History of Computing 8/24/2010

Goals
History • Understand that the relative performance
and cost of components has impacted
off computer
t design.
d i
• Note the drop in the cost of computing
Computers • Know Moore’s Law
• Recognize that clock speed is not the major
contributor
t ib t tto improved
i d performance.
f
COMP375 Computer Architecture
and Organization
• Look at some neat old computer stuff.

Relative Performance & Cost Logic and Memory Performance Gap

• As computers evolved, the performance
and cost of different components (such as
memory, disk
di k ddrives
i or di
digital
it l llogic)
i )hhave
improved at different rates.
• If a component is relatively expensive or
slow, designs will usually minimize the
component.

COMP375 1
History of Computing 8/24/2010

Continual Drop in Prices Continual (but not steady) Drop in Prices

from Operating Systems Concepts, 7th ed by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne from Operating Systems Concepts, 7th ed by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne

Underlying Technologies
• Some technologies are not feasible unless
underlying technologies are sufficiently
capable.
bl
– Windows Vista will not run on my 8086 PC
with only 640K of RAM and a 4.77 MHz clock.
– Disk Drives in the 1970’s were the size of
washing machines. Not very useful for laptops or iPods.
– Voice processing takes a lot of CPU power.

data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

COMP375 2
History of Computing 8/24/2010

Historical Progression Ancient Computing

Antikythera
• People have worked to build “thinking” mechanism
devices for a long time
time. designed to
• Improvements usually build on earlier work calculate
astronomical
positions around
150 – 100 BC.
• Before the 1940’s “Computer” was a job Date Who What
title, not a machine. ~1000 BC ? Abacus
1621 William Oughtred Slide Rule
1642 Blaise Pascal Adding machine

Punch Cards Tabulating Equipment

• In 1804-05 Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a • In 1882 Herman
loom that used punch cards to specify the Hollerith created a
pattern.
pattern punchh cardd ttabulating
b l ti
machine. It was
used to calculate the
1890 census.
• Punched cards were
used through the late
1970s.

COMP375 3
History of Computing 8/24/2010

Charles Babbage Ada Lovelace

Charles Babbage built a mechanical computer
starting in 1822. He never completed the machine.
Augusta
g Ada,, Countess of
Lovelace, was the daughter
of Lord Byron and friend of
Charles Babbage. She is
considered the first
computer programmer.
programmer

Alan Turing ABC machine

• In 1936 Alan Turing invented the • John Atanasoff and Clifford
theoretical Turing Machine. Berry built the Atanasoff-
• With Alonzo Church developed B
Berry C
Computer t (ABC) iin
the Turing-Church thesis. 1939.
“Every function which would
naturally be regarded as
computable can be computed by
computable,
a Turing machine”
• He broke the code of the German
Enigma machine in WWII.

COMP375 4
History of Computing 8/24/2010

ENIAC ENIAC - details

• Electronic Numerical Integrator And
Computer • Decimal (not binary)
• John Eckert and JJ. Presper Mauchly • 20 accumulators of 10 digits
• University of Pennsylvania • Programmed manually by switches
• Trajectory tables for weapons • 18,000 vacuum tubes
• Started 1943 • 30 tons
• Finished 1946 • 15,000
, square
q feet
– Too late for war effort • 140 kW power
• Used until 1955 • 5,000 additions/sec

von Neumann Architecture Core Memory

• Stored Program concept • Invented by An Wang and
• Main memory storing programs and data Way-Dong Woo in 1949
• ALU operating on binary data • A bit is stored by
• Control unit interpreting instructions from magnetizing a ring of iron.
memory and executing • Cycle times of about 6µs
• Input and output equipment operated by • Non-volatile storage
control unit
• Completed 1952

COMP375 5
History of Computing 8/24/2010

Transistors Semiconductor Memory

• Replaced vacuum tubes • Created in1970 at Fairchild corporation
• Smaller • Size of a single core
• Cheaper – i.e. 1 bit of magnetic core storage
• Less heat dissipation • Non-destructive read
• Solid State device • Much faster than core
• Made from silicon (sand)
( ) • Capacity approximately doubles each year
• Invented 1947 at Bell Labs
• William Shockley et al.

Moore’s Law
• Increased density of components on chip
• Gordon Moore – co-founder of Intel
• Number of transistors on a chip will double every
year
• Since 1970’s development has slowed a little
–Number of transistors on a chip
doubles every 18 months
• Cost of a chip has remained almost unchanged
• Higher packing density means shorter electrical
paths, giving higher performance
• Reduced power and cooling requirements
• Fewer interconnections increases reliability

COMP375 6
History of Computing 8/24/2010

©Intel Corp.

Analog Computers IBM

• An analog computer does not store • Punched-card processing equipment
information digitally. • 1953 - the 701
• Values are stored as voltage levels. – IBM’s first stored program computer
• Analog computers are particularly useful – Scientific calculations
solving nonlinear simultaneous differential • 1955 - the 702
equations. – Business applications
• An
A electric
l t i circuit
i it can bbe d
defined
fi d bby an • Lead to 700/7000 series
equation. An analog computer is
programmed by creating a circuit that
follows a desired equation.

COMP375 7
History of Computing 8/24/2010

IBM 360 series

• Introduced in 1964. DEC PDP-8
• Replaced (& not compatible with) 7000 series
• Cost $133K to $5.5M ($33.7M in today’s $)
• First planned “family” of computers
• Introduced in 1964
– Similar or identical instruction sets
– Similar or identical O/S • First minicomputer
– Increasing
c eas g speed • Did not need air conditioned room
– Increasing I/O ports • Small enough to sit on a lab bench
– Increased memory size
• $16,000 vs. $100k+ for IBM 360
– Increased cost
• Multiplexed switch structure • Used a bus structure

Calculators Intel
Wang 720 was a
pprogrammable
g calculator. • 1971 - 4004
– First microprocessor
– All CPU components on a single chip
– 4 bit
• Followed in 1972 by 8008
– 8 bit
HP-35 introduced in 1973 for $399 – Both designed for specific applications
$1,750 in today’s dollars

COMP375 8
History of Computing 8/24/2010

Pentium Evolution (1) Pentium Evolution (2)

• 8080 • 80486
– first general purpose microprocessor – sophisticated powerful cache and instruction
– 8 bit data path pp
pipeliningg
– Used in first
f personal computer – Altair
– built in math co-processor
• 8086
– much more powerful • Pentium
– 16 bit – Superscalar
– instruction cache, prefetch few instructions – Multiple instructions executed in parallel
– 8088 (8 bit external bus) used in first IBM PC
• Pentium Pro
• 80286
– I
Increasedd superscalar
l organization
i i
– 16 Mbyte memory addressable
– up from 1Mb – Aggressive register renaming
• 80386 – branch prediction
– 32 bit – data flow analysis
– Support for multitasking – speculative execution

Pentium Evolution (3) Intel Performance

• Pentium II
– MMX technology
– graphics,
graphics video & audio processing
• Pentium III
– Additional floating point instructions for 3D graphics
• Pentium 4
– Further floating point and multimedia enhancements
• Itanium
– 64 bit RISC processor
• Itanium 2
– Hardware enhancements to increase speed
source:
Stallings textbook

COMP375 9
History of Computing 8/24/2010

Intel Performance Incentive for Dual Core

8000.0
• Intel reports that underclocking a single
7000.0
core by 20 percent saves half the power
6000.0 while sacrificing just 13 percent of the
Clock
5000.0 performance.
4000.0
Architecture

3000.0
Architectural
2000.0
Improvements
1000.0

0.0
1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2002 2003

Source: IEEE Spectrum April, 2008

COMP375 10