Slashdot Mirror
Intel Releases 4004 Microprocessor Schematics
mcpublic writes, "Intel is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004, their very first microprocessor, by releasing the chip's schematics, maskworks, and users manual. This historic revelation was championed by Tim McNerney, who designed the Intel Museum's newest interactive exhibit. Opening on November 15th, the exhibit will feature a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004. To create a giant Busicom 141-PF calculator for the museum, 'digital archaeologists' first had to reverse-engineer the 4004 schematics and the Busicom software. Their re-drawn and verified schematics plus an animated 4004 simulator written in Java are available at the team's unofficial 4004 web site. Digital copies of the original Intel engineering documents are available by request from the Intel Corporate Archives. Intel first announced their 2,300-transistor 'micro-programmable computer on a chip' in Electronic News on November 15, 1971, proclaiming 'a new era of integrated electronics.' Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?"
At first, I thought this was about Intel's new quad-core processors. How wrong I was. :P
Wouldn't it be cool, though, if Intel did name the quad-core chips the 4004 series?
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
With a better FPU and a faster front-side bus, that chip could possibly be useful.
As it is, I don't think it can even run a stripped down 1.0 Linux kernel.
I can't say I miss the days of the nibble and CPUs measured in kilohertz.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.
And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.
Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?
Who would have guessed chips produced 35 years later, would still inherit the brain-damaged ISA of the 4004. (OK, so the ISA probably didn't look too bad when it was for the 4004)
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The 4004 tic tac toe hardware from their unofficial site looks wicked ... http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jsweinrich/. I never thought I'd be drooling over electronic tic tac toe!
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Ah, back in the good old days when 640K _was_ enough for anyone...
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
could it run minix?
m10
pasted from http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/4004/index.html> :
The first microprocessor in history, Intel 4004 was a 4-bit CPU designed for usage in calculators, or, as we say now, designed for "embedded applications". Clocked at 740 KHz, the 4004 executed up to 92,000 single word instructions per second, could access 4 KB of program memory and 640 bytes of RAM. Although the Intel 4004 was perfect fit for calculators and similar applications it was not very suitable for microcomputer use due to its somewhat limited architecture. The 4004 lacked interrupt support, had only 3-level deep stack, and used complicated method of accessing the RAM. Some of these shortcomings were fixed in the 4004 successor - Intel 4040.
wipe wipe
"early gang bang porn, log it"
wipe wipe
"early vivid movie, looks like Jemma was young and need the money, log it"
wipe wipe
"some girl on girl stuff, log it" wipe wipe
"holy crap I am taking this home"
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Can you really call it reverse engineering if you got the schematics?
Looks like somebody's just jealous they didn't make FP.
This will cause a social revolution in Afghanistan. People will now be able to build their own 4004-based, and use them to download movies and MP3s against the will of the Taliban...
http://outcampaign.org/
Intel patented the 4004, which they tried to use to enforce a patent on the "microprocessor" generally - though Gilbert Hyatt eventually won it, 20 years later.
Does Intel still have a working patent protecting the 4004? And doesn't that patent include the schematics? What's the point of patenting an invention if other inventors can't tell whether they're reinventing what you've protected from "infringement"?
--
make install -not war
The 8008 was the real start of the micro-computing revolution. The Scelbi Mark 8H was the first system to really draw people's attention. By the time they figured out what might be done with it, the 8080's were released. The Altair was built, BillyG and friends wrote a basic interpreter in 4Kbytes, and the rest is history.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
That thing about the shuttle boosters would have been perfect for "connections". Which was a PBS program about connections between two seemingly disparete items
The 4004 has less than 2300 transistors, the lowest end Spartan FPGA (since I don't see the exact part # on there) is 40,000 gates (which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 transistors).
You could do TTT in the FPGA on that board with room to spare. You could probably re-implement the 4004 ISA itself and his glue logic inside that FPGA.
This
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but as I recall the 4004 wasn't a single-chip microprocessor. Depending on the chip set used, it took from two to four chips to put together a working microprocessor.
Intel's first shur-nuff single-chip microprocessor was the gosh-awful, horribly slow 8008. They took so long to get past the 8008 and the only marginally better 8080 that Zilog brought out a much-improved, instruction set compatible version, the Z80, which dominated the microprocessor market for a number of years.
