Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2000 Intel introduces the Pentium 4, the latest processor in the Intel Architecture 32-bit
(IA-32) family.
2001 The industry celebrates the 20th anniversary of the release of the original IBM PC.
2001 Intel introduces the first 2GHz processor, a version of the Pentium 4. It takes the
industry 281/2 years to gofrom 108KHz to 1GHz but only 18months to gofrom
1GHz to 2GHz.
2001 MicrosoftreleasesWindowsXP,thefirstmainstream32-bitoperatingsystem(OS),
merging the consumer and business OS lines under the same code base (NT 5.1).
2001 Atheros introduces the first 802.11a 54Mbps high-speed wireless chips, allowing
802.11a products to finally reach the market.
2002 Intel releases the first 3GHz-class processor, a 3.06GHz version of the Pentium 4.
This processor also introduces Intel's Hyper-Threading (HT) technology, appear-
ing as two processors to the OS.
2003 IntelreleasesthePentiumM,aprocessordesignedspecifically formobilesystems,
offering extremely low power consumption that results in dramatically increased
battery life while still offering relatively high performance.
2003 AMD releases the Athlon 64, the first x86-64 (64-bit) processor for PCs, which
also includes integrated memory controllers.
2003 The IEEE officially approves the 802.11g 54Mbps high-speed wireless networking
standard.
2004 Intel introduces a version of the Pentium 4 codenamed Prescott, the first PC pro-
cessor built on 90-nanometer technology.
2004 Intel introduces EM64T (Extended Memory 64 Technology), which is a 64-bit
extension to Intel's IA-32 architecture based on (and virtually identical to) the
x86-64 (AMD64) technology first released by AMD.
2005 Microsoft releases Windows XP x64 Edition, which supports processors with
64-bit AMD64 and EM64T extensions.
2005 The era of multicore PC processors begins as Intel introduces the Pentium D 8xx
and Pentium Extreme Edition 8xx dual-core processors. AMD soon follows with
the dual-core Athlon 64 X2.
2006 AppleintroducesthefirstMacintoshsystemsbasedonPCarchitecture,statingthey
are four times faster than previous non-PC-based Macs.
2006 Intel introduces the Core 2 Extreme, the first quad-core processor for PCs.
