Speaker 1: Technology with tech Stuff from stuff works dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to text Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm a senior writer here with how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to continue our story about Intel,
Speaker 1: a very important company in the history of Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: and electronics and computing in general. Now, in our last episode,
Speaker 1: we really focused on the origins of Intel and traced
Speaker 1: it all the way back to the birth of the
Speaker 1: semiconductor industry itself. Two of the co founders of Intel,
Speaker 1: Gordon Moore and uh and Rob Noyce. They had come
Speaker 1: from a a an organization that didn't treat them very well,
Speaker 1: and so they, along with six other people, left that organization.
Speaker 1: They became known as the Traitorous Eight and founded the
Speaker 1: fair Child Semiconductor business under the umbrella of a larger
Speaker 1: company that did camera and instrumentation work. Worked there for
Speaker 1: about eleven years before they left that company to co
Speaker 1: found Intel. And in our last episode, I ended right
Speaker 1: around the time that they had introduced their first micro processor,
Speaker 1: the four zero zero four. Now we're gonna pick up
Speaker 1: from that point forward. We're also going to backtrack a
Speaker 1: little bit just to explain some other details, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna explore what Intel was all about since its founding
Speaker 1: up until present day. Now, the four zero zero four
Speaker 1: started off as one of a set of four chips.
Speaker 1: It's like a package of four chips that were designed
Speaker 1: specifically for another company. That company was the Nipon Calculating
Speaker 1: Machine Corporation. Now, the original designation for those four chips
Speaker 1: was the MCS DASH four. Along with that four oh
Speaker 1: four or four zero zero four, I should say chip,
Speaker 1: were three others. Right. You had a chip that was
Speaker 1: a read only memory chip or ROM chip that was
Speaker 1: responsible for storing the custom applications for calculating machines. So
Speaker 1: essentially the programs of these calculating machines were stored and
Speaker 1: read only memory. That meant that you could not write
Speaker 1: over that information. It was always going to be there.
Speaker 1: It was hard coded onto the chip itself, and that
Speaker 1: way it made it efficient and reliable and you didn't
Speaker 1: have to worry about accidentally erasing it. There also was
Speaker 1: a random access memory chip or RAM chip. Random access
Speaker 1: memory allows you to store data in a temporary storage space,
Speaker 1: so that way the processor can call upon that data
Speaker 1: quickly without having to search a deeper storage UH solution.
Speaker 1: The fourth chip was a registered chip, and that was
Speaker 1: handling the input output port, so taking in the information
Speaker 1: from the input devices and being able to translate that
Speaker 1: into whatever the commands were for the CPU to process. Now,
Speaker 1: it was the CPU that really ended up changing everything.
Speaker 1: So Intel designed the CPU as sort of a general
Speaker 1: purpose programmable processor. Now it wasn't a true general purpose
Speaker 1: processor yet. That wouldn't come until a little bit later,
Speaker 1: but it showed the promise of this strategy. It wasn't
Speaker 1: locked into a single practical application. So up until the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies, hardware for computing machines was heavily customized
Speaker 1: for each specific machine. In other words, the chips you
Speaker 1: would find in one type of computer, we're completely incompatible
Speaker 1: with every other type of computer. To design the processor
Speaker 1: for these machines, you essentially had to go back to
Speaker 1: the big inning and rebuild the wheel every single time
Speaker 1: you wanted to do it. Uh. There wasn't really a
Speaker 1: concept of a general purpose processor the way the four
Speaker 1: zero zero four was, and the concept of plug in
Speaker 1: play would be decades further into the future. Intel's move
Speaker 1: to create this programmable processor allowed for an explosion in
Speaker 1: various uses. So the four zero zero four would provide
Speaker 1: the foundation for Intel's future chips, which then would become
Speaker 1: an instrumental component in countless types of technology, not just
Speaker 1: computers or calculators. It virtually guaranteed Intel's success in the market.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, the processor was able to take advantage of
Speaker 1: the advances and manturization that had followed the invention of
Speaker 1: the transistor. Now you'll remember from part one of this
Speaker 1: series that Gordon Moore the one of the co founders
Speaker 1: of Intel. He was the guy who came up with
Speaker 1: what we now call Moore's law. All he had made
Speaker 1: an observation that observation would become Moore's laud But the
Speaker 1: observation said that the balance of technology, economics and manufacturing
Speaker 1: processes would mean that for the foreseeable future. And remember
Speaker 1: he made this production back in nineteen sixty five, the
Speaker 1: number of discrete elements on microprocessors, on semiconductor chips would
Speaker 1: double every two years or so. So if you were
Speaker 1: to get a semiconductor chip in nineteen sixty seven, it
Speaker 1: would have twice the number of transistors that you would
Speaker 1: have found on a on a semiconductor in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: The ones in nineteen sixty nine would have twice as
Speaker 1: many as the ones from nineteen sixty seven, and so on. Now,
Speaker 1: by the time Intel was ready to produce the four
Speaker 1: zero zero four chip, they could make a single CPU
Speaker 1: microprocessor that was as powerful as the famous Eniac computer. Now,
Speaker 1: the Eniac computer was one of the first electronic computers
Speaker 1: ever in the history of mankind. Uh. It was constructed
Speaker 1: in the forties, came online more or less in and
Speaker 1: at the time it was one of it was really
Speaker 1: the most powerful electronic computer in existence. It was one
Speaker 1: of the first ones, so obviously it didn't have a
Speaker 1: whole lot of competition, but it took up an entire room.
Speaker 1: It had a lot of very large components that generated
Speaker 1: a ton of heat. It used vacuum tubes instead of transistors.
Speaker 1: But for this supercomputer of the early days, it would
Speaker 1: take up an entire room. Well until's first microprocessor chip
Speaker 1: had the equivalent amount of power stored on a chip
Speaker 1: of semiconductor material that was the size of your fingernail.
Speaker 1: So you went from a device that took up the
Speaker 1: entire room in a building, and it was a big room.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like a little office to something that could
Speaker 1: fit on your fingernail with the equivalent amount of processing power.
Speaker 1: This was a transformational moment in computer history, and one
Speaker 1: of these days I'm doing I'll do a full episode
Speaker 1: about the Eniac computer and also how it came to
Speaker 1: be and the people who worked on it. It was
Speaker 1: a fascinating device all on its own. In the decade
Speaker 1: that it was in operation from around nineteen to nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, researchers estimate that it ran more calculations during
Speaker 1: that ten year period than all the calculations that had
Speaker 1: been performed by humans leading up to that moment. So
Speaker 1: in ten years, it did more calculations than all of
Speaker 1: humans had done throughout history leading up to the creation
Speaker 1: of the Eniac. That is incredible. But then it ended
Speaker 1: up dying after it was struck by lightning. So it
Speaker 1: has a tragic end to that story, which also means
Speaker 1: it would make a great subject for a podcast in
Speaker 1: the future. I think that maybe thour got a little
Speaker 1: miffed that we humans that we're getting really confident, and
Speaker 1: so he can kind of nipped in the bud. But
Speaker 1: that's another story. Let's get back to Intel Now, if
Speaker 1: you want to know what the clock speed was of
Speaker 1: the four zero zero four, it's initial speed was one
Speaker 1: d eight killer hurts. Now, clock speeds, in case you
Speaker 1: aren't aware, they're measured in hurts, and it's a measure
Speaker 1: of how many clock cycles a CPU can perform in
Speaker 1: a second. So a hundred eight killer hurts clock speed
Speaker 1: means that the processor can perform one eight thousand clock
Speaker 1: cycles every second. In an ideal world, every single individual
Speaker 1: instruction sent to a processor takes up one clock cycle.
Speaker 1: So you could translate this as saying this processor was
Speaker 1: capable of completing one hundred eight thousand inst ductions every second.
