According to Mercury Research, Intel produced its one billionth processor sometime during April.
This milestone has been reached in a year that marks the 25th Anniversary of Intel Architecture.

 

Introduced in 1978, the original 16-bit 8086 chip contained only 29,000 transistors and ran at 5 MHz.
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.

 

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.

 

More information @ Intel