Related topics: intel

Eliminating infamous security threats

Speculative memory side-channel attacks are security vulnerabilities in computers for which no efficient solutions have been found. Existing solutions only address specific security threats without solving the underlying ...

Research proves the improbable can be made possible

Microprocessors are at the heart of devices such as computers, smart phones and iPads. In the Texas Architecture and Compiler Optimization (TACO) lab at Texas A&M University, Dr. Daniel Jiménez, professor in the Department ...

Silicon photonics meets the foundry

Advances in microprocessors have transferred the computation bottleneck away from CPUs to better communications between components. That trend is driving the advance into optical interconnection of components, now moving ...

Fortifying computer chips for space travel

Space is cold, dark, and lonely. Deadly, too, if any one of a million things goes wrong on your spaceship. It's certainly no place for a computer chip to fail, which can happen due to the abundance of radiation bombarding ...

How Microprocessor precisely initiates miRNA production

A scientific group from the Center for RNA Research within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and School of Biological Sciences in Seoul National University has reported an insightful molecular mechanism of how Microprocessor, ...

Sensors everywhere could mean privacy nowhere, expert says

Just as we are coming to grips with having less privacy in our lives thanks to the Internet, a new use of the technology is poised to present new questions about security and privacy - and create a new threat to society.

Cooling microprocessors with carbon nanotubes

"Cool it!" That's a prime directive for microprocessor chips and a promising new solution to meeting this imperative is in the offing. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ...

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Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a central processing unit (CPU) on a single integrated circuit (IC). The first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s and were used for electronic calculators, using binary-coded decimal (BCD) arithmetic on 4-bit words. Other embedded uses of 4- and 8-bit microprocessors, such as terminals, printers, various kinds of automation etc, followed rather quickly. Affordable 8-bit microprocessors with 16-bit addressing also led to the first general purpose microcomputers in the mid-1970s.

Computer processors were for a long period constructed out of small and medium-scale ICs containing the equivalent of a few to a few hundred transistors. The integration of the whole CPU onto a single VLSI chip therefore greatly reduced the cost of processing capacity. From their humble beginnings, continued increases in microprocessor capacity have rendered other forms of computers almost completely obsolete (see history of computing hardware), with one or more microprocessor as processing element in everything from the smallest embedded systems and handheld devices to the largest mainframes and supercomputers.

Since the early 1970s, the increase in capacity of microprocessors has been known to generally follow Moore's Law, which suggests that the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every two years. In the late 1990s, and in the high-performance microprocessor segment, heat generation (TDP), due to switching losses, static current leakage, and other factors, emerged as a leading developmental constraint.

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