Speaker 1: That's not exactly true because not all instructions take a
Speaker 1: single clock cycle, and efficiency makes a big difference, but
Speaker 1: it gives you a general idea of the capabilities of
Speaker 1: this microprocessor. Now, really, when you get down to it,
Speaker 1: everything that a processor does takes up a certain number
Speaker 1: of clock cycles, and it depends on what the processor
Speaker 1: needs to do, but it tells you there's a physical
Speaker 1: limit to the number of tasks a processor can complete
Speaker 1: within a given amount of time. So a second in
Speaker 1: this case, if you are throwing stuff at the processor,
Speaker 1: that takes fewer clock cycles than what it is capable
Speaker 1: of doing. Things should run pretty smoothly, right. If the
Speaker 1: number of instructions you're sending to the processor is less
Speaker 1: than the processors clock speed, it should be a pretty
Speaker 1: smooth experience for you on the user side of the computer.
Speaker 1: But as you start to throw more processor hungry tasks
Speaker 1: at the chip, you can start to slow down because
Speaker 1: you might be throwing more directions per second than it
Speaker 1: can handle, and then you start getting lag and things
Speaker 1: get jittery and slow. There are a lot of other
Speaker 1: factors that affect us as well, including how efficient that
Speaker 1: processor is. Some processors are more efficient and can do
Speaker 1: the same task with fewer clock cycles than a similar processor.
Speaker 1: So if you get two different processors and they have
Speaker 1: similar clock speeds, but one of them is designed and
Speaker 1: optimized so that it's much more efficient, you can do
Speaker 1: more with that processors than you can with the other one,
Speaker 1: even if they're both rated at the same clock speed,
Speaker 1: just because the other one handles tasks more efficiently than
Speaker 1: it's uh than it's peer. This is true even if
Speaker 1: you have two processors that have different clock speeds. If
Speaker 1: you've got one processor that has a measurably faster clock
Speaker 1: speed than your first one, but the first one is
Speaker 1: still more efficient. You can still end up having a
Speaker 1: better experience using the quote unquote slower microprocessor because it
Speaker 1: is more efficient in its design. So that's something to
Speaker 1: keep in mind if you're ever shopping for microprocessors. Just
Speaker 1: looking for that clock speed is not really an indicator
Speaker 1: of how good that microprocessor is. It is an indicator,
Speaker 1: but it is not the only one you should pay
Speaker 1: attention to. It's kind of like when you go shopping
Speaker 1: for digital cameras and you start looking at megapixel numbers.
Speaker 1: Larger megapixel numbers doesn't necessarily equate with better pictures. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of other factors that are very important
Speaker 1: when it comes to color, representation, contrast, all of these
Speaker 1: other elements that go into creating digital images. So I
Speaker 1: just want to bring that out here in this part
Speaker 1: of the podcast, just in case you are looking at
Speaker 1: building a computer and you want to find a really
Speaker 1: good micro processor. Just going for that high number is
Speaker 1: not a guarantee that you're getting the absolute best for
Speaker 1: your money. You have to take these other elements into consideration.
Speaker 1: Uh So, I know it's a bit of a tangent.
Speaker 1: But it's important to remember just because otherwise we oversimplify
Speaker 1: and say a higher clock speed equals a faster, better processor.
Speaker 1: That's not always the case. Uh. Anyway, back in Killer
Speaker 1: Hurts was wicked fast. That was a really fast processing time. Today,
Speaker 1: something like Intel's Core I seven KB Lake processor can
Speaker 1: run at four and a half giga Hurts. That means
Speaker 1: it can run four and a half billion clock cycles
Speaker 1: per second. It can handle four and a half billion
Speaker 1: instructions per second. Compare that to the four zero zero
Speaker 1: four that was a hundred eight thousand, four and a
Speaker 1: half billion. You start to see the power of Moore's
Speaker 1: law how that plays out over time, and being able
Speaker 1: to go into the billions of instructions per second would
Speaker 1: probably have amazed even Gordon Moore back in the day,
Speaker 1: because when he was making this observation he didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: think this would be sustainable indefinitely. He thought that eventually
Speaker 1: we would run into some sort of fundamental limit as
Speaker 1: to what we are able to accomplish, and at that
Speaker 1: point the actual progression would break down and you would
Speaker 1: no longer be able to have a processor that's effectively
Speaker 1: twice as powerful two years into the future because we
Speaker 1: would have bumped up against some sort of fundamental limit
Speaker 1: that would prevent us from doing that. Now, for the
Speaker 1: four zero zero four, Intel was using two inch wafers,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because typically semiconductor companies were using twelve
Speaker 1: inch wafers to design microchips, but Intel was using two
Speaker 1: inch wafers for this one. And that might sound delicious.
Speaker 1: You're hearing wafer, you might be thinking cookies. It's not.
Speaker 1: The wafer is called that because it's a big circular disk,
Speaker 1: or in the case of the four zero zero four,
Speaker 1: they're using small circular discs. But a wafer is a substrate.
Speaker 1: It's a foundation. It is the ground upon which you
Speaker 1: build a processor or you build a circuit. It's made
Speaker 1: of semiconductor material It's frequently silicon these days, it's more
Speaker 1: often silicon than anything else, but there are other types
Speaker 1: of semiconductor materials, so I don't want you thinking silicon
Speaker 1: is the one and only type. There are others. Silicon
Speaker 1: wafers are usually twelve inches in diameter, not two inches
Speaker 1: in diameter, so this was a bit of a departure.
Speaker 1: But you have to imagine in a really shiny disk
Speaker 1: that has like a grid like pattern across it that's
Speaker 1: repeated over and over and over again. Uh, the patterns
Speaker 1: that you see, that's actually the patterns of where circuits
Speaker 1: will be laid. So it's not just a design, that's
Speaker 1: actually the physical architecture of where the circuits are going
Speaker 1: to be. They don't just come out that way. They
Speaker 1: have to be etched that way. When you first create
Speaker 1: these silicon wafers and you and you get them polished,
Speaker 1: they are just reflective. They don't have any grid like
Speaker 1: patterns on them. Now, for the geometrically minded out there,
Speaker 1: you might wonder, why the heck would you produce round
Speaker 1: silicon wafers when microprocessors are rectangular. Now, obviously you can
Speaker 1: build a bunch of microprocessors on top of a wafer
Speaker 1: and then you cut them out. So you use your
Speaker 1: wafer to be the the foundation for all of your microprocessors.
Speaker 1: You you etch it out using a repeated pattern over
Speaker 1: and over again. You build out the microprocessors, then you
Speaker 1: cut them all out, and you get your little dies
Speaker 1: of of CPU chips or other microchips, doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be just ae CPU. Other microchips also followed this pattern,
Speaker 1: but you're thinking, well, if it's round and ultimately the
Speaker 1: chips are square, that means there's a lot of waste, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you start to get where the edges of the the
Speaker 1: individual microprocessors are coming up against the edge of the disk. Well,
Speaker 1: square and circle, they're not going to match up perfectly,
Speaker 1: so you're gonna have some wasted material. Why would you
Speaker 1: go with a disc in the first place. Well, in
Speaker 1: order to answer this question, I'm gonna have to talk
Speaker 1: about how these chips are made today for the most part.
Speaker 1: But remember that the process back when Intel made it's
Speaker 1: four zero zero four chip was similar but not nearly
Speaker 1: as sophisticated as the way we do it today. Um,
Speaker 1: the microprocessor manufacturers cut wafers up to make several microprocessors
Speaker 1: per wafer, but that does create some way. So here's
Speaker 1: why we have round wafers instead of say, square wafers.
Speaker 1: It's because we grow the wafers and it's done in
Speaker 1: a very interesting way. So imagine that your goal is
Speaker 1: to create a sheet of silicon that's perfect from a microprocessor.
Speaker 1: That means you have to have an incredible amount of
Speaker 1: pure silicon, or as close to pure silicon as you
Speaker 1: can possibly manage. Any sort of impurity will introduce electrical
Speaker 1: elements into your substrate that you don't want because that's
Speaker 1: going to create errors. So you need it to be
Speaker 1: as pure as you possibly can make it. You then
Speaker 1: treat it to allow transistors and other components to transmit
Speaker 1: electricity across the circuit without having it bleed through or
Speaker 1: leach away the substrate. Because silicon is a semiconductor and
Speaker 1: can either conduct or insulate based on properties, it is
Speaker 1: ideal for this. And we start with sand. Sand has
Speaker 1: a very high percentage of silicon in it, and again
Speaker 1: silicon is our semiconductor material of choice. The sand gets
Speaker 1: melted down and then you eventually end up with a
Speaker 1: material called polly or poly silicon, and you use this
Speaker 1: to um you separate out as much of the impurities
Speaker 1: as you possibly can to you get to pure silicon.
