CHIPMAKER Intel today must put up 40 candles on the 4004 microprocessor and blow all at once, for bringing us to the computing world that we know today. The 4004, the world’s first commercially available microprocessor, is signed with the initials F.F., for Federico Faggin, its designer.
Back in 1969 when Japanese calculator outfit Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation asked Intel to design 12 chips for a business calculator called Busicom, Intel had already achieved some success with its memory business. Although Intel was far from being a market leader, the two ‘Fairchildren’, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were busy making money fabbing RAM chips, but not for much longer.
Faggin in 1996 donated it to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
The birth of the 4004 was an intense moment witnessed by Faggin alone, working into the night in the deserted Intel labs. He had received the 4004 wafers from the manufacturing line at around 6 PM, in January 1971, as people were leaving for the day. With hands trembling and heart pounding he loaded the wafers in the wafer prober and connected it to the tester. A sigh of relief raised from his chest, above the humming of the instruments, as he observed electrical activity in the device. As the testing progressed, the tension was gradually transforming into elation as all the critical functions showed to be operating properly. At around 3 AM, exhausted and ecstatic, Faggin left the lab.
Source : www.intel4004.com
Four decades, Intel placed an advertisement for the first single-chip CPU, the Intel 4004, in Electronic News and started its venture into the hardware world.
For stats, 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. Now if want to compare it to today’s then plz find yourself…because getting that is easy rather that finding what have i told u here.
So say thanks to what happened 40 years back.
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It’s amazing to think about how far we have come in just 40 short years. The new Sandy Bridge-E i7-3960X has 2.27 BILLION transistors that are roughly 1 MILLION TIMES as many transistors as the 4004.
The amount of progress is incredible. And that is just in the processor market, everything about electronics has advanced by leaps and bounds. And we are not done yet. We still have further to push, and we show no signs of slowing down.
Talking of the power that the microprocessors now have, we are already pushing the limits of electronics. Heat being the major factor. Looking for other composite materials might be a option. Also nano-scale development is bound to happen in this field & they are gonna open up new horizons for exponential growth.
It is just the starting trouble of nano-scale transistors.
Lets see where does this take us then?