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Intel's 4004 Microprocessor Turns 40
harrymcc writes "On November 15th 1971, Intel introduced the 4004 — the first single-chip microprocessor. Its offspring, needless to say, went on to change the world. But first, Intel tried using the 4004 in a bunch of products that were interesting but often unsuccessful — like a pinball machine, an electronic vote-counting machine, and Wang's first word processor. Technologizer's Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with an illustrated look back at this landmark chip." Here's another nostalgic look back at V3.co.uk, and one at The Inquirer. And an anonymous reader points out another at ExtremeTech, from which comes this snippet: "Designed by the fantastically-forenamed Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor, the 4004 was a 4-bit, 16-pin microprocessor that operated at a mighty 740KHz — and at roughly eight clock cycles per instruction cycle (fetch, decode, execute), that means the chip was capable of executing up to 92,600 instructions per second. We can’t find the original list price, but one source indicates that it cost around $5 to manufacture, or $26 in today’s money."
Oh wait, that was something else...
If we've come this far in 40 years, where will we be in 40 more?
If the same rate of price reduction could be applied to 4004, then without inflation in today's money 4004 would have cost literally 0. With inflation it's less than 0, but that makes no sense
I think you need to work on your compound interest.... if year 1 is 26 and year 2 = year1*0.71, then year 40 is four thousandths of a cent.
Which is probably a fair price, compared to the cost/performance ratio of something like a pic 10f220 series chip.
One thing economists are remarkably poor at understanding, is something that cannot go on forever, eventually stops.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Wait, would that be Word Wang? The sequel to the off season hit Number Wang?
Hey, stay on topic. They didn't mention anything about money in the story...
We can't find the original list price, but one source indicates that it cost around $5 to manufacture, or $26 in today's money.
oh wait, they did.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
http://www.4004.com/
In particular, that fully-functional 4004 mock-up someone made by using 1G TTL chips on a large circuit board is absolutely awesome.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Yes, obviously it's a tiny number, in one thousands of one percent. It's zero for all purposes.
You can't handle the truth.
Obligatory:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of zero cost 4004s....
Imagine emulating the Beowulf cluster on one medium-sized FPGA... ;-)
Hey, what happened to all the Apple fans saying the Motorola chips where better?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hey, what happened to all the Apple fans saying the Motorola chips "were" better?
Hey, what happened to all the Apple fans saying the Motorola chips were better?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I still have a Radio Shack EC-4004 programmable calculator floating around that uses one of these. Fun little calculator for its time.
Hey, what happened to all the Apple fans saying the Motorola chips where better?
I don't know, but this is surely cool:
http://www.visual6502.org/
From the technologizer article:
as Intel churned out more powerful chips throughout the rest of the 1970sâ"the predecessors of the ones inside every current Windows PC and Mac.
Really? I was pretty sure my computer has an AMD inside.
*Well, not really a typo but more of a poorly considered sentence.
Still available, although I believe they are made in Malaysia. The whole chip-set was not very expensive.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
So the value of dollar went down by over factor of 5 since 1971.
In 1971 the US Dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per Oz Its ~$1700 today. I don't remember exactly when during the Nixon administraion the US decoupled the dollar from gold but I think it was after the election in 1972. At any rate an oz of gold would about buy a 4004 in 1971 and a ~3.5GHz 6-core Xeon today.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Our progress is being destroyed by our monetary policy.
Money is nothing more than some arbitrary magnetic patterns on some mainframe disk drive. Don't waste your time obsessing over it.
You don't keep money around for decades; It's a short-term medium used to buy real investments.
In the meantime, if you want progress, quit whining and start working towards progress.
You would have been if your computer didn't run a 4004 microprocessor.
It mostly failed because it was put in a 16-pin package, meaning that all the addresses and data had to be shuffled out and in through a narrow bus. This is a slow process. That also means you had to surround the chip with a lot of decoders and latches and buffers to hold the memory and I/O addresses and shuffle the data in and out. Same downside to the 8008. You needed like 30 chips around the CPU chip just for the very basics of generating an actual memory address and data bus.
It's a short-term medium used to buy real investments.
Yeah you try eating your illiquid assets one day when you're in a pinch. The more money you have, the more wealth you have to keep around as cash. And that's when inflation bites you in the ass.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
8008, 6800, and 8086
Try eating your money.
Don't forget the 6502 and Z80!
Could it handle at least 16-bit numbers?