Speaker 1: You melt down ingots of this stuff into a purged
Speaker 1: furnace at a temperature of more than two thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred degrees fahrenheit, which is more than one thousand, three
Speaker 1: d seventy degrees c intigrade. The furnace must be purged
Speaker 1: with oargon gas to make certain there's no unintended impurities present.
Speaker 1: You want to make sure that you've gotten rid of
Speaker 1: anything that could end up affecting the silicon as you
Speaker 1: try to create a wafer. Now, at this point there's
Speaker 1: about one non silicon atom per billion silicon atoms, so
Speaker 1: that's incredibly pure. You get a billion silicon atoms and
Speaker 1: then one thing that is not silicon. That's pretty pure.
Speaker 1: You then have all of this molten silicon inside a crucible,
Speaker 1: which is like a giant, uh cylindrical column, and it
Speaker 1: keeps that molten silicon nice and hot. The crucible starts
Speaker 1: to spin in a given direction. For the purposes of
Speaker 1: this discussion, will say it's spinning witter shans, also known
Speaker 1: as counter or anti clockwise, so it's spinning anti clockwise.
Speaker 1: You then insert a seed crystal of silicon. It's about
Speaker 1: the size and shape of a pencil, and you put
Speaker 1: this it's lowered down by machine, into the molten sil
Speaker 1: con and it acts as sort of the nucleaic spot
Speaker 1: for other silicon crystals to form. And this way you
Speaker 1: get a a very regular crystalline structure, a mono crystalline
Speaker 1: structure of silicon, and this seed will turn in the
Speaker 1: opposite direction of the crucible, So in our example, it
Speaker 1: would turn clockwise while the crucible turns counterclockwise. Now, as
Speaker 1: this happens, you end up creating this column, this cylindrical
Speaker 1: column of pure silicon or mostly pure silicon. Uh, and
Speaker 1: you get that monocrystalline structure all the way throughout the
Speaker 1: entire thing. When you withdraw the cooled silicon from the crucible,
Speaker 1: it looks like a giant silicon log that tapers at
Speaker 1: an end because that's where you've been pulling the sea
Speaker 1: crystal out, where you've been very slowly drawing it upwards.
Speaker 1: You you draw it incredibly slowly, like a millimeter and
Speaker 1: a half per minute, so it's a very very slow process.
Speaker 1: You're not just whipping the crystal out of the molten silicon.
Speaker 1: Doing this ends up creating, like I said, a tapered column.
Speaker 1: And the silicon has great tent sile strength, meaning you
Speaker 1: can suspend it from a thread like amount of silicon,
Speaker 1: and even though it weighs between two and four pounds
Speaker 1: or between a hundred and two hundreds, it'll hold it. However,
Speaker 1: is very brittle, so while it has great tent sile strength,
Speaker 1: if you were to just try and cut it. It
Speaker 1: would cut very easily. The column or pole of silicon
Speaker 1: would be about twelve inches or so in diameter, and
Speaker 1: you would then use that to slice it into wafers.
Speaker 1: So imagine this log of silicon and you put it
Speaker 1: through a device that uses very thin wire cutters or
Speaker 1: wire blades. I guess I should say they're not cutters,
Speaker 1: they're they're blades made a very very thin wire that
Speaker 1: then just zoom through this column and chop it up
Speaker 1: into these very thin wafers. They're about a millimeter thick,
Speaker 1: and you can get quite a few out of one
Speaker 1: column of this silicon material. At that point, you send
Speaker 1: them to another device to polish them out, because the
Speaker 1: cutting creates uneven set sections on the surface of the wafers,
Speaker 1: so you have to polish it to remove as much
Speaker 1: of that unevenness as you can. But even that's not
Speaker 1: good enough, because when you're building microprocessors, you're working on
Speaker 1: the microns scale or smaller. These days, you're working on
Speaker 1: the nano scale. At that scale, even the tiniest of
Speaker 1: bumps or grooves is going to look like an enormous
Speaker 1: mountain range or incredible valley. You have to buff it
Speaker 1: all out and get it as level as you possibly can.
Speaker 1: So after putting it through the polishing machine, you typically
Speaker 1: would need to chemically treat the wafers to get them
Speaker 1: as smooth as they possibly can be. Now, the next
Speaker 1: step would involve etching the wafers to create the pattern
Speaker 1: for your circuits. So this is sort of like building
Speaker 1: the blueprint for the circuits directly onto the substrate itself.
Speaker 1: Uh So, obviously, any sort of flaw in either the
Speaker 1: silicon material or it's physical properties, whether it's the unevenness
Speaker 1: or maybe there's an impurity that has fallen down and
Speaker 1: touched the wafer, it's enormous when you get down to
Speaker 1: that scale, so the tiniest of imperfections can completely ruin
Speaker 1: a chip. For etching, Intel uses a light sensitive layer
Speaker 1: called photo resist and coats the surface of the wafer.
Speaker 1: That's essentially an etch resistant material. Anything that UH encounters
Speaker 1: it is going to resist being etched. And they let
Speaker 1: this layer harden and then they use other little stencil
Speaker 1: like devices called masks. The masks cover parts of the
Speaker 1: chip while allowing other parts of the chip, or rather
Speaker 1: I should say cover parts of the wafer and allow
Speaker 1: other parts of the wafer uh to be exposed. You
Speaker 1: then use ultra violet light, which turns the photo resist
Speaker 1: material it encounters soluble, and through the process of building
Speaker 1: a circuit, you have to use lots and lots of
Speaker 1: different masks, essentially, lots of different stencils, and lots of
Speaker 1: applications of this ultra violet light. Because circuits are really
Speaker 1: three dimensional creations. They're not just two dimensional. They're not
Speaker 1: just width and and height. There's also depth to them.
Speaker 1: So you use a sequence of these masks and you
Speaker 1: expose the wafer to ultraviolet light. Each time the ultra
Speaker 1: violet light hits through the mask and contacts the photo
Speaker 1: resistive layer below, it makes it soluble. You then treat
Speaker 1: the wafer with a chemical that removes all the soluble material.
Speaker 1: So that's you're left with everything else. You've etched away,
Speaker 1: all the stuff you do not want. All the stuff
Speaker 1: you do want remains on the wafer. That is the
Speaker 1: blueprint for your circuit. At that point, then you would
Speaker 1: implant some ions, which are charged particles. They can have
Speaker 1: either a positive or a negative charge, depending upon the
Speaker 1: application you need them to be. You would either put
Speaker 1: in positive ions or negative ions, but you use that
Speaker 1: in the silicon itself. This is called doping. This is
Speaker 1: used in semiconductors all the time to specifically dictate how
Speaker 1: the semiconductor performs under specific circumstances. While you're etching, you're
Speaker 1: creating channels for what will become transistors. The transistors themselves
Speaker 1: must be deposited into the channels, and today Intel uses
Speaker 1: a method called atomic layer deposition to apply materials to
Speaker 1: the wafer surface at a level of precision necessary for
Speaker 1: components on the nanoscale, because at that scale you're talking
Speaker 1: about something so small you can't even see it with
Speaker 1: an optical microscope. You would need a scanning electron microscope
Speaker 1: or something similar in order to even get a look
Speaker 1: at it, so obviously you have to have atomic precision
Speaker 1: with this. Intel also uses electroplating to deposit copper ions
Speaker 1: onto the transistor, and if you listen to my History
Speaker 1: of Electricity episodes, you'll hear more about electroplating and how
Speaker 1: that works. Now, since the individual components on microprocessors now
Speaker 1: measureing the nanometers, it's critical that from this point forward,
Speaker 1: all potential contaminants have to be eliminated from the fabrication area.
Speaker 1: That means anyone working within the environment has to wear
Speaker 1: a special suit often called a bunny suit, to eliminate
Speaker 1: the possibility of dust, skin, or hair getting into the environment. Also,
Speaker 1: they tend to have very powerful air conditioning systems which
Speaker 1: are circulating and filtering the air on a very frequent basis.
