In 1978, a “hand-held” was a transistor radio, computers were gigantic mainframe, immobile machines, and the Internet was a project by a handful of research scientists. Twenty-five years later, Intel Corporation is marking its 25^th year of delivering silicon products based on Intel architecture, and data from industry analyst firm Mercury Research indicates that the company has now shipped more than 1 billion x86 CPUs since that time.

Based on combined desktop, laptop and server shipments, Mercury Research calculates that Intel reached this milestone in April, roughly 25 years after the debut of the first 8086 microprocessor on June 8, 1978. Intel's silicon is found in hand-held computing devices, desktop and mobile PCs, servers, networking and communication gear and machines such as point-of-sale terminals and medical equipment.

Mercury Research calculates that the next billion x86 CPUs could ship far faster than the first billion processors and could come as early as 2007.

Introduced in 1978, the original 16-bit 8086 chip contained only 29 000 transistors and ran at 5MHz. The original IBM PC shipped with a version of the 8086, the 8088 in 1982, ushering in a new age of PC computing. In comparison, today’s Pentium 4 processor contains 55 million transistors and runs more than 600 times faster at 3.06GHz.