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?"

21 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Heh by Mitchell+Mebane · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  2. Zzzz by KNicolson · · Score: 4, Funny

    Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.

    And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.

    1. Re:Zzzz by Scarletdown · · Score: 4, Funny
      Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.

      And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.


      Well, Belgium! You had to go and use up most of the old standbys yourself. But you missed at least one...

      I, for one, welcome our 4 bit overlords.

      --
      This space unintentionally left blank.
  3. 4004 tic tac toe by Salvance · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:4004 tic tac toe by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, you're thinking about Global Nuclear War and politics. The only winning move in Tic-Tac-Toe is to play a 6-year-old who's never seen the game before.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
  4. 640k by Aehgts · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:640k by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ah, back in the good old days when 640K _was_ enough for anyone...

      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.

      --
      Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
  5. Re:Does it run Linux? by gadzook33 · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, no, it's fine. You just need to cross compile with ARCH=4004; OPTIMIZE_FOR_CPU=4004; STRIP_EVERYTHING_EXCEPT_RESET_INCLUDING_THE_KERNEL =true.

  6. Re:The days of the Nibble... by Ant+P. · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I do, because back then bloatware wasn't an option.

  7. a bit of relevant info.... by frakir · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Fast-forward by Mitchell+Mebane · · Score: 4, Informative

    ISA, as in "Instruction Set Architecture". Not the bus.

    --

    The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
    --Aristotle
  9. Re:Fast-forward by jmv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While not binary compatible, the 8086 was a 16-bit improvement of the 8-bit 8080, which was compatible with the 8008, which AFAIK wasn't too far from the 4-bit 4040 and the 4004... and that's why the space shuttle's boosters are sized according to a horse's rear end and a 64-bit quad core CPU architecture that is influenced by the first 4-bit microcontroller.

  10. Re:how about minix ? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  11. Re:Digital archaeologists by msobkow · · Score: 5, Funny

    Before DivX pr0n there was MJPEG pr0n.

    Before MJPEG pr0n there was JPEG pr0n.

    Before JPEG pr0n there was bitmap pr0n.

    Before bitmap pr0n there was ASCII art pr0n.

    Before that, some weirdo was convinced that two LED's looked like nipples...

    *g*

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  12. Re:Does it run Linux? by mode13 · · Score: 5, Funny
    I can see it now:

    From forums.gentoo.org / Architectures & Platforms / Gentoo on 4004 ...

    Yea, I just did a stage 1 install, it took 12865 hours but the binaries are TOTALLY optimized!

  13. Re:More Relevant Info? by turly · · Score: 3, Informative
    Dunno what you're smoking, fella, but Motorola never "got" the 6502. From this article:

    The 6502 was designed primarily by the same engineering team that had designed the Motorola 6800. After quitting Motorola en masse, they quickly designed the 6501, a completely new processor that was pin-compatible with the 6800 (that is, it could be plugged into motherboards designed for the Motorola processor, although its instruction set was different). Motorola sued immediately, and MOS agreed to stop producing the 6501 and went back to the drawing board.

    The result was the "lawsuit-compatible" 6502, which was by design unusable in a 6800 motherboard; Motorola dropped their objection.
    ...
    The 6502 was introduced at $25 in September 1975, when the 6800 and Intel 8080 were selling for $179. At first many people thought the new chip's price was a hoax or a mistake, but shortly both Motorola and Intel had dropped their chips to $79. Far from the intended result, these price reductions actually legitimized the 6502, which started selling by the hundreds.

    --
    IX CCXLIX XVII II CLVII CXVI CCXXVII XCI CCXVI LXV LXXXVI CXCVII XCIX LXXXVI CXXXVI CXCII
  14. Re:how about minix ? by Amadodd · · Score: 3, Funny

    Operating systems are for sissies.

    --
    Freedom of speech doesn't come with bandwidth.
  15. Re:Railroad gauges by Cadallin · · Score: 5, Informative
    I really rather disagree with their conclusion. Although it was not "inevitable" the fact of the matter is that the rail road gauge that became dominant in the USA and Europe CAN be traced to the one adapted for rail use from carriages designed to fit on roads built to a standard specified originally by the Roman Legions based on the width of the asses of two standard war horses. That this is merely coincidental doesn't make it any less true, or less telling about the nature of beaurocracy and resistance to change. And the fact of the matter is that the standard does continue to affect rail shipping to this day, as it most definately determines what an oversize rail car or load is. Whether or not this actually had a direct impact on the Space Shuttle's SSRB's is less clear, although certainly they had to be designed so that they could be shipped from the factory to Cape Canaveral.

    The thrust of the point to me, is the very point that nobody sat around and actually considered what might be a good rail gauge to adopt for shipping lines, they just went ahead with a horribly odd standard that was already in existence.

  16. LED porn? by Dion · · Score: 5, Funny
    --
    -- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
  17. Re:Railroad gauges by johnw · · Score: 3, Informative
    The thrust of the point to me, is the very point that nobody sat around and actually considered what might be a good rail gauge to adopt for shipping lines

    One man did. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did exactly that. He sat down and thought about what gauge to make his railway (The Great Western) and came up with 7 feet as a much more sensible value. He was entirely correct, but unfortunately his version was abandoned simply because far more people had used the existing default.

    John
  18. Re:Does it run Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    if you coupled it with a modern graphics card you should be able to use the 4004 to bootstrap linux into the graphics card and run it from there!