Speaker 1: Uh intel They're setup has air coming in from the
Speaker 1: ceiling vents and the ceiling allow air to come down,
Speaker 1: and then vents on the floor pull air away and
Speaker 1: it does this constantly, so you're constantly circulating and filtering
Speaker 1: the air to remove any potential pollutants that could ruin
Speaker 1: a microprocessor. This is what gives us the term clean room,
Speaker 1: and the clean rooms in semiconductor facilities tend to be
Speaker 1: a Class one clean room, meaning there more free of
Speaker 1: pollutants than even the most advanced hospitals. Are so extremely
Speaker 1: clean environments, obviously, all the equipment that's being used has
Speaker 1: to be absolutely spotless, because again, you introduce a tiny
Speaker 1: impurity and you ruin a microchip, or worse yet, you
Speaker 1: might ruin an entire wafer, which means all of the
Speaker 1: microchips that would have been produced on that wafer are
Speaker 1: a loss. You you'd have to throw them out. From
Speaker 1: the beginning, Intel had to work on ways to design, miniaturize,
Speaker 1: and imprint circuit layouts onto silicon, and this continues to
Speaker 1: be an engineering challenge as companies like Intel attempt to
Speaker 1: keep up with the observations Gordon Moore made decades ago.
Speaker 1: The individual transistors are acting like switches, so they either
Speaker 1: complete a circuit and allow electrons to move through, or
Speaker 1: they break a circuit and they keep electrons from moving through.
Speaker 1: And they're turned on and off by these devices called gates.
Speaker 1: So a gates either open or it's closed, and that
Speaker 1: tells you you know, essentially that the microprocessors. Ultimately their
Speaker 1: job is traffic management. They're managing the movement of electrons
Speaker 1: because they represent single pieces of information, either a zero
Speaker 1: or a one and off or an on, a no,
Speaker 1: or a yes. And collectively, when you get lots of
Speaker 1: these dull pieces of information, you can describe much more
Speaker 1: complex concepts than just on or off, and that's where
Speaker 1: you get into the very basics of computer science. So
Speaker 1: all of this, these different components have to be etched
Speaker 1: onto the silicon, and that's because in the later stages
Speaker 1: of manufacturing, the individual elements of the microprocessor have to
Speaker 1: be deposited on the wafer. That can be up to
Speaker 1: thirty layers of of material put onto a wafer before
Speaker 1: it becomes a chip, and each incredibly tiny element needs
Speaker 1: to be in its proper place. And these days, chip
Speaker 1: manufacturers use variation of lithography to essentially print the components
Speaker 1: onto the circuit etchings to build the microprocessor layer by layer.
Speaker 1: It is incredibly precise and difficult to imagine. But we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about that a little bit later on. First,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Back
Speaker 1: to the four zero zero four. It had an impressive
Speaker 1: number of transistors for the time. It had about two
Speaker 1: thousand three transistors on this one chip. Uh, the micro
Speaker 1: processors of today leave this processor behind in the dust.
Speaker 1: That doesn't exist in those clean rooms I just talked about. So,
Speaker 1: for example, the Broadwell E family of Intel processors, which
Speaker 1: is actually from a couple of generations back well, they
Speaker 1: launched in two thousand and sixteen and have a trans
Speaker 1: sister account of about three point four billion. So you
Speaker 1: went from two thousand, three hundred way back in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one to three point four billion in two thousand, sixteen.
Speaker 1: So yeah, Moore's law is no joke. While today's chips
Speaker 1: have components that can measure just a smidge more than
Speaker 1: a dozen nanometers in width, the four zero zero four
Speaker 1: circuit line was ten microns wide, or ten thousand nanometers,
Speaker 1: So the transistors of nineteen seventy one measured about ten
Speaker 1: thousand nanometers wide. Today it's more like fourteen if you're
Speaker 1: getting a top of the line processor, fourteen nanometers instead
Speaker 1: of ten thousand. If you're wondering exactly how much that is,
Speaker 1: because it's still kind of hard to imagine even like
Speaker 1: ten thousand nanometers, how white is that, well, that's one
Speaker 1: tenth the width of your typical human hair. Human hair
Speaker 1: tends to be around a hundred thousand nanometers wide, not
Speaker 1: long wide, or at least so I'm told I have
Speaker 1: to take a lot about hair on faith these days.
Speaker 1: I miss having hair. Well. The four zero zero four
Speaker 1: launched and changed the world of electronics and computers. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, Intel would expand, opening up an assembly
Speaker 1: plant in Penang, Malaysia. This was Intel's first international manufacturing facility.
Speaker 1: Intel also acquired a company called Microma, which was experimenting
Speaker 1: with a new technology themselves. They were offering up digital
Speaker 1: watches that had liquid crystal displays. This was pretty new
Speaker 1: in the early seventies. So Intel got into the wearables
Speaker 1: business just a couple of years after it was founded,
Speaker 1: and people would think, oh, I thought Intel got into
Speaker 1: the wearables business pretty recently with providing chips that could
Speaker 1: be found in lots of different types of products out
Speaker 1: there now. As it turns out, this early attempt to
Speaker 1: get into wearables didn't really pan out for Intel. Uh.
Speaker 1: Intel held onto Microma for about six years, but they
Speaker 1: found that they had real trouble meeting consumer expectations and
Speaker 1: figuring out exactly what consumers wanted. Because Intel was not
Speaker 1: a consumer electronics company. Intel was building products for other businesses.
Speaker 1: So Intel would create a processor that some other computer
Speaker 1: manufacturer would use in its products. Intel wasn't building stuff
Speaker 1: specifically for the end consumer, and as a result, they
Speaker 1: weren't really good at running Microma as a business. They
Speaker 1: held onto it for about six years and then they
Speaker 1: sold it for a big loss. They lost about fifteen
Speaker 1: million dollars on it. They sold it for less than
Speaker 1: what they bought it, so it was a a tough
Speaker 1: lesson for Intel in those early days. Jumping back to
Speaker 1: two again, Intel created the first eight bit micro processor,
Speaker 1: also known as the eight zero zero eight. Now, this
Speaker 1: one obviously was more powerful than the four zero zero four,
Speaker 1: but it still wouldn't really transform the world. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be until nineteen seventy four when the company introduced the
Speaker 1: eight zero eight zero or the eight. This was the
Speaker 1: first true general purpose microprocessor. So the four zero zero
Speaker 1: four and the eight zero zero eight had laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork for the eight, but it was this a D
Speaker 1: eight that would become the basis for microprocessors in everything
Speaker 1: from computers and calculators to traffic lights because it was
Speaker 1: a true general purpose processor that could be used for
Speaker 1: all sorts of different applications. So we often think of
Speaker 1: Intel as the company that makes the processors in computers,
Speaker 1: but the truth is they make processors that are in
Speaker 1: all sorts of different gadgets and devices and products, not
Speaker 1: just computers and phones. This made into one of the
Speaker 1: most competitive companies in the space. They offered up a
Speaker 1: computing solution in a small package for an aggressive price,
Speaker 1: and as a result, Intel became the global leader in
Speaker 1: microchips and held onto that title for a while. The
Speaker 1: cost of the eight was just three d sixty dollars,
Speaker 1: which you know they were. Intel was saying, this is
Speaker 1: a computer on a chip. You get all the power
Speaker 1: of a computer on a single chip that can be
Speaker 1: incorporated into lots of different applications, and it's three sixty bucks,
Speaker 1: which was much cheaper than full computer systems. So Intel
Speaker 1: was doing really, really well in these days. It was
Speaker 1: also dominant in the area of memory chips at the time,
Speaker 1: so remember Intel had started by making chips that were
Speaker 1: for memory, not for processing. By the end of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, Intel held eighty two point nine percent of
Speaker 1: the d RAM chip market. Now this would change over
Speaker 1: the next decade because other companies would get involved in
Speaker 1: making memory chips and the competition got really fierce. And
Speaker 1: once you get a ton of different companies all competing
Speaker 1: with each other making the same stuff, you'll see that
Speaker 1: product your your market share will start to drop over time,
Speaker 1: unless you're making crazy deals by undercutting your competition. So
Speaker 1: by a decade later, Intel's sharing the d RAM market
Speaker 1: would have dropped all the way down to one point
Speaker 1: three per cent. But while that memory chip business had
Speaker 1: become incredibly competitive. Intel was still dominant in the microprocessor market,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't as big a deal even though their
Speaker 1: memory chip business was leaking away over time, or at
Speaker 1: least was getting uh was being less dominant in the
Speaker 1: market over time to the point where they had dropped
Speaker 1: down to one point three within a decade. Because they
Speaker 1: were the definitive name in microprocessors and more than balanced out,
Speaker 1: they were able to recapture a lot of that success
Speaker 1: with the microprocesss. In nineteen Robert Neiss, who was again
Speaker 1: while the co founders, became the chairman of the board
Speaker 1: at Intel. Noise was known as an executive who issued
Speaker 1: the lavish trappings that many CEOs and chairpersons have indulged in.
