Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1965, Gordon Moore was preparing a speech about the growth trends in computer memory
and made an interesting observation. When he began to graph the data, he realized a striking
trend existed. Each new chip contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and
each chip was released within 18-24 months of the previous chip. If this trend continued, he
reasoned, computing power would rise exponentially over relatively brief periods.
Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued to this
day and is still remarkably accurate. It was found to not only describe memory chips, but also
accurately describe the growth of processor power and disk drive storage capacity. It has
become the basis for many industry performance forecasts. As an example, in less than 40
years the number of transistors on a processor chip increased more than half a million fold,
from 2,300 transistors in the 4004 processor in 1971 to 1.4 billion transistors in some of the
Ivy Bridge quad-core i-Series processors released in 2012.
In addition to performance and storage capacity, another major change since the original IBM PC was
introduced is that IBM is not the only manufacturer of PC-compatible systems. IBM originated the
PC-compatible standard, of course, but today it no longer sets the standards for the system it
originated. More often than not, new standards in the PC industry are developed by companies and
organizations other than IBM.
Today, Intel, Microsoft, and AMD are primarily responsible for developing and extending the PC
hardware and software standards. Some have even taken to calling PCs “Wintel” systems, owing to
the dominance of the first two companies. Although AMD originally produced Intel processors under
license and later produced low-cost, pin-compatible counterparts to Intel's 486 and Pentium
processors (AMD 486, K5/K6), starting with the Athlon AMD has created completely unique
processors that are worthy rivals to Intel's own models.
In more recent years, the introduction of hardware standards such as the universal serial bus (USB),
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) bus, PCI Express
bus, ATX motherboard form factor, as well as processor socket and slot interfaces show that Intel is
the driving force behind PC hardware design. Intel's ability to design and produce motherboard
chipsets as well as complete motherboards has enabled Intel processor-based systems to first adopt
newer memory and bus architectures as well as system form factors. Although in the past AMD has on
occasion made chipsets for its own processors, the company's acquisition of ATI has allowed it to
become more aggressive in the chipset marketplace.
PC-compatible systems have thrived not only because compatible hardware can be assembled easily,
but also because the most popular OS was available from a third party (Microsoft) instead of IBM.
The core of the system software is the basic input/output system (BIOS); this was also available from
third-party companies, such as AMI, Phoenix, and others. This situation enabled other manufacturers
to license the OS and BIOS software and sell their own compatible systems. The fact that DOS
borrowed the functionality and user interface from both CP/M and UNIX probably had a lot to do
with the amount of software that became available. Later, with the success of Windows, even more
reasons would exist for software developers to write programs for PC-compatible systems.
One reason Apple's Macintosh systems have never enjoyed the market success of PC systems is that
Apple has often used proprietary hardware and software designs that it was unwilling to license to
other companies. This proprietary nature has unfortunately relegated Apple to a meager 5 to 7%
market share in personal computers.
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