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Intel Allows Release of Full 4004 Chip-Set Details
mcpublic writes "When a small team of reverse engineers receives the blessing of a big corporate legal department, it is cause for celebration. For the 38th anniversary of Intel's groundbreaking 4004 microprocessor, the company is allowing us to release new details of their historic MCS-4 chip family announced on November 15, 1971. For the first time, the complete set of schematics and artwork for the 4001 ROM, 4002 RAM, 4003 I/O Expander, and 4004 Microprocessor is available to teachers, students, historians, and other non-commercial users. To their credit, the Intel Corporate Archives gave us access to the original 4004 schematics, along with the 4002, 4003, and 4004 mask proofs, but the rest of the schematics and the elusive 4001 masks were lost until just weeks ago when Lajos Kintli finished reverse-engineering the 4001 ROM from photomicrographs and improving the circuit-extraction software that helped him draw and verify the missing schematics. His interactive software can simulate an ensemble of 400x chips, and even lets you trace a wire or click on a transistor in the chip artwork window and see exactly where it is on the circuit diagram (and vice-versa)."
It'd be nice to remember that the Italian Business was a good thing in this case at least!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I guess I'm wrong. They crammed 45 instructions into the architecture using instruction words of varying width.
At that point in time retired Intel employees would say: "It was all binary... You know ones and zero's on solicon *audience laughs*, which was a bunch of sand basically. Heh... And at that time we were bumping against the limits of this technology so we decided to bake a multitude of them on a single die. Haha... dear God... can you imagine? *audience laughs* Programming this was, well you can imagine, not so pretty. Taking advantage of this technology was still very hard at that time, but OpenCL largely made up for it, so... Any questions?"
-"I worked for a RAM company at that time. And I realised that while the CPU was in fact doing everything in parallel, the RAM was actually serialy read out. What was your stand on this?"
Ühm... *audience laughs* That question is for [person sitting next to the speaker]. *audience laughs harder*
I think that the Core i7 is a little bit too complex to understand right away. I mean with the 4004 everything was realy, realy basic. It had a design team consisting of four people. Nowadays it takes a whole team to improve it all. So I guess the awnser is no.
Here be signatures
better question, how would they physically handle a processor that small, 4004 has 2300 transistors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004 , and the i7 has 731 million transistors at 45nm at 263 mm^2, http://www.legitreviews.com/article/824/1/ , So by those numbers the 4004 on a 45 nm process would have an area of .00082749 mm^2 or 1/317826th the physical size of an i7 die. Disclaimer: this is a very rough calculation, but in any case it is more than 5 orders of magnitude smaller than an i7. On the other hand you could have the king of multicore processors....
In the very early 70s our engineering group was interested in using the new 4004 to simplify the production of control systems for heavy machinery (windlasses, hydraulic systems, etc). The machinery itself was slightly different from contract to contract and even from item to item within a contract so we had to design a new control system for each unit. When the 4004 came out we were excited to see if we couldn't do it cheaper and faster using a microprocessor.
We had moved from relays and discrete wiring to CMOS components on printed circuit boards and thought that was a big step. CMOS could be run at 15vdc which meant that the noise inherent in the environments our machinery worked in would not be quite as big a problem.
Unfortunately we discovered that we had several problems including the limited instruction set and memory capabilities of the 4004 along with the lower voltages needed so we stuck to CMOS until I left a couple of years later.
Still, the 4004 was my introduction to microprocessors and that changed the course of my career from electronics and electronic control systems to digital control systems and computers.
It's been an exciting ride, too. I am grateful to have grown up with the technology.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
One of the things I hated most about my computer arch class was that we had to learn about a completely made up system design which didn't translate to ANYTHING in the real world. Oh yeah, and it was RISC. *Snoooreeee*
That's only because you dropped out before getting to the FPGA classes!
Any functional CPU design (technically non-functional ones too, for whatever good that would do) can be flashed into an FPGA and become as real as any other silicon chip.
And identical to psudocode, psudo-chipfab can be translated into any real code/fab language by anyone that knows basic design and the target language. You were supposed to be learning the basic design part, so once you got to using a real language used in the real world, you would have some clue what to do with it.