Intel Pentium 4 (Midpoint of Moore's Law)
The turn of the millennium processing power.
Explore this event on the interactive timeline →The Intel Pentium 4 was released, representing the peak of single-core consumer CPU speeds before the industry shifted to multi-core designs. It serves as a perfect mid-point on the Singularity timeline to track the velocity of Moore's Law.
Key Numbers
- Transistors (1971)
- 2,300
- Transistors (2000)
- 42,000,000
Verified Facts
- By 2000, engineers had shrunk transistors down to 180 nanometers, allowing them to pack 42 million transistors onto a single piece of silicon.
- This represented a staggering 18,000x increase in transistor density compared to the original Intel 4004 (2,300 transistors) released just three decades prior.
- It pushed clock speeds ever higher (eventually past 3 GHz); the first consumer chips over 1 GHz were actually the AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium III, both in March 2000.