And the 6809! Everybody forgets the 6809. ;_;
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Wrong question. I've seen 32-bit PCs handle arbitrary precision (with some appropriate library of course), not only 32 bits. Okay, there is a limit of the size of available RAM ...
Please look at the full white paper here.
While it looks like most of the instructions were one word instructions, it does seem to have a few two word instructions. So, to answer your questions, yes, in some cases, it could handle some 16-bit processing (though most instruction codes are 8-bit).
...that we landed on the MOON before the invention of microprocessors! Now that's scary.
You are thinking the wrong way.
It was used in calculators.
4bit is enough to encode 0-9. The rest was done in software (using arbitrary precission math, although for very limited values of "arbitrary", given past constrains...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I think we're all missing the more interesting question here, and that is: is the 4004 RISC or CISC?
There is an unbroken chain of compatibility from the latest AMD processors back to the 8008...
Of course, no discussion about Intel vs AMD compatibility would be complete without some jerk* remarking that with x86-64, Intel is actually cloning AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86. One of the more ironic twists in that race, to be sure.
* Today's jerk being played by DragonHawk
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I clicked on the link and only saw a 4004 ;)
http://www.firstmicroprocessor.com/
Now what?
Corrrect. It's probably better to describe the 4004 as BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) rather than as "four bit." Storing a number larger than 9 requires eight bits, the first four store the first digit, and the second four store the second digit. The bit patterns 0xA through 0xF were actually special patterns used for various things (like marking negative numbers).
Since the original purpose of the 4004 was a calculator, this system makes a lot of sense. It might not be the most efficient use of bits (an eight-digit decimal number uses 32 bits in BCD, but requires only 27 bits when in binary), but it makes the translation to and from human-readable formats very easy.
This is exactly how most circuits using discrete logic operated, and for the exact same reason. In fact, I'm working on a project right now that uses only discrete logic -- encoding in BCD makes the whole thing possible. Using BCD on the first microprocessor makes lots of sense as an incremental improvement on what people already did.
Hebrews 13:5
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Only $26 to make one!? Have you seen what an Intel 4004 is going for on eBay *right now*? Whoever restarts the fab will become filthy rich!
I don't remember exactly when during the Nixon administraion the US decoupled the dollar from gold but I think it was after the election in 1972.
Actually it was August 15, 1971, three months prior to the release of the 4004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock
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I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.
I claim breach of contract.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Ah, yes... the classic EE major freshman year calculator project.
The 4004 is too expensive, but I was thinking about getting an 8008 and a bunch of ttl to make a little computer... maybe next April.
404: sig not found.
There are encoding schemes that allow arbitrary precision on any sized processor. The Atari 800 series running on 8 bit 6502s used a BCD encoding, it is a little slower, but fractional results are more predictable than binary representations. You can implement something like that to an arbitrary number of digits... as many bits as you have memory for (and time to wait for processing).
8008, 6800, and 8086
Eh? While there were a few designs using 8008 and 6800, I don't think any of them was successful; high volume commercially available PCs used Z80s (the TRS-80, the Sinclair ZX-80 and Spectrum, the MSX machines) or 6502s (Apple II, Atari, Commodore). The successor of the 6800, the excellent 6809 was used in the TRS-80 Color Computer; years later, when IBM launched their PC, they used the reduced data bus version of the 8086, that is the 8088.
That's a Rockwell chip. Mot was 6800.
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That's a Rockwell chip. Mot was 6800.
True, that, but it was also the chip in the Apple II.
The flame wars back in the day were between sixers and eighters. TRS-80 & CP/M vs C64 & Apple folks, and even before that was the Altair & IMSAI vs SWTPC & AIM-65 people. The main difference was a Harvard vs Von Neumann architecture design in the CPU.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Yeah, I had the (6502 based) Atari 800 when I was about 14, and I never could (and still can't) understand who would ever want Harvard Architecture, or the insane segmented addressing of the 80286....
I meant native support for numbers. If you wrote an assembler program for this kind of processor, what would be the biggest type you can use to store integers, pointers, etc.? On 8-bit processors it was 16 bit numbers I think, which is restricting but still reasonable. If you can access at most 8 bits for pointers and native integers however, I can't imagine how this would work.
They mention photolithography. It was still being used in the mid 80's at Texas Instruments. I went from micrographics to photolithography in 84'ish. You shoot rubyliths with room sized cameras then stack the negatives, positives, or both, on top of each other on a reducer. It was all .001 tolerance work.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.