Intel X86 and ARM's battle for the "architecture king"

In 1968, Gordon Moore, Noyce and others who "left" Fairchild Semiconductor spent $15,000 to buy the right to use the Intel name from IN-TELCO, and Intel Corporation was officially born.

Intel's development direction at the beginning was memory, and a new memory product code-named 3101 helped the company achieve profitability in the second year of its establishment. However, the good times did not last long. Competition in the memory market became increasingly fierce, and Intel's development encountered a bottleneck, so it decided to shift its main business to microprocessors.

It was this decision of Intel that gave birth to the X86 architecture. On June 8, 1978, Intel released a new 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, which used an architecture called the X86 architecture. In fact, the 8086 processor did not cause much sensation when it was first released, but the X86 architecture it brought became an industry standard, and even today's powerful multi-core processors can still be seen with the X86 architecture.

Seeing this, do you question what the three symbols X86 stand for? In fact, X86 is a standard number abbreviation for Intel's general-purpose computer series, referring to some computer language instruction sets executed by specific microprocessors, defining the basic usage rules of the chip.

After more than 40 years of development, the X86 family has continued to grow. Starting with the 8086 processor, Intel's 286, 386, 486, 586, P1, P2, P3, and P4 all adopted the X86 architecture; at the same time, the areas covered by this architecture have gradually expanded, from the initial desktop computers to notebooks, servers, supercomputers, writing equipment and other fields.

It can be said that Intel and the X86 architecture complement each other. Intel invented the X86 architecture and continuously improved its ecosystem, while the X86 architecture helped Intel become famous.

However, the X86 architecture itself also has disadvantages such as variable instruction length, lack of registers, memory access, floating point stack, 4GB limit and larger chips. Of course, Intel itself has also realized that the X86 architecture limits the further improvement of CPU performance and is exploring more possibilities. Some people in the industry even say that the era of Intel's X86 architecture hegemony will eventually pass, and the ARM architecture is the direction of future development.