Speaker 1: He remained in leadership positions at Intel until his retirement,
Speaker 1: which must not have suited him very well because after
Speaker 1: he retired, he then went on to become the leader
Speaker 1: of a semiconductor manufacturing consortium called Sema Tech. And Noise
Speaker 1: would pass away in nineteen nine at the age of
Speaker 1: sixty two. His leadership style would remain a very powerful
Speaker 1: influence at Intel. It became sort of the model of
Speaker 1: how leaders were expected to behave over at Intel, largely
Speaker 1: that you were supposed to have kind of a let's
Speaker 1: get to work sort of attitude and not have too
Speaker 1: many lavish trappings of the executive's life. Uh, the idea
Speaker 1: being that everyone should benefit, not just whomever's at the top. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's how Intel's culture is now.
Speaker 1: I haven't ever been at Intel's corporate headquarters, but I
Speaker 1: know for a long time his values specifically were upheld
Speaker 1: as the model for future Intel executives. Now, as you
Speaker 1: might imagine, Intel's line of processors became more powerful with
Speaker 1: every generation and stuck pretty close to Gordon Moore's predictions.
Speaker 1: The processor's power tended to double every two years or so.
Speaker 1: In nine, Intel introduced the sixteen bit eight eight six
Speaker 1: eight six could work on to eight bit instruction sets simultaneously,
Speaker 1: so it had a parallel processing component in it. However,
Speaker 1: at the time, most software relied on eight bit processors
Speaker 1: and couldn't take advantage of this sixteen bit capability, so
Speaker 1: it's almost like it was future proofed that the software
Speaker 1: that was out wasn't really able to enjoy the benefit
Speaker 1: of the sixteen bit processor at the time. However, there's
Speaker 1: a generally held belief that's been proven true multiple times
Speaker 1: that if you build a really super strong processor, it
Speaker 1: does not take long before someone figures out a way
Speaker 1: to take advantage of that to build the software that
Speaker 1: makes the best use or at least takes up a
Speaker 1: great deal of that new super fast processors abilities. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can get to a point where software
Speaker 1: bloat outpaces processor performance. So it feels like generation over generation,
Speaker 1: your processors are getting slower, But that's not really the case.
Speaker 1: It's just that software is getting more bloated. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: a combination of the two. Actually. Well, by this time,
Speaker 1: Intel was starting to face competition with Motorola, which had
Speaker 1: introduced its own line of microprocessors in a line known
Speaker 1: as the sixty eight thousand. This was the type of
Speaker 1: microprocessors that would end up being used in Apple products
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Motorola was the big uh
Speaker 1: provide leader of micro processors for Apple. For many years,
Speaker 1: there was a race to see which microprocessor architecture would
Speaker 1: end up becoming the industry standard, which one is going
Speaker 1: to be used in personal computers the most, and a big,
Speaker 1: juicy contract helped assure that space for Intel. The contract
Speaker 1: came from International Business Machines Corporation, which is better known
Speaker 1: as IBM. IBM chose the eight bit processor from Intel,
Speaker 1: called the eight eight, to be the processor of choice
Speaker 1: in the official IBM personal computer. Line eight was based
Speaker 1: off the design of the eighty six, the sixteen bit processor,
Speaker 1: but the eight was an eight bit processor, so essentially
Speaker 1: the eight had half of the address bus disabled to
Speaker 1: make it an eight bit processor. Eventually, the pairing of
Speaker 1: Intel chips with the Windows operating system a few years
Speaker 1: down the line would lead to the nickname Windtell for
Speaker 1: I b M Compatible machines, and it just showed that
Speaker 1: Intel was considered a standard part of the IBM compatible universe.
Speaker 1: You had an Intel processor and you had the Windows
Speaker 1: operating system. If you didn't have those things, people didn't
Speaker 1: really think of it as a PC. They thought of
Speaker 1: it as something else, uh, which is a little weird,
Speaker 1: but that just goes to show that, you know, Intel
Speaker 1: had made some very savvy moves to become indispensable in
Speaker 1: the personal computing industry, which ended up taking off like
Speaker 1: gangbusters in the eighties. Now, around this time, Intel also
Speaker 1: introduced a new innovation in computing called coprocessors. Now, these
Speaker 1: were chips designed to take on certain tasks that typically
Speaker 1: would go to the computer's CPU. But by freeing up
Speaker 1: the CPU from doing those little tasks, they could run
Speaker 1: software more efficiently. They could concentrate on the harder computational problems,
Speaker 1: and these coprocessors would free up the CPUs by taking
Speaker 1: on those more mundane tasks because they were very specialized
Speaker 1: microprocessor chips and they were very efficient at handling very
Speaker 1: specific types of computer problems. This kept the chips efficient
Speaker 1: and kept their price down, and it also opened up
Speaker 1: a new market for Intel to dominate. The company was
Speaker 1: really growing rapidly at this time. Back when it was founded,
Speaker 1: Intel had a grand total of twelve employees, but by
Speaker 1: that number had grown to more than fifteen thousand employees.
Speaker 1: Intel's founders tried hard to avoid falling into the same
Speaker 1: traps they had encountered over at fair Child Semiconductor. They
Speaker 1: were really striving to have open communication between executives and
Speaker 1: everybody else. They wanted to make sure that their plans
Speaker 1: were transparent, that everyone knew which way that the company
Speaker 1: was going, and that people's concerns were listened to. Because
Speaker 1: the founders of Intel had come from an environment where
Speaker 1: they felt like they weren't being listened to, and they
Speaker 1: didn't want Intel to turn into the same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But I've see that becomes a challenge when your workforce
Speaker 1: numbers in the thousands of employees. So it was not
Speaker 1: an easy thing for Intel to try and do. Now,
Speaker 1: if you remember my podcast about the story of Macintosh,
Speaker 1: you know I don't like to focus on every single
Speaker 1: product that a company offers, because it just bogs down
Speaker 1: the show. With Intel, it's particularly important. I don't do
Speaker 1: that because the company has has had dozens of different
Speaker 1: microprocessors in its history and hundreds of other types of products.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna focus on a few important highlights rather
Speaker 1: than a rundown of all the chips. Now, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be here for a week going over an
Speaker 1: impressive but exhaustive list of specs. I do want to
Speaker 1: talk about some of the important early processors, though, because
Speaker 1: I think it's it shows Intel strategy and also some
Speaker 1: of the mistakes the company has made over its years.
Speaker 1: The first one I would like to talk about is
Speaker 1: the eight one six, which followed a sixteen bit architecture.
Speaker 1: Is based off that eight six line from before starting
Speaker 1: with the until began to incorporate components in the micro
Speaker 1: processor that would normally be independent on a computer's motherboard. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, Intel was looking at different parts of
Speaker 1: the mother board and saying, well, we can lump this
Speaker 1: in with the CPU. We can increase the response of
Speaker 1: the CPU, we can make it more efficient, we can
Speaker 1: decrease latency, and as a result, the entire computing experience
Speaker 1: goes faster. This does not necessarily mean the CPU itself
Speaker 1: is clocking faster. It's just again making that architecture more efficient.
Speaker 1: So that was Intel strategy. The integration made sense. It
Speaker 1: made the CPUs more efficient, made the computers much more fast.
