Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Intel's 4004 Microprocessor Turns 40

Posted by timothy on from the will-never-amount-to-anything dept.

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."

8 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Who could ever need more than 740KHz? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh wait, that was something else...

    1. Re:Who could ever need more than 740KHz? by necro81 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dude, even if you are too tone deaf to notice the difference, I totally sample my music at 740 kHz - it's the only way to go in order to get clean sound. 16b / 44.1 kHz is for the poor soiled masses, and 24b / 96 kHz is for studio jerk-offs.

    2. Re:Who could ever need more than 740KHz? by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Informative

      Dude, even if you are too tone deaf to notice the difference, I totally sample my music at 740 kHz - it's the only way to go in order to get clean sound. 16b / 44.1 kHz is for the poor soiled masses, and 24b / 96 kHz is for studio jerk-offs.

      There's actually a sane reason for 95kHz sampling - filtering.

      Before any ADC, you need to put in an analog filter (anti-aliasing filter - basically it ensures that the signal going to the ADC is bandlimited below the Nyquist frequency).

      The problem with filters is that it's very hard to get the desired characteristics (flat response in frequency band, narrow transition band) without doing a ton of work (lots of parts, etc).

      Using 44kHz or 48kHz sampling, it means if you want to capture to 20kHz, your filter must "brickwall" in the 2-4kHz region between 20kHz and 22/24kHz. This is extremely hard to do, and the eng result is you usually get rolloff around 16kHz or so. Or the frequency response gets wilder and definitely not flat.

      Using 96kHz or even 192kHz means the anti-aliasing filter can be much gentler and designed with more stuiable characteristics. When you can have rolloff start at 20kHz and extend all the way out to 48/96kHz, you can make some very nice filters indeed - flat from 20Hz-20kHz, very little phase distortion, etc.

      The other end benefits as well - the antialiasing filter on the DAC side can be a lot nicer as well.

      And of course, the more bandwidth you have to play with, it means the filters are also much cheaper and simpler (and that also means less distortion).

  2. Re:Cue Kurzweil... by JoeMerchant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nearly 70 and doing everything I can to avoid a computer for my entire retirement?

    You miss the Kurzweil reference, if medical progress keeps pace, 70 will be young.

    I think the half-way mark 1991 makes an interesting reference point: in 1991, my desktop PC at work cost 2 months salary, it was a 16MHz 386 with a 640x480 resolution 15" color monitor. My desktop PC at work today cost about 3 days pay and is a 2+GHz i5 with two 1920x1080 24" flat panels.

  3. Link to 35th Anniversary site by Megane · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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; }
    1. Re:Link to 35th Anniversary site by mikael · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In 1971, an Intel 4004 had 2300 transistors, on a die size 12mm square (144mm^2).

      In 2011, an Intel i7 had 560,000,000 transistors on a die size 296mm^2

      Going by those dimensions, you could get 24378 4004's into the die size of an i7. Or the i7 mockup would be 24000 times the area of the 4004 mockup. If you were to build the i7 with the same brass and copper technology as a Diffference Engine, it would probably fill Manhattan.

      For comparison, an Intel 80386 had 275000 transistors, and an 80486 had 1,180,000 transistors.

      For those CPU's, you could get 2000 80386's into the die size of an i7, and 474+ 80486's into the same die size.

      I'd guess in reality that would be less because you would need cache management for all those processors.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  4. Re:Interesting typo* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not poorly worded. The history of AMD is poorly understood (by you, not them).

  5. Re:Interesting typo* by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Informative

    There *is* an unbroken chain of compatibility from the latest AMD processors back to the 8008, which was Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor (the design of which was actually started before the 4004 design, IIRC). So they were indeed "predecessors".

    Not to mention that AMD got its start in the PC business by being an officially licensed 2nd source for Intel's 8086 chips.