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Intel 4004 Turns 30
fm6 writes: "Just the thing to remind an aging geek of his mortality: this week marks the 30th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor. Another historical page here, and a column bemoaning the absence of dancing in the streets here. Trivia -- why 4004? Because it was the fourth component in a 4-bit chipset." You might want to read the interview with Ted Hoff from a few months ago, it's pretty informative about the origins of the 4004.
Is it still in production anywhere and what's the current record for overclocking one of these babies?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Unless you can port linux to this, why do we care? This is slashdot, we have standards!
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
Maybe some day, when I get tired of making small electronic curcuits explode, I'll get one of these and build an SAP (simple as posssible) computer out of one, just for jollies, assuming I still have eyes left.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
4004 Not found.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
"this week marks the 30th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the very first microprocessor. "
What?
I thought Microsoft made the first microprocessor after purchasing the idea from Al Gore.
But, well, if they say so on Slashdot, it MUST be true.
-Shaunak.
Perhaps no overclocking and Linux, but -vice versa- there exists a 4004 software emulator for Linux (e.g., i4004em).
The 4004 was certainly a significant milestone, but I think the 8080 launched in 1974 was truly the "Model T" of the computer industry. That was the chip that was general enough to really run everything. It was the basis for all the microcomputers and the CP/M operating system.
In fact, I believe Zilog Z80s (an 8080 clone with some extra instructions -- around 1977?) are still being manufactured as controllers in various products.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The 8008 was twice as powerful as the 4004.
If only naming conventions could make that much sense today . . .
At Intel, they call it the Aging Microprocessor Depression.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I remember stopping by the Intel booth at the National Computer
Convention in New York in 1971-1973 timeframe (can't remember exact
date).
My Dad had put me on a train to New York to expand my teenage
horizons. I returned with 4004 and 8008 data sheets and some chip
samples. I spent the next few months dreaming up what I was going to
do with the chips and drawing schematics.
I never did build anything with them, because owning a terminal and a
modem was more important to me at that time than a having a uP - if I
had had my priorities straight, I might be famous now [grin]. I did end up
designing and building 3 different video terminals, though.
Thanks for the memories.
-Rick
about the 4004 development, right here - they were Intel's customer at the time.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
According to The Chronology of Personal Computers (1969-1971):
The first production run of the 4004 was in December 1970. Admittably the production run had to be tossed due to mask errors, but 2nd and 3rd production runs in Jan and Feb of 71 were more sucessful (the 2nd run still had errors). Sample calculator designs were shipped to Busicom in March 71 - comprising 4 4001s, 2 4002s, 2 4003s and 1 4001.
The only relevance of November 71 that I can find, was that the MCS-4 microcomputer based on the 400x series was released. But thats not the microprocessor itself.
One thing that stands out, is that Intel have had production problems and bugs since day 1 :)
CS and other hobbyists get all sniffly for the good old days. I was having a huge amount of fun a couple weeks ago hacking a 6502. That we even recall such an occasion should suggest to you that so long as some of us are alive, remembering and playing around with such artifacts defines who we are.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is lesser known because the designer, Ray Holt, only received clearance to publish information about it in 1998.
I'm sure i'll miss a few but here goes,
Sorry the formatting is poor due to the lameness filter.
4004
4040
8008 8080 Z80 (Zilog) Z8000 (16-bit)
8086 8085 Z800 (Z80 extension)
80186
80286
386SX also IA468 (still born new archi)
386DX
486SX
486DX
486DX-2
486DX-4
Pentium, AMD K5, 586 (cyrix)
P-MMX P-PRO K6 686 Win chip
P-2 Celeron K6-2 686MX Win Chip II
P-III Cel(2) K6-3 ?