Speaker 1: And later that same year, Intel would release the eight
Speaker 1: two eighties six, and at this point we would just
Speaker 1: call it the two eight six. We would also end
Speaker 1: up calling the next two computers the three six and
Speaker 1: the four eight six. They were all from the same
Speaker 1: kind of family of microprocessors. There were obviously changes and
Speaker 1: redesigns with each generation, but they were all based off
Speaker 1: that same architecture. In Intel Creative It's first reduced instruction
Speaker 1: set computer or RISK microprocessor. These are more specialized processors
Speaker 1: that concentrate on a relatively narrow band of computer instructions,
Speaker 1: which means it can go really fast as long as
Speaker 1: the instructions sent to it are within that narrow band.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies can handle forms
Speaker 1: that are filled out properly very well. That's what a
Speaker 1: bureaucracy does. But if you have a case that is
Speaker 1: outside of the normal line, bureaucracies are terrible because they're
Speaker 1: not signed to process stuff that's outside the norm. If
Speaker 1: they can process something that's inside the norm, it should
Speaker 1: go very fast. Same sort of thing is true with
Speaker 1: risk microprocessors, except we're talking about computational problems, not licenses
Speaker 1: and other issues that we would have when we encounter bureaucracies.
Speaker 1: The first person to theore rise a risk microprocessor was
Speaker 1: John Coke of IBM Research in nineteen seventy four, and
Speaker 1: David Patterson, who taught at the University of California at Berkeley,
Speaker 1: has the credit of coming up with the term. Intel's
Speaker 1: I nine sixty risk microprocessors and its descendants would find
Speaker 1: use in many applications, including military systems. In the three
Speaker 1: six debuted, and it was the first CPU Intel designed
Speaker 1: to be fully backwards compatible with previous CPUs. This was
Speaker 1: a design decision that was carried forward into future microprocessors,
Speaker 1: and it was also Intel's first thirty two bit x
Speaker 1: a D six processor. It could support up to four
Speaker 1: gigabytes of system memory, which at the time was a
Speaker 1: truly enormous amount. Nobody really expected to use for gigabytes
Speaker 1: of memory back in the mid eighties, but the architecture
Speaker 1: texture was capable of supporting it. Now, that's not to
Speaker 1: say that everything Intel touch turned into gold at this time.
Speaker 1: The company also designed a processor called the i A
Speaker 1: p X thirty two, and as you would guess by
Speaker 1: the name and number, this did not follow the same
Speaker 1: architecture as the X eight six chips did. This was
Speaker 1: meant to expand its product line and differentiate microprocessors by
Speaker 1: following a brand new architecture, but the design process did
Speaker 1: not go smoothly. There were lots of flaws that were
Speaker 1: introduced into the final processor design, and it was a
Speaker 1: much more complicated design than the eight six line, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't particularly efficient. So ultimately Intel would end up
Speaker 1: shelving the product and saying that this was not a success.
Speaker 1: Later in another attempt to break away from the x
Speaker 1: A D six processor line, Intel would introduce the I
Speaker 1: eight sixty Risk. While the early Risk microprocessors weren't intended
Speaker 1: to go into personal computers, this was not true of
Speaker 1: the I eight sixty. Unfortunately, like the I A p
Speaker 1: X four thirty two, the microprocessor was flawed. It would
Speaker 1: stall out when the processor encountered computational problems that were
Speaker 1: outside of scope. So again, it's like that bureaucracy. When
Speaker 1: a form doesn't have the right capability of capturing the
Speaker 1: information you need, and you go to the bureaucracy, you're
Speaker 1: gonna get the run around, and it's gonna be painful
Speaker 1: and slow and laborious. Same thing was true with this processor.
Speaker 1: It could not handle all computational problems efficiently, and that
Speaker 1: eventually led to it not being a particularly powerful or
Speaker 1: popular UH product in Intel's line. But the four six
Speaker 1: was a different story that the first x A D
Speaker 1: six CPU to incorporate an element called the functional processing unit,
Speaker 1: or FPU, which until that time had been a separate
Speaker 1: component from the CPU. This decreased latency between the FPU
Speaker 1: and CPU, which translated again to faster computing speeds. The
Speaker 1: first of these were running at clock speeds of fifty
Speaker 1: mega hurts or fifty million clock cycles per second. Starting
Speaker 1: a n Intel's ad campaign, Push made the company's slogan
Speaker 1: Intel inside a common phrase in computer circles, into on
Speaker 1: a really clever way of convincing computer companies to include
Speaker 1: Intel chips and to use this phrase Intel inside, both
Speaker 1: in the marketing strategy and on the computers themselves. The
Speaker 1: way Intel convinced companies to do this as they said, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you include our chips and you include the phrase
Speaker 1: Intel inside in your marketing, we will pay for half
Speaker 1: of your marketing costs. So they would shoulder half of
Speaker 1: the marketing budget of these companies for print and television ads.
Speaker 1: That's an enormous amount of money and Intel spent millions
Speaker 1: of dollars doing this. But as a result, they were
Speaker 1: able to essentially guarantee that their name would become synonymous
Speaker 1: with computers. People thought, well, if I'm buying a computer,
Speaker 1: a PC at any rate, not a Mac, then it's
Speaker 1: gonna have that Intel and side sticker on there. It's
Speaker 1: gonna have Intel inside on all the advertising, and Intel
Speaker 1: became a household name, so it was a very valuable
Speaker 1: move on Intel's part. In n Intel introduced the Pentium
Speaker 1: line of processors. I remember when that happened because it
Speaker 1: confused me because I was used to two eighty six
Speaker 1: three eight six for eighty six, and then it went
Speaker 1: to Pentium. These were still built on the X eight
Speaker 1: six processor architecture, but they did depart from that eighty
Speaker 1: six naming system. They decided to go with more trademark
Speaker 1: names and less about just numbers. They part of this
Speaker 1: was probably to appeal to a larger audience of computer consumers,
Speaker 1: people who probably didn't really care for referring to processors
Speaker 1: by what seemed to be meaningless numbers to them. Now,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, these chips were more efficient and
Speaker 1: faster than their predecessors, and this helped usher in an
Speaker 1: era of PC gaming. Among other things, the faster processors
Speaker 1: allowed game developers to create software that was graphically intense
Speaker 1: and fast paced. And while games had always been part
Speaker 1: of personal computer history ever since personal computers had first
Speaker 1: come on the scene, they now could rival consoles, which
Speaker 1: are essentially specific computers designed to run very particular types
Speaker 1: of software. So a console video game console like the
Speaker 1: Xbox or back in the day of this the Super
Speaker 1: Nintendo Nintendo Entertainment System. It's just a specialized computer. But uh,
Speaker 1: Intel was able to show that with these Pentium processors,
Speaker 1: personal computers could run games that would rival even the
Speaker 1: best consoles. But there was a big problem. Those first
Speaker 1: Pentium chips had a design flaw in them that would
Speaker 1: cause the microprocessor to make it incorrect calculation for certain processes. Now,
Speaker 1: this incorrect calculation didn't happen frequently, but it did happen,
Speaker 1: and while Intel had hoped that perhaps the flaw was
Speaker 1: so minor as to go unnoticed, that did not happen.
Speaker 1: The reason that was noticed was due to a mathematician
Speaker 1: named Thomas Nicely. It was a professor Nicely was actually
Speaker 1: working on a math problem involving twin primes. So a
Speaker 1: twin prime is a set of two prime numbers that
Speaker 1: differ by just two. So three and five are both
Speaker 1: prime numbers and their twin primes because five miles three
Speaker 1: equals two, five and seven are twin primes. Seven milus
Speaker 1: five is two. But as numbers get larger, primes become
Speaker 1: less frequent, and twin primes become even more rare. The
Speaker 1: philosopher Euclid created a proof that suggested there's an infinite
Speaker 1: number of prime numbers, and he believed that the same
Speaker 1: was going to be true of twin primes, but he
Speaker 1: had no way of proving it well. Euclid was thinking
Speaker 1: that way back in three hundred b c. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be until the twentieth century before someone came up with
Speaker 1: a means of describing this mathematically, and that person was
Speaker 1: Vigo Brune, a Norwegian mathematician. He said that the sum
Speaker 1: of the reciprocals of twin primes would converge to a
Speaker 1: constant sum that later on we would call Bruns constant.