The first true computer-on-a-chip was Motorola's 6800, but they muffed their opportunity by waiting too long to market it and priced it too high. Worse, some employees stole their chip masks and modified the design, which they sold (cheaply, compared to the 8008 and 6800) as the 6502, which was adopted for the Apple. Motorola sued and got the 6502, which they continued to sell, but lost years of opportunity and the chance to dominate the whole market.
Snopes says not quite. Though the lesson of the story is true and profound.
You are a spineless, soulless, slimy, worthless shell of a human being. You make me sick. Consider posting something worthwhile, yourself.
"Dude, my first computer had 256 Bytes (not K -- *BYTES*) of memory (Built form the September 1976 issue of Popular Electronics -- Build Your Own Microcomputer, based on the COSMAC 1802 processor). 640K was beyond freaking imagination."
Pfft! Youngsters. I had to wire-wrap my own tubes and hand-spin the drum
I recall my father coming home from work (chemistry lecturer in higher education) and saying that he'd got access to calculators. A few weeks later I went over with him and played for a while on a Busicom, nixie tubes and all. This would be about 1972, I think, guessing from which building it was in.
Thanks for reminding me that I wasn't 8 when I started learning DOS (before the 486 era)! And then I haven't had a life until I met my wife a few years ago :)
Debian will probably catch up to it in a year or two.
Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents.
Well I, for one, welcome our gigantic calculator overlords. And remind them that as an internet personality, I could be useful in rounding up citizen's to slave away in their underground button-pushing dungeons.
"Ooo, Check out the hanging chad on that one!"
Er, I guess it worked better for gay porn.
I'll shut up now...
How many IP Core equivalents of the 4004 would fit onto the Xilinx Spartan FPGA? Any guesses?
Just curious. Didn't see what type of Spartan it is, nor do I know the complexity of implementing the 4004.
... only to encourage sales of dual core 8008... ;o)
.
They've got a few Ken Starlings heading departments and a reportedly missing Federation Timeship Aeon sequestered under the buildings.
Janeway will be BACK: for the timeship, the deep-fried alien jerky, AND the KFC chickens. And, she'll pick up a few humons from the White House to supply the Vidiians, cuz she's in NO mood to donate organs today. Fixing the timeline is a byatch!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Intel releases 4004 schematics? Man, that's a lot.
Oh, wait...
Like this?
- each-other-024002.php
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/circuits-discover
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
35 years ago this was the best personal computer you could get. Now the same company is bringing us processors which can simulate the entire thing in an interpreted language using a fraction of one percent of the available processing power.
Even though another company would have done the same if Intel hadn't, they deserve some kudos for getting in there first and staying on top. No-one would have thought they'd be able to push x86 to where it is today.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
where are the blinkenlights ?
A custom DSBGA chip simulating a mosfet and including a driver for a tiny SMD LED could have shown the state of each individual gate.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
A practical application cannot be found
The reason to buy this processor you were looking for might have had its name changed, or never existed.
-----------------
Please try the following:
* If you asked your boss to upgrade to this, make sure you you mentioned you're willing to give up your Christmas Bonus.
* Open the www.sex.com home page, & take a lunch break.
* Click the Back button & get back to work.
* Click the Search button to look for a new job.
Intel 4004 - Reason not found
The fucking boss.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
2 to the power 64 = 18446744073709551616
Which should be the number of memory addresses assuming that each memory address holds 8-bits.
Means that 18446744073709551616 / 1024 = 18014398509481984 kilobytes of memory
Then 18014398509481984 / 1024 = 17592186044416 megabytes of memory
Dividing this by 1024 leaves 17179869184 gigabytes of available RAM which seems unfeasibly large.
... for a grinding machine control in 1972. As I recall, the assembler ran on a commercial time-sharing system. The one I used was a PDP-10, but I suspect the assembler was written in FORTRAN, so it would run on any system of the time. I made it work on the prototype board, but the 8008 was out before it could be considered for production, so I ported it.
Doesn't run Java.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
With these schematics, will the 4004 be a good test case for the proposed circuit printers?
Revive the Constitution.
Fred Huettig, the 4004 museum project's lead EE, reports that with no optimization whatsoever, his FPGA implementation of the Intel 4004 runs at 100MHz, and takes up about 10% of an Altera Cyclone II 8K, including all the RAMs and ROMs needed to simulate the Busicom 141-PF calculator.
...I want the MOS 6581!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Pretty much everyone.
Back then, "new era" was really a new era, "innovative" was really innovative and "breakthrough", well, you know the drill.
That was before monopolies' newspeak we use nowadays, when you totally copy a concept and call yourself a pioneer, while threatening to destroy others who are really inventive (or making deals to get subservience in exchange for no aggression).
