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Intel And The 8086 Chip

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In 1978, Intel came out with the 8086 chip. This chip had 29,000 transistors, 20 address lines, and could “talk with up to 1MB of RAM ... designers never suspected anyone would ever need more than 1 MB of RAM” (PCMech, 2001, para. 4). Intel continued to produce its 8000 series chips, increasing the speed and the memory each time. In 1982, the 286 was the first processor to have protected mode, which was later used by Windows and other operating systems to allow programs to run separately but concurrently (PCMech, 2001, para. 8). In the late 1980s, Intel came out with the 386. The 386 was a huge step forward, as it had 275,000 transistors, came in a 33 MHz version, worked with 4 GB of RAM, and could support a virtual memory of 64 TB (PCMech, 2001, para. 9). In 2002, hyper-threading came out in the Pentium 4 HT, which meant that the CPU could be fooled into thinking it had two CPUs for each one that it actually had. Using hyper-threading along with additional cores has enhanced performance and speed because some cores are utilized for programs while others perform background jobs (Hoffman, 2014, paras. 6,7). Another way CPUs have been able to increase speed is by raising the number of cores per CPU socket, and utilizing an I/O Hub “called QuickPath Interconnect” (Santana, 2014, p. 565). The use of multiprocessing has been the key for the development of today’s CPUs. Memory Memory has undergone many changes over the years. In 1949, Jay Forrester developed the first

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