Coppermine Athlon Cyrix III
T-bird
P4 Tualatin Athlon XP
I've missed out the Xeons, and of course all the
microprocessors that didn't have some lineage
to the orignal 4004. Although the instruction
sets changed a lot particular from the 4004 to
8080 and from the 8080 to 8086, there is enough
similarity in there style and content to claim
that your Pentium 4 or Athlon XP is directly
descended from the 4004. It makes you wonder
if Intel can really expect to shift people from
the x86 arch to a totally new one.
here is my working Simon test/prototype board - I'd love to make a 'finished' one someday (given time, $$$, and a better, faster stepping relay).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Still utterly unused, in anti-static foam, three Intel 4004s. My roommate decided to start collecting old CPUs, and I managed to find these, free. I still want to make a very simple blinking-lights toy with one of these, and proudly put the "Intel Inside" sticker on the box :)
:)
Goddess, this brings back memories! Hanging out at the library, using their terminal to call (at 300 baud, that was *fast!*) the HP-2000 system at Harper College, and chatting with friends who had serious money (Jeff actually *built* an Imsai 8080 unit, though he got many of the parts free by schmoozing the sales person).
30 years, gads. Back then, having even a floppy disk was a wild dream, now we have 100+ gigabyte hard disks. Back then, having one whole K of ram was heaven - last week, I bought 512 meg for $20. Back then, the clock oscillator could be made from a simple L-C circuit, and it ran several hundred kilohertz. Now, it's a PLL-controlled internal oscillator, using an external crystal oscillator, all running at frequencies that make a microwave oven look slow.
All this, in thirty years. That *really* makes me feel old
Lemon curry?
In those days you couldn't put enough transitors
on a chip to make a descent CPU core for a
high end system, so what people did was join
a lot of bit-slices together. A bit-slice was
a 1,2 or 4 bit segment of an ALU +with instruction
decoders, which could be chained together with
carry bits outputs and inputs to make a 16 or 32 or whatever bit CPU core.
Here is a link that has a simple graph from the 4004 to the P7 (Merced Pentium II) that shows how Intel has obeyed Moore's law (at least until the P2.)
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
Intel 4004 Turns 30
:P
from the middle-aged dept.
I'm 33 and that ain't middle-aged. I take offence!
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Intel summed up the "speed" [sic] difference between a 4004 and a Pentium 4 with an interesting assume-this-basketball-represents-the-sun-like analogy: "Intel's first microprocessor, the 4004, ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), compared to the Pentium® 4 processor's initial speed of 1.5 gigahertz (1.5 billion hertz). If automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from San Francisco to New York in about 13 seconds."
There's a Dutch auction over at eBay with 100 of these little babies at $10 a piece. Just search for "Intel 4004". The date code on the picture shows that they were made in 1975, so they're not the ceramic and gold ones. Auction ends Thursday evening. Don't outbid me, or I'll mod you down.
But imagine a beowulf cl...
.13 micron technology, making them a tiny fraction of their original size ? Throw down a hundred of them on a board and have it run a massively parallelized app of some sort at 25 cents per node.
Hey, seriously, wouldn't it be groovalicious to have a bunch of 4004's produced using today's
Why the hell not ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The Z8000 was available in four flavors:
Z8001 Segmented (8MB address space)
Z8002 Non-Segmented (64KB address space)
Z8003 Segmented (8MB address space), Virtual Memory Support
Z8004 Non-Segmented (8MB address space) Virtual Memory Support
The Segmented CPUs had a flag bit that allowed them to run in non-segmented mode.
The Z8000 was much closer architecturally to the 68K family than the Z80/x86 family. It had 16 orthagonal, 16-bit registers (R0-R15), which could be paired up as 8 32-bit registers (RR0-RR14). R15 (non-segmented mode) or RR14 (segmented mode) was the stack pointer.
The opcode names were similar to the Z80, but the architecture was vastly different. The Z8000 series was popular in embedded and military applications. Unfortunately, I don't believe Zilog ever built the Z8070 FPU for the processor, which also hindered it's acceptance as a mainstream CPU.
Anyone out there remember the Zilog ZEUS System 8000? It was a Unix System III variant.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Anyway, a conveyor belt dropped bottles from a wheel going around (a horizontal disc) onto straight rows of pins, also moving. Required some trigonometry and timing, especially when starting the machines up. It was controlled by a 4004, the code lived in 7 256-byte uv eprom dip chips.
We had an assembler written in Fortran, it ran on either a Honeywell 1648 or a Dec PDP-10 (both notable machines in ARPANET/Internet history). When I got there, they used to type the hex assembler output into the prom burner by hand! Burning the 7 proms took 18 hours of person time, and was error-prone. I wrote some code to do the eprom download automatically, with a paper tape or something, cut the process down to an hour and a half, made some folks pretty happy.