Those were the golden days, when people made great advances and pioneered new industries (like Gary Kildall and Jobs/Woz did). Everybody was free to be an inventor and very few (RMS & Gates) realized how things would change.
This same pioneer spirit returned a few years ago when Linux came up. Don't let the same dark forces take over again. Who knows if we'll be lucky again to have another RMS to warn and help us this time...
I wonder if they had to get government permission to release this since it was originally released to them as alien technology from the US government?
Most chips and circuits boards manufactured before 1978-1980 were drawn or taped by hand. By taping, I mean you pasted a mockup from thin drafting tapes, then photo-reduced them to circuit boards and chips. I did a fair share of them myself. There was a certain artistic statisfaction in doing this, somewhat like rebuilding your own car engine or remodeling a room in your house. I would dream of taping circuits in my sleep as my busy subconsious worked out upcoming issues, much like my brain computes animation grphics now.
Computer-aided circuit design allowed getting past the 10,000 gate level with much less error. The results arent as artistic, but are a lot cheaper to implement and more accurate. CAD required interative computing and a minimum of vector graphics display, both possible by the late 1970s. Kind of incestuous: using computers to design bigger computers, with a dash of human intervention.
My Dad was the first guy in Seattle to use the 4004,
and I grew up surrounded by little boxes with 4004's
and the requisite funky power supplies. I recently
found the programmer's manual, and it's looking down
at me from my bookshelf. Ah, the memories...
With all the engineering in India, that Intel museum must be the only thing left in the Montegue Expy building. Has anyone actually gone to the Intel museum? Sitting on Montegue Expy for 30 minutes to get to Intel sounds like work.
After writing 10k+ lines of code on the PDP-8, I can tell you that there's no argument that could convince me that it was a better architecture than the 8088/8086.
One could almost sustain an argument that the PDP-11 was a better architecture than the 8088/8086 as far as it went, which at the time could be extended to a Mbyte of physical RAM (later instances of the -11 could get all the way to 4 Mbytes physical, as in the 11/73). Manipulating the APRs (active page registers), one could do some mild hackery to make a single process address more than 64kbytes.
Through it would have changed computing history fairly dramatically, I believe the MC68008, an 8-bit-bus variant of the MC68000 would have been a much better choice for IBM's new play-toy in the long run. The reason is the 68k began its design life with 32-bit registers. (IBM was still king of the mainframe hill with their mainframes back then, and they might be forgiven for not taking this new toy-sized computer seriously.)
But I will not second-guess IBM, since their inspiration was the Apple][ and they would have to be very forward-looking indeed to apply Moore's law 10+ years into the future.
I put one of these bad boys into my Apache webserver ... now all my users get "4004 - Processor not found"!!
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Moore's Law works both ways. Sure, you get faster CPUs, but you also get cheaper bottom end CPUs. People with the skill to design tight software to run on these can use micros in systems where they were not deasible in the past.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
with only ~2000 transistors per processor element,
what could one do with a 4096 Processor Array of 4bit 4004 Chips?
hmm...
Sun release the UltraSparc T1 as open source; Intel give away masks for the 4004. Who do you think is going to get more press coverage?
Atari Video Computer System 2600 used a variant of the MOS Technology 6502, an 8-bit CPU.
Another possibility is the atMega8 based Arduino platform. It's open source, and uses an ATMega8 with a bootloader already installed, so you can easily put programs on it over the USB interface. Plus the entire kit is cheap (~$30 USD), so you could conceivably wire the board into a one-off project. Or, if you choose, pull the actual IC out and put it in a circuit with the necessary support hardware - for a lot less than the $30 for the full kit. Looks like fun stuff.
Disclaimer, I've never seen one of these in person (although I will have by the end of this week). My last microcontroller work was with the PIC. I think I'm more impressed overall with the PIC's abilities vs. price in projects where you'd end up buying just the chip and putting it in the circuit. The PIC line just has a wide range of chips with a lot of capability, ranging from the dirt cheap to the expensive. However, for picking up a mcu and playing around with schematics/software, the Arduino platform looks intriguing. Looks like it would be good for rapid prototyping where you need to get the circuit figured out and the software isn't the most important part, too.
Arduino
Did I mention it's all Open Source?
I was confused because Pong (a table tennis sim) and Football were early 2600 titles, if not launch titles. A lot of the early dedicated consoles just used various Pong-on-a-chip ASICs.