The 4004 CPU was the forerunner of all of today’s Intel offerings and, to date, all PC processors have been based on the original Intel designs. The first chip used in an IBM PC was Intel’s 8088. This was not, at the time it was chosen, the best available CPU, in fact Intel’s own 8086 was more powerful and had been released earlier. The 8088 was chosen for reasons of economics: its 8-bit data bus required less costly motherboards than the 16-bit 8086.

Also, at the time that the original PC was designed, most of the interface chips available were intended for use in 8-bit designs. These early processors would have nowhere near sufficient power to run today’s software.

This generational list of Intel processors attempts to present all of Intel's processors from the pioneering 4-bit 4004 (1971) to the present high-end offerings. Concise technical data is given for each product. The Intel 4004 used MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) transistors. What has been the transistor types used in Intel processors onwards from the 4004 to 8085 to the x86 family of instruction set. Following up their 8086 and 8088, Intel released the 80186, 80286 and, in 1985, the 32-bit 80386, cementing their PC market dominance with the processor family's backwards compatibility. The integrated microprocessor memory management unit (MMU) was developed by Childs et al. Of Intel, and awarded US patent number 4,442,484. Desktop processors Nehalem microarchitecture (1st generation) 'Lynnfield' (45 nm) All models support: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), Intel 64, XD bit (an NX bit implementation), Intel VT-x, Turbo Boost, Smart Cache.

The table below shows the generations of processors from Intel’s first generation 8088/86 in the late 1970s to the eighth-generation AMD Athlon 64, launched in the autumn of 2003:

Chronological Evolution of CPUs

Evolution Of Intel Pentium Processors

Intel Processors Over The Years - Businessnewsdaily.com

Type/ Generation	Year	Data/ Address bus width	Level 1 Cache (KB)	Memory bus speed (MHz)	Internal clock speed (MHz)
8088/ First	1979	8/20 bit	None	4.77-8	4.77-8
8086/ Spinworks singapore. First	1978	16/20 bit	None	4.77-8	4.77-8
80286/ Dansrue cassette to mp3 converter mac software. Second	1982	16/24 bit	None	6-20	6-20
80386DX/ Third	1985	32/32 bit	None	16-33	16-33
80386SX/ Third	1988	16/32 bit	8	16-33	16-33
80486DX/ Fourth	1989	32/32 bit	8	25-50	25-50
80486SX/ Fourth	1989	32/32 bit	8	25-50	25-50
80486DX2/ Fourth	1992	32/32 bit	8	25-40	50-80
80486DX4/ Fourth	1994	32/32 bit	8+8	25-40	75-120
Pentium/ Fifth	1993	64/32 bit	8+8	60-66	60-200
MMX/ Fifth	1997	64/32 bit	16+16	66	166-233
Pentium Pro/ Sixth	1995	64/32 bit	8+8	66	150-200
Pentium II/ Sixth	1997	64/32 bit	16+16	66	233-300
Pentium II/ Sixth	1998	64/32 bit	16+16	66/100	300-450
Pentium III/ Sixth	1999	64/32 bit	16+16	100	450-1.2GHz
AMD Athlon/ Seventh	1999	64/32 bit	64+64	266	500-2.2GHz
Pentium 4/ Seventh	2000	64/32 bit	12+8	400	1.4GHz-3.6GHz
AMD Athlon 64/ Eighth	2003	64/64 bit	64+64	400	2GHz-2.4GHz

Evolution Of Intel Processor