Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
the lower-priced Macintosh introduced a year later was a huge success and inspired
love and passion among its many admirers.
The early personal computer market also led to the then-unheard of desire for
portable computers. At that time, a portable computer made as much sense as a
portable refrigerator does now. The first true portable personal computer was the
Osborne-1, which at 11 kg was more of a luggable computer than a portable com-
puter. Still, it proved that portables were possible. The Osborne-1 was a modest
commercial success, but a year later Compaq brought out its first portable IBM PC
clone and was quickly established as the leader in the market for portable com-
puters.
The initial version of the IBM PC came equipped with the MS-DOS operating
system supplied by the then-tiny Microsoft Corporation. As Intel was able to pro-
duce increasingly powerful CPUs, IBM and Microsoft were able to develop a suc-
cessor to MS-DOS called OS/2, which featured a graphical user interface, similar to
that of the Apple Macintosh. Meanwhile, Microsoft also developed its own operat-
ing system, Windows, which ran on top of MS-DOS , just in case OS/2 did not catch
on. To make a long story short, OS/2 did not catch on, IBM and Microsoft had a
big and extremely public falling out, and Microsoft went on to make Windows a
huge success. How tiny Intel and even tinier Microsoft managed to dethrone IBM,
one of the biggest, richest, and most powerful corporations in the history of the
world, is a parable no doubt related in great detail in business schools around the
globe.
With the success of the 8088 in hand, Intel went on to make bigger and better
versions of it. Particularly noteworthy was the 80386, released in 1985, which was
a 32-bit CPU. This was followed by a souped-up version, naturally called the
80486. Subsequent versions went by the names Pentium and Core. These chips
are used in nearly all modern PCs. The generic name many people use to describe
the architecture of these processors is x86 . The compatible chips manufactured by
AMD are also called x86s.
By the mid-1980s, a new development called RISC (discussed in Chap. 2)
began to take over, replacing complicated (CISC) architectures with much simpler
(but faster) ones. In the 1990s, superscalar CPUs began to appear. These ma-
chines could execute multiple instructions at the same time, often in a different
order than they appeared in the program. We will introduce the concepts of CISC,
RISC, and superscalar in Chap. 2 and discuss them at length throughout this topic.
Also in the mid-1980s, Ross Freeman with his colleagues at Xilinx developed
a clever approach to building integrated circuits that did not require wheelbarrows
full of money or access to a silicon fabrication facility. This new kind of computer
chip, called a field-programmable gate array ( FPGA ), contained a large supply
of generic logic gates that could be ''programmed'' into any circuit that fit into the
device. This remarkable new approach to hardware design made FPGA hardware
as malleable as software. Using FPGAs that cost tens to hundreds of U.S. dollars, it
became possible to build computing systems specialized for unique applications
 
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