Intel Releases the 4004
The world’s first single-chip microprocessor. The chip that launched an industry giant. The birth of a new age of technology.
Hello, and welcome to On This Date, Some Years Back. Today is November 15, 2017, and on this date, 46 years back, in 1971, Intel released the 4004 central processing unit.
Intel began in 1968, and their early product portfolio consisted of shift register memory and random access memory (RAM) circuits. In 1970, Federico Faggin joined Intel and headed the development of their first central processing unit, the 4004.
In 1971, the processor was completed. The chip had a clock rate of 740 kHz, was 4-bit, used 2300 transistors with a 10 micrometer process, and connected to control boards via 16 pins. For comparison sake, the Apple A11 Bionic chip powering the iPhone X is 64-bit, and operates six separate cores with a clock speed up to 2.39 GHz — more than 3,200 times faster. Also, for comparison, modern Intel processors are built using a 10 nanometer process — one thousand times smaller, and connect via over a thousand contacts rather than 16 pins. This allows for more transistors to be fitted in the same physical space. An Intel Atom processor from 2012 contained 432 million transistors, and there are processors available nearing 20 billion.
The first sales of the 4004 were to Busicom, who had commissioned the chip, to be used to power it’s top of the line desktop calculator.
The 4004’s importance stems from Federico Faggin’s silicon gate design. It was such an improvement, in fact, that he would leave Intel in 1974 to found Zilog, the first company ever dedicated to microprocessors and nothing else. Beyond that, Faggin has enjoyed a long and storied career in the tech world. He’s still active in Silicon Valley. Oh, did I mention that he also pioneered touch-pads and touchscreen technology, as well?
The Intel 4004 is so important to tech history that Intel celebrated it’s 35th birthday by making all of their data on it public, including schematics and manuals. They also installed a 130x scale model of it in their Intel Museum. It is fully functional and contains individual transistors, similar to how electronics operated before integrated circuits.
In 2010, President Obama awarded Federico Faggin and several others from his design and engineering team National Medals of Technology and Innovation in recognition of the 4004.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to check back tomorrow for an 1849 death sentence for the crime of reading.
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