Computer trends
Computer trends
|
| Difference Engine 2 built from Babbage's plans, 1990's |
First programmable calculator: Charles Babbage's mechanical Analytical Engine, conceived in the 1830's, but never actually completed because of funding problems.
First programmers: Charles Babbage and Ada, countess of Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron).
(Ref. Scientific American, 1999 May; and the
San Diego
Computer Museum.
See also
Analytical Engine emulator.)
|
| IBM history |
Harvard Mark I: conceived by Howard Aiken, built by IBM, completed 1944.
Electromechanical, weighed ~5 tons.
The first electronic digital computers were built from
vacuum tubes.
|
| The History of Computing at BRL |
The first electronic programmable calculator, ENIAC, was built in 1946:
electronic.
19,000 vacuum tubes, 30 tons, 1000 sq ft, consumed ~190kW;
clock speed 100kHz, ~6000 additions/sec.
Binary circuits but not binary number representation;
no central memory unit.
The first stored-programme computer,
‘the
Baby’, first successfully ran a programme in 1948.
It had 32-bit words and up to 8 kwords of main memory, and
could execute about 830 instructions/second.
In 1998, a noodle-timing programme won a 50th-anniversary programming competition for a replica Baby.
By the autumn of 1949, the Manchester Mark I was running, with a drum memory supplementing the electronic memory.
Ref:
Manchester 50th Anniversary site
The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Labs.
The earliest transistors were germanium crystals touched by two fine wires:
‘cat's whiskers’.
Transistors were commercially available by the late 1950's.
Magnetic-core memory was developed in the late 1940's and early 1950's.
It became commercially available in the mid-1950's and was
the dominant memory technology during the 1960's and well into the 1970's.
The integrated circuit was developed in 1958. The first one contained a two transistors on a single silicon chip.
Early commercial IC's contained a few transistors, resistors and capacitors on one chip.
| Digital computers are
‘at heart, only carefully polluted sand’ N. Holmes, Computer 35(5): 112, 2002 |
Chips are manufactured in batches on wafers.
Evolution of Intel CPU chips:
| Bits | Date | Transistors | Clock speed MHz | Line width nm | Die size mm2 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4004 | 4 | 1971 | 2 250 | 0.1 | 10 000 | 13.5 | |
| 8008 | 8 | 1972 | 3 500 | 0.2 | 10 000 | 15.2 | |
| 8080 | 1974 | 6 000 | 2. | 6 000 | 20.0 | ||
| 8088 | 16/8 | 1979 | 29 000 | 8. | 3 000 | 28.6 | 1st IBM PC |
| 8086 | 16 | 1978 | 29 000 | 8. | 3 000 | 28.6 | |
| 80286 | 1982 | 134 000 | 12.5 | 1 500 | 68.7 | ||
| 80386 | 32 | 1985 | 275 000 | 20. | 1 500 | 104. | |
| 80486 | 1989 | 1 200 000 | 25. | 1 000 | 163. | ||
| Pentium | 1993 | 3 100 000 | 66. | 800 | 294. | ||
| 1994 | 3 300 000 | 75. | 600 | 148. | |||
| 1995 | 3 300 000 | 120. | 350 | 91. | |||
| Pentium II | 1997 | 7 500 000 | 233. | 350 | 203. | ||
| 1998 | 7 500 000 | 300. | 250 | 131. | |||
| Pentium III | 1999 | 9 500 000 | 450. | 250 | 123. | ||
| 2000 | 28 000 000 | 533. | 180 | 106. | |||
| Pentium 4 | 2000 | 42 000 000 | 1500. | 180 | 217. | ||
| 2002 | 55 000 000 | 2200. | 130 | 146. | |||
| 2004 | 125 000 000 | 2800. | 90 | 112. | |||
| 2006 | 188 000 000 | 3200. | 65 | 81. | |||
| Itanium | 64 | 2001 | 25 000 000 | 733. | 180 | 300. | |
| Itanium 2 | 2003 | 220 000 000 | 900. | 180 | 421. | ||
| 2004 | 592 000 000 | 1300. | 130 | 374. | |||
| 2006 | 1 720 000 000 | 1400. | 90 | 596. | |||
| Core 2 | 2006 | 291 000 000 | 1860. | 65 | 143. | ||
| 2008 | 800 000 000 | 45 |
(These numbers are from various sources; see HTML source for
references.
The numbers are meant just to be representative. Often different versions with
the same model name would have different specifications.)
Chips are packaged in various ways.
The packages are mounted on printed circuit boards (or cards)
with components on the
top
and wiring on the
bottom.
The integrated circuits are actually only a small part of the component
count and surface area, as little as 10%.
(IEEE Spectrum 2006 Jun, p. 44)
For example, the circuit board of the Nokia 6161 cellular phone
contains 15 IC's (containing millions of resistors) plus
405 passive components:
232 capacitors, 149 resistors and 24 inductors. The passive components
take up most of the room.
(IEEE Spectrum 2003 Jul, p. 26)
In the beginning there were mainframes. And there still are.
Transistors made it feasible to build ‘minicomputers’
for individual departments and labs, such as the PDP-1 in 1960:
$120 000, 0.2 MHz clock, 4K 18-bit words of memory.
Integrated circuits made it feasible to build ‘microcomputers’, or personal computers.
The first was Canadian: Mers Kutt's MCM/70 in 1973: $3 500, Intel 8008 microprocessor, 0.2 MHz, 8 Kbytes of RAM + 14 Kbytes of ROM.
It was followed by the MITS Altair (1974), Apple (1976), ...
These data are from ca. 1987.
Photo of Amdahl 5860 CPU and
Roger Broughton,
and of disks, ca. 1987.
Each of the two large banks of disks held about 4 Gbytes.
(From
University of Newcastle, by permission.)
Things have changed a lot since then, and are changing faster than ever.
| ‘The computer technology in today's cars ... is 1,000 times more powerful than that which guided the [1969] Apollo moon mission.’ (Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers) |
Moore's law - number of transistors per square inch doubles about every 18 months.
(Based on an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of
Intel. The original ‘law’ actually said 12 months, not 18.)
Moore's law on a linear scale.
Serious obstacles to continued progress, including heat ...
|
| Heat sink and fan for 1-GHz processor |
Cost of cooling
Many other factors, such as interconnect delays
... continuing active research and development, e.g.,
Doubling time:
| computing power | 18 months |
| storage | 12 months |
| networks | 9 months |
| G. Stix, Sci. Am., 2001 Jan | |
Could use XML, RDF, etc. to ‘advertise’ availability and features.
Biomedical applications include
testbed to address ... need to access and analyze data at a variety of levels of aggregation located at diverse sites throughout the country.(brain-scan data)
See Scientific American, 2003 April.
See both Computers
and 
Computer Science Distributed ComputingComputers in the
Open Directory.
Parallel Computing
| New applications | 
|
| Sci. Am., 2002 Apr | ||
