16 Chapter 2: Intel Architecture Basics
has had the benefit of fundamental revision (gradually leaving legacy behind),
BIOS has grown through accretion on the same architecture. Table 2.1 illustrates
some example advances.
Table 2.1:
Advancement s s s s
CPU bit internal
bit xternal
bit
Virtual memory,
Pentium, P,
Dual Processors
b extensions
Pentium
®
, Intel
®
Xeon, bigger caches,
multi threading
b processing,
b extensions
Intel
®
Atom, intel
®
Core, multiple
cores, little cores
(again)
Buses bit ISA Microchannel†,
XT, EISA, PCI†,
USB†
PCI-X†, PCI Express†,
USB
USB, Light Peak
Memory – KB down,
KB expan-
sion PROMs,
EEPROMs
EDO, BEDO,
SDRAM, RDRAM,
DDR, NOR, FWH
DDR,
DDR,
NAND,
SPI
Lower power DDR,
DDR,
SSDs, PCIe NVMe
Video MDA for text, EGA Color, VGA,
SVGA,
XVGA
DVI, HDMI, DP eDP, K and soon
K
Graphics CGA to TV D, D D enhancements GPUs
Audio PC speaker, Ch.
PWM
SoundBlaster†,
AC’
Intel
®
HD Audio Lower power and
codec enhance-
ments
Storage Cassette tape, KB
with ¼-inch
floppy drives
HDDs, mega-
bytes, with IDE
and UDMA, PATA
USB, SATA, SATA,
SSDs,
gigabytes
Terabytes, SDIO,
MMC, SATA, ONFI
NAND
OS PC-DOS .
and above
Windows† .,
Windows
Windows
Windows NT
Linux†
Windows
Windows XP,
Windows ,
Windows , .,
Windows , full
protected mode
operating systems,
Linux .. and
above
Firmware KB ASM BIOS
KB BASIC
Up to MB EFI
and legacy
MB and MB UEFI
and legacy
MB, offload
engines