The microprocessor turns 40
It all started 40 years ago with the Intel 4004 – and it just keeps going and going and going
Oct 17, 2011 in Chips, Desktop, Gaming, Microprocessors, Opinion
This fall it is exactly 40 years since the first microprocessor saw the day of light. Intel has of course provided us with a press kit that we will make good use of, but complement it with additional information.
Until the advent of the microprocessor the market was dominated by minicomputers and mainframes. They were distinguished as follows: The CPU of a microcomputer was a single chip, the CPU of a minicomputer took up an entire board of discrete components and the CPU of a mainframe took up at least a rack.
The 4004 was a 4 bit processor clocking along at the amazing speed of 740kHz and was manufactured in 10 micron process technology. For those of you newcomers used to measuring process technology in nm this is equivalent of 10,000nm. The processor was primarily used in embedded electronics.
Intel 4004 microprocessor. Photo copyright Intel Corp.
It’s successor the Intel 8080 became a huge success – so huge in fact that it was copied and enhanced by Zilog under the name Z-80. Even Texas Instruments manufactured the 8080 under a license and called it the TMS8080.
However, Intel was not the only player on the 8 bit market. Also Motorola was popular with its 6800 series, but probably most popular was the 6500 series from MOS designed by Chuck Peddle who had also designed the 6800 for Motorola.
The 6500 became very popular due to the VIC-20 home computer.
At roughly the same time Texas Instruments moved t a 16 bit technology with its TMS9900 that was a great processor but used in a crippled fashion in the TI-99/4(A) home computer. In order to save money only very little ram was available directly to the processor. All extra ram was accessed through the videocontroller making the computer extremely slow. On top of that all the games and the BASIC interpreter were coded in an interpreted language called GPL (Graphics Programming Language) making the computer even slower. Trust me – I used to develop games and programming languages for the TI-99/4A.*
Intel marched on with its 16 bit processor; the 8086 that was not widely adopted, but the cost reduced version with an 8 bit bus known as the 8088 was chosen by IBM for the original Personal Computer.
And the 8088 made Intel the dominant player that the company still is today. Motorola tried with its 68000 series that in many respects were far superior, but they lacked software and the same was the case with the Alpha processor.
These days the PC market is totally dominated by AMD and Intel, but the mobile and embedded markets have given ARM and MIPS a place to grow. ARM is very much used in mobile phones and tablets, MIPS is used in tablets and in embedded electronics, although it can also be found in a number of Chinese smartphones.
Since its inception the core frequency has gone up from 740kHz to just above 8GHz with some aggressive cooling. Stop and think about it: a million fold improvement in clock speed and all without the power budget going through the roof.
And what will the future hold? Probably not a lot in terms of extra clock speed in the near future, but many more cores and with that a challenge for programmers to start writing code that can adapt to many cores automatically and also to processors with heterogeneous cores. The future should be interesting.S|A
*Editor’s note: We recommend counseling for your pain. {/html 7.9 joke}
Nice, Short, To the point.
Thumbs Up!
The article referred some name, but not the main one: who “invented” the microprocessor?
You mean the marketing term or the specific incarnation of it – the 4040?
BTW, chips are not invented. They are usually engineered. ;)
“The 6500 became very popular due to the VIC-20 home computer.”
Complete cobblers. The VIC-20 used the 6502 – the same CPU that became popular due to it’s previous use in the Commodore PET series and, more importantly, the Apple ][.
It was also the CPU used in the Acorn Electron and the BBC Micro…
And in C64, NES, Atari 8bit computers, Atari lynx and so on :)
loved Vic20, especially BEDLAM, game wwith castle rooms & patients strapped to beds, Screaming. then Me, theDOCTOR, went around doing anything iWANT, like punching patients in Eye. So Great.
little data cassete player , ordinary TV for screen. Never Forget;VIC20 & Bedlam.
drashek bedlamologist…
adjectives fail me.
I was willing to let that slide, since he very clearly was talking about the 6500 *family* and not a specific model number.
E.g., the Commodore 64 used a 6510, not a garden-variety 6502…
do not forget that Bender uses a 6502, too
;-)
The fact that some marketing people from Intel decided to call 4004 the first processor does not make this a true fact.
