Ivy Bridge, Pentium 4 Willamette 1.7GHz and Mobile, IE 2.0 for Mac (PCGH-Retro April 23)

…1970: One of the few hard drive manufacturers still remaining, more than forty years later, is founded. Alvin B. Phillips, a former Motorola employee, fills out the necessary paperwork this April 23 and gets the stamps on it from the authorities. General Digital is founded. The company initially sold test equipment for checking the function of MOS chips (Metal Oxide Semiconductors) and processors for pocket calculators. It was not until the early 1980s that the company, which had meanwhile been renamed Western Digital and had already gone bankrupt for a short time in 1976, took the step into storage technology with the FD1771.

…1996: Today, what is probably the greatest web browser of all time is being launched: Internet Explorer 2.0 – at least on the Mac (from Mac OS 7.0.1) and actually as version 2.1. The Windows version for 95 OSR2 and NT 4.0 had already appeared the year before. But why is Internet Explorer 2.x the greatest browser in the world? A look at our gallery will tell you!

..2001: The 1.7 gigahertz version of the Pentium 4 comes onto the market. It’s the first clock stage of the new Pentium 4 CPUs, based on the Netburst architecture, which can easily relegate the aging Pentium 3 to places. The new flagship initially costs 352 US dollars (in quantities of 1,000) and, according to Intel, should have benchmark values ​​of 573 (SPECint_base2000) and 598 (SPECfp_base2000). A small snag at that time: the Pentium 4 CPUs, which depended on high bandwidths, still needed the i850 chipset for two-channel Rambus DRAM (RDRAM). This was not only expensive (so were the board and CPU) but also scarcely available.

..2002: Intel presents the mobile version of the Pentium 4: Starting today, the Mobile Pentium 4M is preparing to drain the batteries of the folding computers (despite SpeedStep and a TD of 35 watts in record time at the time). Initially there are models from 1.4 to 1.8 GHz at prices from 198 to 637 US dollars (as always for quantities of 1,000). After all, the Mobile Pentium 4 is no longer based on the old Willamette core, but on the more modern Northwood core, which is already manufactured in 0.13 micrometer structures.

..2012: Ten years after the mobile P4M, Intel has learned quite a bit when it comes to energy saving and is bringing umpteen times more powerful processors with astonishingly low waste heat, even in the area of ​​non-portable desktop PCs. On April 23, 2012, the Ivy Bridge series was launched, in the production of which Intel uses 3D transistors. All other details about the new efficiency kings in the processor market can be found in our well sorted launch article on Intel’s Ivy Bridge.