Developments in Processors

  • First transistor was invented

    John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invent the first transistor at Bell Laboratories.
  • First Integrated circuit

    Developed by Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, it was first introduced and demonstrated on September 12th of the same year.
  • Moore's Law

    Gordon Moore made an observation about Integrated circuits that then became known as Moore's Law. The law states that every two years the number of transistors in a microchip doubles, this law is still accurate to this day.
  • Intel founded

    The Intel corporation was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Intel is now one of the leading companies in processor development, and most computers have an Intel processor in them.
  • AMD founded

    AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) was founded by Jerry Sanders and 7 others.
  • First Microprocessor

    Intel, with the help of Ted Hoff, introduced the first micrprocessor, called the intel 4004. It had 2,300 transistors, and performed 60,000 operations per second. It also had 640 bytes of memory and cost a total of $200.
  • Intel 8008 processors

    Intel introduced an improved version of their 4004 processor, this now contained 3,500 transistors.
  • Motorola processor

    The Motorola 68000 was released, it was a 16/32 bit processor that was chosen as the processor for Apple Macintosh and Amiga Computers.
  • SPARC processor

    SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) was developed by Sun Microsystems
  • AM386

    AMD introduced the AM386 microprocessor family.
  • Intel Pentium processor

    It had a clock speed of 60 MHz, 3.1 million transistors were in it and it sold for $878 at launch.
  • Intel Pentium pro

    This was an upgraded version of the Pentium processor that Intel introduced 2 years prior.