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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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In January 1995, after many years of legal wrangling, Intel and AMD

settled and decided to end the licensing agreements. As a result of this

settlement, AMD chips are no longer compatible with sockets or

motherboards made for Intel CPUs—even though in some cases the chips

look similar. Today, if you want to use an AMD CPU, you must purchase a

motherboard designed for AMD CPUs. If you want to use an Intel CPU, you

must purchase a motherboard designed for Intel CPUs. You have a choice:

Intel or AMD.

Model Names

Intel and AMD differentiate product lines by using different product names,

and these names have changed over the years. For a long time, Intel used

Pentium for its flagship model, just adding model numbers to show

successive generations—Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, and so on. AMD

used the Athlon brand in a similar fashion.

Most discussions on PC CPUs focus on four end-product lines: desktop

PC, budget PC, portable PC, and server computers. Table 3-1 displays many

of the current product lines and names.

Table 3-1 Current Intel and AMD Product Lines and Names

Microarchitecture

Intel and AMD continually develop faster, smarter, and generally more

capable CPUs. In general, each company comes up with a major new design,

called a microarchitecture, about every three years. They try to minimize the

number of model names in use, however, most likely for marketing purposes.

This means that they release CPUs labeled as the same model, but the CPUs

inside can be very different from earlier versions of that model. Both

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