Speaker 1: And in case you're rusty on your mathematical terms, a
Speaker 1: reciprocal of a number is what you get when you
Speaker 1: take one and divide it by that number in question.
Speaker 1: So let's say you start with five. The reciprocal of
Speaker 1: five is one five, because again you're looking at the
Speaker 1: one divided by the number you had started with, or
Speaker 1: point two if you prefer. So. Brun figured out that
Speaker 1: if you took the reciprocals of twin primes and you
Speaker 1: added the two reciprocals together, they converged on a number
Speaker 1: that would end up again being called Bruins constant, and
Speaker 1: by nineteen seventy six that constant was calculated to be
Speaker 1: approximately one point nine oh two one six o five
Speaker 1: four for twin primes up to one hundred billion. But hey,
Speaker 1: that's not good enough for math. We need to be
Speaker 1: more specific than that. So enter Thomas Nicely, who bought
Speaker 1: a computer in n with a Pentium processor and he
Speaker 1: wanted to run calculations related to Bruin's constant. But as
Speaker 1: he did so, he was coming up with errors that
Speaker 1: should not have been there, and he was eventually able
Speaker 1: to track it down to a design flaw and Intel's
Speaker 1: chips that only showed up if you were doing some
Speaker 1: really big calculations. That's when the flaw would make itself apparent,
Speaker 1: but most people would never see it. At first, Intel
Speaker 1: tried to shirk this issue, but intense pressure caused the
Speaker 1: company to change its tune. So eventually Intel issued a
Speaker 1: recall offering a free replacement of the affected print Pentium
Speaker 1: chips with a modified chip that corrected this error, and
Speaker 1: that recall would end up costing Intel four hundred seventy
Speaker 1: five million dollars. Ouch. Well, we've got a bit more
Speaker 1: history of Intel to talk about But before I wrap
Speaker 1: all this up, let's take another quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. In Intel would debut the Pentium two. They
Speaker 1: actually had a slight missed up between the Pentium and
Speaker 1: the Pentium two called the Pentium Pro that didn't go
Speaker 1: over so well, but the Pentium two was a slightly
Speaker 1: different story, and Intel also introduced two new product lines
Speaker 1: of processors, the Cellern and Zion brands. Now, these were
Speaker 1: based off of Intel's existing architecture, but they had very
Speaker 1: specific implementations where some of the bells and whistles weren't
Speaker 1: present on them. This allowed them to be used for
Speaker 1: very specific implementations, like you could have mid range UH
Speaker 1: servers for example, or lower priced computers because you had
Speaker 1: the same sort of processors but with some of the
Speaker 1: features turned off essentially in these more mid range machines UH.
Speaker 1: That was Intel's attempt at serving all different levels of
Speaker 1: the market, not just the premium customers. So later on,
Speaker 1: from that point, Intel introduced the Pentium three, which would
Speaker 1: become the first microprocessor to break the one giga hurts
Speaker 1: clock speed. Intel had been in a race with its
Speaker 1: competitor a m D to create the first commercial processor
Speaker 1: that could hit a giga hurts clock speed, and at
Speaker 1: one point Intel even had a model of the Pentium
Speaker 1: three that had a processing speed of or a clock
Speaker 1: speed I should say of one point one three giga hurts,
Speaker 1: but that one was unstable. Uh A. A review found
Speaker 1: the performance was unstable and so that one got recalled.
Speaker 1: But still gigga hurts clock speed meant that it could
Speaker 1: complete a billion instructions per second under ideal circumstances. By
Speaker 1: the late nineteen nineties, Intel was starting to get into
Speaker 1: the business of buying other businesses. It was acquiring other
Speaker 1: businesses to get into new markets that included wireless communications products,
Speaker 1: networking components, and controlled chips for specific types of applications,
Speaker 1: such as the kind you might find in v equal
Speaker 1: control systems. And if you listen to my shows about
Speaker 1: the Macintosh, you know that. In two thousand five, Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs shocked the tech world when he announced that Mac
Speaker 1: computers would move away from their traditional CPUs and use
Speaker 1: Intel CPUs instead. Intel maintained a competitive advantage over others
Speaker 1: in the space, but this also came at a pretty
Speaker 1: stiff price. In two thousand nine, the European Union found
Speaker 1: guilty Intel guilty of alleged monopolistic actions. In other words,
Speaker 1: they said that Intel was effectively acting like a monopoly
Speaker 1: within the European Union, and they hit Intel with a
Speaker 1: fine that was one point four five billion dollars. That
Speaker 1: same year, Intel had to pay its competitor, A m D,
Speaker 1: a hefty sum of one point to five billion dollars
Speaker 1: as part of a settlement in which am D had
Speaker 1: accused Intel of using leverage on computer company is two
Speaker 1: put Intel products in instead of other processors into those computers.
Speaker 1: So essentially am D was saying Intel was being anti
Speaker 1: competitive and really putting the screws to computer manufacturer saying
Speaker 1: you've got to use Intel products and not anyone else,
Speaker 1: and uh, that is not legal, which is why the
Speaker 1: lawsuit happened, and eventually the two settled. Now I could
Speaker 1: talk about how every generation of Intel's chips were faster,
Speaker 1: included more on board memory, had faster bus speeds, greater
Speaker 1: clock speeds, lower latency, but we can just sum it
Speaker 1: up to say the company kept following a strategy that
Speaker 1: it branded the tick talk strategy. So let me tell
Speaker 1: you what TikTok it means and and why that has
Speaker 1: recently changed. So TikTok is a two part strategy to
Speaker 1: developing the microprocessors of today or really yesterday at this point,
Speaker 1: because again we're just now beyond TikTok. The tick part
Speaker 1: involves looking at the architecture you designed on your previous
Speaker 1: generation of micro chips. So you look at that architecture
Speaker 1: and you look at the size of it, and you decide,
Speaker 1: how can I shrink down these components to the next
Speaker 1: smaller size. That is your tick. So you might look
Speaker 1: at a generation of processors that have forty five nanometer components,
Speaker 1: and your challenge is to figure out how to shrink
Speaker 1: down that same design so that the components measure thirty
Speaker 1: two nanometers not forty five. And you follow essentially the
Speaker 1: same blueprint as you did before, only you can cram
Speaker 1: more stuff into that blueprint because you reduced the size
Speaker 1: of the individual components. You freed up some space by
Speaker 1: making everything smaller. However, at these sizes, how those components
Speaker 1: are arranged matters more and more. So you could just
Speaker 1: keep shrinking the components down as your research and development
Speaker 1: allows you to make ever smaller pieces, but that only
Speaker 1: gets you so far. What you really need to do
Speaker 1: is figure out how to arrange those new smaller pieces
Speaker 1: in the ideal configuration to get the most efficient use
Speaker 1: out of them. And this is the TALK step. So
Speaker 1: in TICK you figure out how to shrink stuff down further,
Speaker 1: and talk you figure out how to rearrange these new
Speaker 1: smaller components so that they work the best way you
Speaker 1: possibly can make them. So in our example, we would
Speaker 1: be looking at those thirty two nanometer components and figuring
Speaker 1: out the right architecture to maximize their efficiency. And the TikTok.
Speaker 1: Generations of a single family of processors are going to
Speaker 1: have the same size opponents, They're just gonna have different configurations.
Speaker 1: The TICK is going to be based on the previous generation.
Speaker 1: The TALK is the new architecture to maximize the efficiency
Speaker 1: of the new sized components. And then your next TICK
Speaker 1: is going to be taking those thirty two nanometer components
Speaker 1: and figuring out how to shrink them down even further,
Speaker 1: but within the same general architecture as your previous generation.
Speaker 1: Tick talk, tick talk. That was pretty much how Intel
Speaker 1: ran things uh for quite a few generations of processors.
Speaker 1: Now Intel follows a new strategy. It calls it the
Speaker 1: process architecture Optimize pattern others will call this tick talk
Speaker 1: talk because again, the first one is shrinking components down
Speaker 1: to a new smaller size, the second means finding a
Speaker 1: better arch at lecture for those sized components, and the
Speaker 1: third one is refining that design even further, so you're
Speaker 1: staying on the same size of components for three generations
Speaker 1: in a row. UH. This means that you don't have
Speaker 1: to spend so much time trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: are you going to shrink things down even further as
Speaker 1: you gradually get closer and closer to a fundamental physical limitation. UH.
