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The PC Heritage
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Bandwidth CPU
I/O
Memory
1987 Time 1995
The basic desktop PC has looked pretty constant on the outside for the past 10 to
15 years. But inside, the PC technology has been moving fast and this pace is
accelerating.
Microprocessor technology has fueled the growth and CPU performance has, over
the last ten years, increased 400 fold. Of course, we want to deliver this increased
performance directly to the user's eyes, hands and more recently ears. We want
CPU performance to translate directly into system performance. Just increasing the
performance of the CPU creates bottlenecks in the system design. These
bottlenecks need to be removed so that we can unleash the latest capability within
the CPU.
Over the past 1-2 years, the PC industry adopted the PCI IO subsystem to relieve
the IO bottleneck.
Increased Pentium processor performance is revealing the next system bottleneck --
the memory subsystem.