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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)."
of Intel 4004s!
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See all the _hardware_ errata at Microchip.com.
Pentium Floating Point error, anyone?
There are many issues with CPUs - they are just so well-hidden and/or obscure that you never see them. With the advent of updatable microcode, you'll see fewer flaws that need permanent work-arounds.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Yeah, because there are a lot of microchip pirates with several billion dollars lying around to create a modern chip fab and copy cpu's willy-nilly, putting Intel out of business inside of a few weeks probably (heck, with the speed of modern chip pirates probably a few days!).