PS/2 Standard Launches, AMD K6 and Intel’s Atom Introduced (PCGH-Retro, April 2)

…1987: The IBM PC had given its inventor enormous market power – but he suffered from a problem: other manufacturers brought their own IBM-compatible computers onto the market, which were significantly cheaper than the originals with similar equipment and IBM snatched market shares away. The same applied to the newer versions XT and AT. With the new Personal System 2, PS/2 for short, which will be presented on April 2nd and uses Intel’s 80386 processor for the first time, everything is supposed to change: The PC gets a new system bus called Microchannel. Anyone who wants to use it has to pay high license fees to IBM – this is intended to prevent cheap replicas from flooding the market again. Other innovations include a floppy disk drive for 3.5-inch floppies and new interfaces such as the PS/2 ports named after the system. But the plan doesn’t work out, competitors like Compaq are offering their own new systems with a 386 CPU and the old ISA bus, later also with alternatives like EISA or VESA local bus. Instead of returning to old strength with the PS/2, IBM is losing further market power – and from now on compatibility is the top priority on the PC market.

…1997: For years AMD only copied Intel processors, only with the K5 did the chip manufacturer dare to design its own x86 CPU. However, this came out too late and was too slow to compete against Intel’s Pentium might and the Cyrix 6×86. Only with the K6, which AMD will present on April 2nd, does the Pentium MMX have a worthy opponent: in games and other floating-point-heavy applications the Pentium stays ahead, but thanks to the high integer performance the K6 is more than just a respectable success, which finally positions AMD as number two behind Intel. The K6 supports MMX and runs at up to 233, in later revisions even up to 300 MHz; its architecture is based on that of Nexgen’s Nx686, which AMD took over the year before. With the new editions K6-2 and K6-3, AMD extends the life of Socket 7 for several years – until the K7 aka Athlon is due for its own socket for the first time.

…2008: At the in-house developer conference IDF in 2008, Intel presented the Atom architecture, trimmed down to low power consumption. The processor, which was initially up to 1.6 GHz, should pave the way for mobile devices and can in fact give the new netbook device class a temporary boost before it has to assert itself against tablets such as Ipda… no, Ipad or smartphones.