References: CPE380 Introduction (Chapter 1)
The introductory slides I
used in the lectures are the primary reference.
To familiarize everyone with the "guts" of a computer, I like to
begin with a guided tour through the parts of a PC. There are
lots of similar walk-throughs available on the WWW and
elsewhere. I've also collected a few overview
diagrams showing what's inside a modern PC and processor.
The book gives a reasonable introduction and defines a lot of
terminology; you should be aware of those terms. You also
should recall physically what these things look like from that
very first day when we opened a PC. The following links provide
additional history references.
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The "History of Computing" assembled by the IEEE Computer
Society in 1996. Of particular interest is the timeline at
given here. You might not be able to get into that without
using EZProxy, like this.
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Another good history site is The Computer Museum
History Center. This one only goes to 1994.
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Blinkenlights has a cute little summary of the history of
personal computing.
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Intel's Processor Hall of Fame discusses only their chips,
but is a nice little slice of the history of microprocessors.
(The Intel 4004 is generally accepted as the first microprocessor.)
Note that Intel frequently re-arranges their site, so the link
above breaks on a regular basis... and for Fall 2009, it is
broken again, this time without a trace! As an alternative, The Evolution of a Revolution PDF is pretty similar.
Here is another nice reference (although getting details
takes a lot of clicks from there).
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Another goodie from Intel is:
From Sand to Silicon: the Making of a Chip.
Hopefully, it will not move soon.... ;-)
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On a more personal note, when supercomputer manufacturers
started dropping like flies, I wrote Is Parallel processing Dead?,
which gives my biased view of how a bunch of parallel computer
companies imploded as parallel processing became mainstream.
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Tom's Hardware maintains a very impressive collection of info
about processors; it began as
"The Mother of All CPU Charts," summarizing 111 processors and their
performance on 3330 benchmarks (30 for each processor). The
ultimate table of processor specs also was there, listing clock
rates, transistor complexities, die sizes, power, etc.
Here is one version.
Computer Organization and Design.