The circuitry within an Intel processor are hundreds of times thinner than a human hair.
Intel has grown into the world's foremost manufacturers of processors for PCs and laptops, and, according to CNET News, is even gaining in new chip markets. Through the years, the research and development of new chip circuitry at Intel's lab has virtually defined the personal computing landscape. From it flagship 4004 to the latest tablet chips, Intel has been a chip innovator for over 40 years.
Pre-PC Market
Before it made major waves in the world of circuitry, Intel was approached by the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation to create a processor for a new line of printing calculators. The result was the Intel 4004, which was among both the smallest and most versatile chips of the time in 1970. Intel would later buy back the rights to this chip to market it as a general purpose chip for engineers wishing to develop a customized computing device. The 4004 held 2,300 transistors, with circuits 10,000 nanometers, or 10 microns, wide, and an ultimate clock speed of 108 KHz.
Moore's Law and the x86 Years
Though Intel created various chips throughout the '70s, its first major break into the PC market came with the 8086, a modified version of which was the flagship processor in IBM's first consumer "PC." Through the '80s, Intel's chip developments made true on a prediction -- made by its co-founder, Gordon Moore -- that the number of transistors on a chip would double approximately every two years. This would eventually become known as known as Moore's Law. The 8086, release in 1978 with 3-micron-wide circuitry, was succeeded by a number of processors which roughly met this edict. The 286, released in 1982, had 134,000 transistors and was followed by the 275,000-transistor 386 processor. The 386 processor had the distinction being the first 32-bit processor. The '80s would culminate with the Intel 486, release in 1989 and holding 1.2 million transistors on a chip with a clock speed of 25 MHz.
Pentium Years
In 1993, Intel moved past the x86 processors and introduced the Pentium processor with a 66-MHz clock frequency utilizing a 0.8-micron circuit width. In addition to the same standards of speed and transistor innovation, the '90s also saw the introduction of Intel circuitry dedicated to specific markets. The Celeron, for example, was a budget-minded processor which made for slightly cheaper PCs when compared to its equally clocked Pentium counterparts. The comparatively more expensive Xeon processor line was geared towards high-performance environments, including servers and business PCs. The final iteration of the Pentium line was the Pentium 4, with 42 million transistors connected with a .18-micron circuit width, offering speeds in excess of 1.5 GHz.
Rethinking Moore's Law
As the era of the Pentium came to a close, many became skeptical of the continued relevance of Moore's Law, Gordon Moore among them. It was during this time that Intel released its "dual core" technology. This reinvigorated the concept of Moore's law by allowing a computer to process two functions simultaneously through a single physical chip. The Core 2 Duo, released six years following the initial release of the Pentium 4, contained 291 million transistors with a 65-nanometer circuit width. The circuit width shrank even further just two years later, to only 45 nm. The latest generation of processor from Intel integrates as many as 16 cores and 1.4 billion transistors -- over 600,000 times more transistors than Intel's flagship 4004 processor.
Shrinking CPUs
As of publication, Intel innovation focuses less on increasing clock speed and more on delivering equally high speeds in increasingly smaller forms. Released in 2008, the Intel Atom processor has 47 million transistors, and can be found in a variety of "micro" PCs. The Atom processor is finding its way into a growing tablet PC market, according to the EE Times website, and Intel also makes processors that fit into smartphones, such as the 2.0-GHz Motorola MT788.
Tags: circuit width, million transistors, clock speed, Atom processor, circuitry Intel, flagship 4004