Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The PC Industry 30 Years Later
In the 30 years since the original IBM PC was introduced, many changes have occurred.
The IBM-compatible computer, for example, advanced from a 4.77MHz 8088-based sys-
tem to 3GHz (3,000MHz) or faster systems—about 100,000 or more times faster than the
original IBM PC (in actual processing speed, not just clock speed). The original PC had
onlyoneortwosingle-sidedfloppydrivesthatstored160KBeachusingDOS1.0,where-
asmodernsystemscanhaveseveralterabytes(trillionbytes)ormoreofharddiskstorage.
Aruleofthumbinthecomputerindustry(called
Moore's Law
,originallysetforthbyIntel
cofounder Gordon Moore) is that available processor performance and disk-storage capa-
city doubles every one and a half to two years, give or take.
SincethebeginningofthePCindustry,thispatternhasheldsteadyand,ifanything,seems
to be accelerating.
Moore's Law
In1965,GordonMoorewaspreparingaspeechaboutthegrowthtrendsincomputermemory
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,
andeachchipwasreleasedwithin18-24monthsofthepreviouschip.Ifthistrendcontinued,
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
thisdayandisstillremarkablyaccurate.Itwasfoundtonotonlydescribememorychips,but
alsoaccuratelydescribethegrowthofprocessorpoweranddiskdrivestoragecapacity.Ithas
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 1.17 billion transistors in the six-core
versions of the Core i-Series processors released in 2010.
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 sys-
tems. 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, andAMDareprimarily responsible fordeveloping andextending
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
