March 2016
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
12h 59m
English
This chapter covers
Only a few decades ago, many large computer hardware companies had their own fabrication facilities and maintained competitive advantage by making specialty processors, but as costs rose, fewer companies produced the volume of chips needed to remain profitable. Merchant chip fabricators emerged, able to produce general-purpose processors at scale, and drove down costs significantly. Having just a few computer chip manufacturers encouraged standardized desktop and server platforms around the Intel x86 instruction set, and eventually led to commodity ...
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