Intel 4004 was not usable as a microprocessor, i.e. as the CPU of a computer, and its architecture did not have any influence on later microprocessors. It was a calculator chip and it can be considered the ancestor of the integrated circuits with programmable logic that are embedded in appliances that are not user-programmable.
The first real microprocessor was Intel 8008, which was introduced in April 1972, so we should celebrate 40 years only in 2012.
However, the architecture of 8008 was not designed by Intel, 8008 was an implementation of Datapoint 2200, which was announced in June 1970 and was shipping in 1971. Therefore, the most popular but the most annoying computer architecture was introduced more than 40 years ago (even the 64-bit Intel/AMD architecture still includes most of the original 8-bit instructions implemented by Datapoint 2200, but with the different binary encoding introduced by Intel 8086 in 1978).
Okay, so I fail at reading comprehension. You did mention the 68000 and Alpha, in a back-handed sort of way. My bad.
The big difference between Intel (pre-386) and the other 16/32-bit contenders was in Intel’s use of a brain-damaged segmented memory model. Code and data segments were limited to 64K per segment in a 1MB address space. 64K! While the 68000 and others had a linear memory model up to the capacity of the chip, typically 16MB for the 68000.
It wasn’t until Windows95 came out that the typical business programmer was freed from the limitations of 64K segments in 1MB of address space. Whipper-snappers these days have it easy.
You are wrong, segmentation of memory was elegant solution to compatibility problem and is not so difficult to understand
Of course INTEL literature describe INTEL 8080-8085 and X86 very well so nobody should a problem
No, sorry, segmentation was the spawn of Satan resulting from Intel not wanting to provide any 32 bit registers. The 8080 was an 8 bit CPU with a 16 bit address space. What on earth prevented them from just doubling everything for the 8086?
For Guy Wong
Intel can do no wrong
What for most is elephant
Is for Wong elegant
cute
What, no mention of the entire Motorola 68000 series of processors? The mind boggles. That CPU was the heart of the original Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, Sun Microsystems (pre-SPARC), and many many more. Hard to miss unless you’re just reading Intel press releases, ha ha.
And what about DEC Alpha? The chip that spawned an entire generation of CPU engineers. No mention of a whole slew of other RISC chips (Motorola 88000, National Semiconductor 16032, Sun SPARC, HP PA-RISC, etc) either.
Nice try, but if you’re going to present a concise history of the microprocessor, and specifically state that you’re not going to be limited to Intel’s myopic version of history, you’re going to need to do a little more research.
Z80 a copy of 8080? You’ve obviously not programmed them!
I have programmed both, and yes, the Z80 is based on the 8080 instruction set. It has some enhancements, but you can pretty much run 8080 binaries on it.
The Ti99/4A was deliberately handicapped by Ti management to prevent it competing with their lucrative minicomputer range (the 9900 was a 1 chip implementation of their mini CPU) and is a prime example of what happens if a company tries to protect their legacy products from up-and-coming technology.
The 4004 needed 8 clock cycles per instruction cycle, and 1 or 2 instruction cycles to execute one instruction. MAXIMUM performance was 92600 4 bit instructions per second. A 6 core Intel i7 980X can manage about 147,000M instructions, or nearly 1.6 million times faster. Each instruction is however 64 bit as opposed to 4, so the i7 is at least another factor of 10 faster at any general purpose task.
My first system was a Victor PC with an Intel 8086. It also came with a compressed 5 1/4″ harddisk that offered an amazing 32MB and EGA graphics. It was bundled with Windows 1.02 and Excel 2.0. good ol’ times.
Ya, Owned bbunch of that Crude. Used IT to impress guest with Dual Trace. From Voltage Gen of v+ pin, osilo show sq waves aplenty, then could hook one sq pin to another & ALL pins sq would change. thats about It. UPS gave tham away, as each misdelivered item brought $1,000.00 claim against shipping , nearworthless, lightweight part, could be replaced for dollar & UPS could write off tremedous loss. Timex Sinclair was start of Basic in home. There where word processors, of antiquated style. Women in
studios above 2120 Lab, worked All day, trying to learn machines keyboard. Exclusitiveity was StrongPoint.
Yesterday, now 4004 has gone, went to Martin Luther King Jr memorial deication, listen to Honnorable speakers & steveie wonder, arethea franklin is in worse shape than me, maybe hsould of poped 4004 for breakfast. here”
http://thomasxstewart.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dsci0237.jpg
thats pledge of alligence, & yes, did get Cap,FREE. Now got backache. Thats cuz when slseep, iTURN into king
Faud.
