| Year | Processor | Cycle Time | Comments |
|---|
| 1971 | Intel 4004 | 750 KHz | First simple 4-bit CPU on a single chip |
| 1972 | Intel 8008 | 0.8 MHz | Simple 8-bit CPU manages Monitors and Controllers |
| 1974 | Intel 8080 | 2 MHz | 8-bit (some 16 bit) mostly for hand-held calculators |
| 1976 | Intel 8086 | 10 MHz | 16-bit CPU - no FP, cache, or memory protection logic, IBM PC |
| 1985 | Intel 80386 | 40 MHz | 32-bit CPU - no FP, cache, IBM PC-AT |
| 1991 | AMD Am386 | 40 MHz | First real competitor to the Intel 8086 family |
| 1993 | DEC Alpha 21164 | 266 MHz | +L2$ |
| 1993 | AMD Am486 | 40 MHz | Cheaper than Intel 80386 |
| 1993 | Intel Pentium P5 | 66 MHz | IBM Personal Computer |
| 1995 | AMD AM5x86 | 160 MHz | Slightly better than Pentium on Benchmarks |
| 1998 | AMD K6-2 | 570 MHz | Cheaper than Intel Pentium II |
| 1999 | AMD K6-III | 550 MHz | Competed with Intel Pentium II, but Intel released Pentium III |
| 2001 | AMD Athlon XP | 1733 MHz | First Gigahertz! Copper wiring + silicon shrink |
| 2001 | Transmeta Crusoe | 400 MHz | VLIW w/ virtualization to support X86, etc. |
| 2003 | AMD Athlon 64 | 3.2 GHz | Competed with Intel Pentium 4 |
| 2004 | Intel Pentium 4F | 3.8 GHz | IBM ThinkCenter |
| 2007 | AMD Athlon II | 3.5 GHz | Aimed at the budget to mid-range market |
| 2008 | Intel Core i7 | 3.3 GHz | Lenovo Thinkpad + multicore |
| 2010 | AMD FX | 5.0 GHz | High end PC competing with Intel Core |
| 2014 | Intel Core i7 extreme | 3.5 GHz | Lenovo Ultrabook |
| 2017 | Intel Core i9 7900X | 3.3 GHz | 10 core |
| 2017 | AMD Ryzen | 5.0 GHz | Improved cache and memory latencies |
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