Speaker 1: That being where quantum physics comes in and doesn't play
Speaker 1: nicely with your designs anymore, and you get things like
Speaker 1: electron tunneling where electrons seem to leak through transistors, and
Speaker 1: since transistors are meant to control the flow of electrons,
Speaker 1: this is what we in the computer biz often call
Speaker 1: a bad thing. It introduces the possibility of errors and miscalculations,
Speaker 1: and you don't want that in your processor, so it
Speaker 1: ends up extending the amount of time Intel spends on
Speaker 1: a specific size of dye for their their chips, but
Speaker 1: it also maximizes the efficiency of that while engineers continue
Speaker 1: to work on the next breakthrough. One other thing I
Speaker 1: need to touch on before I conclude is the concept
Speaker 1: of multi core processors, because Intel story doing that as well.
Speaker 1: Intel's work with parallel processing way back in the nineties
Speaker 1: provided the basis for multi core processors. Multi core processors
Speaker 1: can handle several computational problems simultaneously, which brings the clock
Speaker 1: speeds to bear on the problems to solve them in
Speaker 1: parallel rather than in sequence. So one core might be
Speaker 1: working on one problem, another core could be working on
Speaker 1: a separate problem, So dual core processors. You could do
Speaker 1: two of these, quad core four and so on and
Speaker 1: so forth. And there's also threading as well, you can
Speaker 1: thread different copy stational problems. But ultimately the concept we
Speaker 1: need to really focus on here is that idea of
Speaker 1: parallel processing, because for certain types of computational problems, parallel
Speaker 1: processing is much much faster than doing sequential processing where
Speaker 1: you're just going down a list of instructions. Even if
Speaker 1: you make a really really super fast CPU, if it's
Speaker 1: tackling a very long list of instructions that could otherwise
Speaker 1: be divided up, a multi core processor might be more
Speaker 1: effective than a very fast single core CPU. I like
Speaker 1: to use an analogy whenever I talk about this, and
Speaker 1: long time listeners of tech stuff are probably familiar with
Speaker 1: us because I've used it before, but I find it's
Speaker 1: very helpful if you're trying to understand the difference between
Speaker 1: a super fast CPU and a fast but not as
Speaker 1: crazy fast multi core processor. So we're going to imagine
Speaker 1: a math class and you've got essentially sixteen kids in
Speaker 1: this math class, right, one of those kids is a
Speaker 1: math genius. She's a prodigy. She's so smart she can
Speaker 1: complete any problem in a fraction of the time of
Speaker 1: any of her other classmates. Her classmates, by the way,
Speaker 1: are smart. They're they're not They're not slower anything, they're
Speaker 1: just not geniuses like she is. Now, on any given
Speaker 1: singular problem, the genius is always going to solve it
Speaker 1: faster than her her other classmates. They're just never going
Speaker 1: to be as fast as she is for any one problem.
Speaker 1: But imagine the teacher hands out the test, and the
Speaker 1: test has fifteen problems on it, So there are fifteen
Speaker 1: problems you have to solve, and they're sixteen kids in
Speaker 1: the class, including the genius. The teacher gives the genius
Speaker 1: a test that has all sixteen, all fifteen problems on it.
Speaker 1: So she has to solve all fifteen of those problems
Speaker 1: as quickly as she can. But he tells the other
Speaker 1: fifteen students, you each will tackle one of these problems,
Speaker 1: and he assigns them. Student one has problem one, Student
Speaker 1: two has problem to, and so on all the way
Speaker 1: down the fifteen problems, and they have their job is
Speaker 1: to complete their problem, their one problem before the genius
Speaker 1: can complete all fifteen problems. Well, this is sort of
Speaker 1: what multi core processors are capable of doing. They divide
Speaker 1: up problems into different parts, and collectively they can solve
Speaker 1: that big problem faster than a really super fast processor
Speaker 1: could nine times out of ten, ninety nine times out
Speaker 1: of a hundred, nine times out of a thousand. Those
Speaker 1: fifteen students are going to finish their individual problems before
Speaker 1: the math genie can work through all fifteen on her test.
Speaker 1: And you might say, well, that's not fair to like,
Speaker 1: that's not the point. It's an analogy to explain how
Speaker 1: multi core processors work from a kind of high level approach.
Speaker 1: It gets a lot more technical than that, obviously, but
Speaker 1: that's just to explain that for certain types of computational problems,
Speaker 1: parallel processing is much more effective. Now, there are types
Speaker 1: of computational problems that cannot be broken into parallel processing,
Speaker 1: and for those a super fast CPU is still more
Speaker 1: often than not going to be more effective than a
Speaker 1: multi core processor. So it really just depends upon the application.
Speaker 1: But more and more we're seeing parallel processing problems being
Speaker 1: the type that computers tackle. Now, how long will Intel
Speaker 1: and other microprocessor manufacturers be able to keep Moore's law alive?
Speaker 1: Because people are constantly predicting the end to Moore's law
Speaker 1: has happened numerous times throughout history. From the eighties on.
Speaker 1: People will say, oh, Moore's law is coming to an
Speaker 1: end because it's not physically possible for us to keep
Speaker 1: up with it. But so far, engineers have been able
Speaker 1: to stave that off, partly through innovative architectures that don't
Speaker 1: necessarily increase the number of components by a factor of two,
Speaker 1: but rather increase the output of the processor by a
Speaker 1: factor of two every two years. So it requires some
Speaker 1: reinterpretation of what Moore's law means. It may mean that
Speaker 1: you fudge a bit on the amount of time necessary
Speaker 1: to get to that factor of two. And it might
Speaker 1: mean reinterpreting it as processing power versus number of discrete elements.
Speaker 1: But I think the important thing for us as consumers
Speaker 1: is the performance, not whether the chip actually has twice
Speaker 1: as many transistors as the one from two years ago.
Speaker 1: So that is still a battle that's going on today. Uh.
Speaker 1: It does mean that maybe we'll hit that fundamental limit
Speaker 1: at some point and we will not be able to
Speaker 1: continue More's law using traditional microprocessor designs, and then we
Speaker 1: may need another true revolution in computer processing to create
Speaker 1: a new means of keeping up with that power output.
Speaker 1: But maybe stepping outside of what a processor is supposed
Speaker 1: to look like, that's a possibility today. Intel is doing
Speaker 1: pretty well as of the recording of this podcast. When
Speaker 1: I checked it was its shares were trading at around
Speaker 1: thirty five dollars a share. That puts the market cap
Speaker 1: value of Intel at about a hundred and sixty five
Speaker 1: billion dollars. The company may nearly sixty billion in revenue
Speaker 1: in twenty six, which is not too bad for a
Speaker 1: company that was found by a couple of traders. Well done,
Speaker 1: More and Noise. That wraps up our two part episode
Speaker 1: on the story of Intel. Obviously, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: I could talk about from the various sensors and processors
Speaker 1: Intel has been developing for all sorts of applications to
Speaker 1: their partnerships with various companies throughout its history, and maybe
Speaker 1: in future episodes I'll touch on some of those, but
Speaker 1: I thought that it was really important to just kind
Speaker 1: of hit the high points to understand where Intel came
Speaker 1: from and how it developed over its years. If you
Speaker 1: guys have any suggestions for future episodes of Text Stuff,
Speaker 1: whether it's a topic I should cover, someone I should
Speaker 1: have on to interview, a guest co host who might
Speaker 1: be able to tackle a specific subject with me, let
Speaker 1: me know. Send me an email. The address for the
Speaker 1: show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
Speaker 1: The handle for both of those is text Stuff h
Speaker 1: s W. Remember you can tune in on Wednesdays and
Speaker 1: Friday's to see me stream this podcast live. You can
Speaker 1: watch me record it live, which includes all the ridiculous
Speaker 1: mistakes I make and when I have to restart, and
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm chatting with the chat room and just answering
Speaker 1: questions or shooting the breeze. Go to twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: slash tech stuff. To see the schedule there and join
Speaker 1: me sometime, won't you. And in the meantime, I hope
Speaker 1: you guys have a great week and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, is it staff works dot com.