There was software, controled by IBM. Lotus 1,2,3 was already TS Package, waiting for Dod release near decade latter. Ms Pacman emerged. Love Save theCITIES, as good as any game today,Yet, 4004 compared well to burnt out shells walking streets & shelters. Untill designer Vechile Vans, with fancy painted pictures on side, Killed dem ALL. 2000 Fiasco in SE mentoned, last cough of Bloodee’ era.
Computing Back Them, on televison & automated radio stations. VCR emeraged. Ford Record a Call Was Hot. Computing Course Work Was HOT. Seymor CRAY Was HOT.
DRASHEK Owned World, Thru Sewer Plate Covers & Fire Hydrants had RED, WHITE & BLUE Paint Jobs. Many People Hadn’t Been Bourne, Yet. BOATPEOPLE Ruled.
Signed:HAHA.
OMG the weirdo is back XD
It’s widely believed Drashek is a bot, and sometimes (like above post) his state fails to converge.
But Drashek is cool in my books, often he makes more sense than the real people posting comments.
Bot? I always thought he is some foreign guy, Google-translating his posts.
holy crap! the ‘shek can has a blog site?! and chizburger?! BOOKMARK! CTRL-D!
“embedded markets have given ARM and MIPS a place to grow.”
MIPS was a real star back in the days, highly regarded and that too at the server/enterprise level. MIPS R4000 was the first true 64bit commercial microprocessor. If memory serves properly there was some kind of a short lived consortium between Microsoft, DEC and MIPS to counter Intel’s monopolistic advent in the client sector too. But as always Intel took unfair advantage of its dominant relationship with the OEM partners, namely the Taiwanese mainboard manufacturers and repelled that threat. But most ironical would be MIPS retreating from the enterprise space in fear of Itanium(IA64)! Now we all know how that panned out.
Actually, Intel took unfair advantage of Microsoft’s desire to maintain their monopoly in the desktop and enterprise software market, office was never ported properly to Alpha and MIPS, and 1995-99 were not the years of Unix on the desktop.
DEC was a company renowned for brilliant engineering and a near monopoly on brilliantly expensive minicomputers that they were too stupid to sacrifice to get Alpha into the market. Despite being one or even two process nodes behind Intel they managed to outperform anything x86 by very large margins.
4 bit running at 0.00074 GHz. At 16 Hz per instruction, it was like 0.00005 Ghz.
4 bit. Useful to count from 0 to 15.
Only 46 instructions possible.
256 BYTE of ROM. (0.00000024 Gb)
How the 4004 was useful for anything? Many of them were used in parallel?
Originally used for a calculator – see the Wiki entry for the intel 4004
From the Intel data catalog 1975: the main argument for the 4004 was the replacement of normal logic, because it allowed far less components, compared to normal TTL logic. It could address 4 Kbyte of ROM and 5120 bits of RAM. Instruction cycle was 10.8 us (92 kHz) for 1 word (8 bits) instructions, double that for 2 word instructions.
I think it it more correct to compare it to current ‘logic replacement’ micros, like the Microchip PIC series.
Kids these days with their jiggly bites and giggly hurts! Real men can make that 4004 sing! :-p
Why so petty? I’m sure he wanted to point the big difference. So if he had written gazillion it would have been right. Relax.
Please don’t forget about IPC from back then to today.
When you type the following in Google: 8GHz / 740kHz
The answer is:
(8 gigahertz) / (740 kilohertz) =
10,810.8108
“Stop and think about it: a million fold improvement in clock speed and all without the power budget going through the roof.”
Um that statement is not even semi-accurate.
Was the 4004 really made of wood, Charlie?
It is made of gold not wood. Picture was old that’s why it look different.
Thanks ;-)
You left out two important steps in Intel’s microprocessor tree – the 4040 and the 8008 both of which came before the 8080.
uhh, 8GHz/740KHZ doesn’t give milion fold improvement in clock. That’s slightly more then 10,000.
I can also guess the BD core that you mention with 8GHz needs like 500W power? I guess that’s like 1,000 more then 4004 ;P
But tech did go ahead like crazy in all those years…