than one million transistors with large on-chip cache of 8 KB and integrated floating point unit. Also it has great instruction pipelining with built in math coprocessor.

Pentium On March 22, 1993, Intel released Pentium which is a CISC processor that allows parallel execution of multiple instructions. Also it has 2 on chip L1 caches.

Pentium Pro: In November 1995, Intel released Pentium Pro which used the branch prediction, data flow analysis and speculative execution.

Pentium II: On May 7, 1997, Intel introduced Pentium II that has MMX technology for processing many multimedia operations like video etc. more efficiently.

Pentium III: It has extra floating point instructions that can support 3D graphics software.

Pentium IV: It has the speeds in excess of 2.0 GHz. It has additional floating point instructions and multimedia advancements along with L2 cache. This is a CISC processor with some of the RISC features too and supports the multiprocessor configurations.

There are multimedia and 3D graphics enhancements. The size of the processor is twice that of Pentium III. This is mostly used in games and applications like speech recognition, digital photography and scientific projects.

Itanium: It uses 64-bit organization based on IA-64 architecture and is mainly designed for high end business use. This processor supports the predicated execution and speculative loading which greatly enhances the communication between hardware and the software in a computer.

It is used in applications like security transactions, CAD designing etc. Intel introduced two types of Itanium processors till now. It has an integrated L3 cache.

Original Itanium: Speed 733 MHz and 800 MHz models

Itanium 2:Speed 900 MHz and 1 GHz models.

IA-64 architecture:Intel and Hewlett-Packard (HP) jointly developed IA-64 architecture. It is neither 64 bit PA-RISC architecture of HP nor the extension of Intel’s 32 bit architecture.

It was developed based on the research of the two companies and many scholars. Itanium is the first Intel product of this IA-64 architecture and not compatible with the software designed for x86-based computers.


Celeron Intel designed the Celeron processor for the lower-end computer market.

Celeron uses the main RAM of computer for executing the instructions as there is no L2 cache.

The processor runs at a lower frequency than Pentium processor.

Xeon Intel designed the Xeon processor for the high-end computer users. It has faster and bigger 512 KB L2 cache along with 12 KB L1 cache. Also Intel introduced L3 cache in this processor for first time.

This L3 cache is on the processor for granting wider and faster data path to memory for decreasing the memory latency.

No comments: