Introduction
CPU also referred as microprocessor. It is a Brain as well as Heart of normal computer.
It is a part of Desktop, Laptop or Server. It is a complete computation engine that is fabricated on a single chip. The CPU is where most calculations take place. It is the most important part of a computer system. The first microprocessor was the Intel 4004, introduced in 1971. It was not very powerful, it could do only add and subtract. It was 4 bit chip. Prior to the 4004, engineers built computers either from collections of chips, transistors and other components. The 4004 powered one of the first portable electronic calculators.
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Intel 4004Busicom Calculators 4004/Core duo wafer
Cited from http://www.intel.com/museum/archives/history_docs/index.htm
Today’s personal computers have more processing power and storage space than the famous Cray-1 supercomputer. In 1976, the Cray-1 was state-of-the-art: it could process 160 million floating-point operations per second (flops) and had 8 megabytes (MB) of memory.
Today, many personal computers can perform more than 10 times that number of floating-point operations in a second and have 100 times the amount of memory.
The man who first made is Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the microprocessor company Intel. Computer scientists, electrical engineers, manufacturers and journalists extrapolated Moore's Law from his original observation. In general, most people interpret Moore's Law to mean the number of transistors on a 1-inch (2.5 centimeter) diameter of silicon doubles every x number of months.
Today, Intel's Core i7 microprocessor has 731 million transistors, while its Xeon processor has 1.9 billion transistors [source: Intel].
Intel and AMD are big manufacturer of Micro processor.
Timeline of Intel Processor Name | Date | Transistors | Microns | Clock speed | Data width | 8080 | 1974 | 6,000 | 6 | 2 MHz | 8 bits | 8088