Page 63 -

38 CHAPTER 2 / COMPUTER EVOLUTION AND PERFORMANCE

Table 2.6 Continued
(c) 1990s Processors
486TM SX Pentium Pentium Pro Pentium II
Introduced 1991 1993 1995 1997
Clock speeds 16 MHz–33 MHz 60 MHz–166 MHz, 150 MHz–200 MHz 200 MHz–300 MHz
Bus width 32 bits 32 bits 64 bits 64 bits
Number of transistors 1.185 million 3.1 million 5.5 million 7.5 million
Feature size ( m)m 1 0.8 0.6 0.35
Addressable memory 4 GB 4 GB 64 GB 64 GB
Virtual memory 64 TB 64 TB 64 TB 64 TB
Cache 8 kB 8 kB 512 kB L1 and 512 kB L2
1 MB L2

(d) Recent Processors

Pentium III Pentium 4 Core 2 Duo Core 2 Quad
Introduced 1999 2000 2006 2008
Clock speeds 450–660 MHz 1.3–1.8 GHz 1.06–1.2 GHz 3 GHz
Bus sidth 64 bits 64 bits 64 bits 64 bits
Number of transistors 9.5 million 42 million 167 million 820 million
Feature size (nm) 250 180 65 45
Addressable memory 64 GB 64 GB 64 GB 64 GB
Virtual memory 64 TB 64 TB 64 TB 64 TB
Cache 512 kB L2 256 kB L2 2 MB L2 6 MB L2

2.2 DESIGNING FOR PERFORMANCE

Year by year, the cost of computer systems continues to drop dramatically, while the
performance and capacity of those systems continue to rise equally dramatically.At
a local warehouse club, you can pick up a personal computer for less than $1000 that
packs the wallop of an IBM mainframe from 10 years ago. Thus, we have virtually
“free” computer power. And this continuing technological revolution has enabled
the development of applications of astounding complexity and power. For example,
desktop applications that require the great power of today’s microprocessor-based
systems include

• Image processing
• Speech recognition
• Videoconferencing
• Multimedia authoring
• Voice and video annotation of files
• Simulation modeling