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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)
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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!
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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
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.
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Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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
It couldn't run Minix, and it would be quite hard to port Minix to it. It already runs on 8086 CPUs, so it doesn't need an MMU (or an FPU). Originally it came with 40-bytes of RAM, which is certainly not enough for Minix. It supports 12-bit addressing though, so you can address 4K-words. Unfortunately, the word size is 4-bits, so that means you can only address 2KB of RAM, which is definitely not enough for Minix. For reference, Bash is about 284 times bigger than the entire address space of the 4004. If you tied it with a custom MMU chip, you could possibly extend this to 4096 segments of 4096 words, giving you 8MB of total address space. This would be enough for Minix, but you'd need to do a lot of paging, which would slow down the performance of the 4004 chip a lot. It would probably boot in under a week...
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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.
Debian will probably catch up to it in a year or two.
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Operating systems are for sissies.
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... only to encourage sales of dual core 8008... ;o)
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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 ][
Well, another of Federico Faggin's designs, the Z80, has been implemented in VHDL (and Verilog). I implemented the T80, a VHDL variant, along with a VGA-grade video interface, and a triple-ported SDRAM interface into a Xilinx XC3S1000. The combination only used 3% of resources in the FPGA, but the processor itself was about 1%.
;-)
The 4004 had 3900 transistors, and the 8080 had 6000, and the Z80 had more than that (more instructions). So, let's say for argument's sake that the Z80 is about twice the size of the 4004.
If that's true, then you can stuff about 200 clones of the 4004 in a Xilinx $15 million-gate Spartan FPGA, and have block RAMs left over for program memory. Wow, I'm sure the Beowulf guys are scared now
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They do now. But what did they use prior to that?
Intel really did start something new with the 4004. Anybody who minimizes the effect it had is just plain silly.
I had the 4004 manuals at the time, but never had the opportunity to play with the chips themselves. Of course, now it's easy to emulate one in software. I run Unix V5 and V7 on a simulated PDP-11, strictly for the hell of it.
...laura who wouldn't mind owning a real PDP-11, but who refuses to pay the electricity bills for a VAX