Chapter 1: Nick Nicholls, Albert Chu
Transistor Count
According to the text, since 1971 the number of transistors on a chip has increased from 2,300 to 167 million in 2006. By 2011, the transistor count had further increased to 2.6 billion, a 1,130,434x increase from 1971. The clock frequency has also continued to rise, if a bit slower since 2006. At the time, it was around 2.4ghz, a 3k multiple of the speed in 1971 of 750khz. Now the high end clock speed of a processor is in the 3.3ghz range.
Increase
Evolution of Intel Processors
| From | Procs | Specifications | New Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Pentium IV | 1.4-3GHz, 55M transistors | hyper-pipelining, SMT |
| 2006 | Xeon | 64-bit, 2GHz, 167M transistors, 4MB L2 cache on chip | Dual core, virtualization support |
| 2007 | |||
| 2008 | |||
| 2009 | |||
| 2010 | Core i3 | 2.93-3.33 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache, 512 KB L2 cache, 4MB L3 cache | First 32 nm processors |
| 2011 | Sandy Bridge E | 3.2-3.3 GHz, 32 KB L1 cache per core, 256 KB L2 cache, 20 MB L3 cache | Up to 8 cores |