40th anniversary of the central processor

That says it all - welcome under the cat, where the most interesting details of the creation of the first microprocessor are revealed, as well as congratulations from the Russian office of Intel.







November 15, 1971 could have remained just one more day in history if Intel had not released the world's first commercially available microprocessor, the i4004. From this day on, the technological revolution began in the world, which led to the fact that today processors surround us wherever we go: they are in cars, ATMs, players and phones, computers and cameras, at home, at work, on holiday. We can no longer imagine our life without these little helpers who help us cope with the simplest and most difficult tasks in life.

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We congratulate all the geeks, computer and IT professionals on this holiday - if it were not for you, today we would hardly be where we are!



As you know, the Intel 4004 was the first microprocessor to contain the main elements of a programmable computer in a single chip. The credit for creating this small but central element of the chain belongs to: Federico Faggin; Ted Hoff; Les Vadasz and Masatoshi Shima from Busicom.



On October 15, 2011, US President Barack Obama presented Federico Faginu, Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor (Stanley Mazor, Intel) one of the country's top awards — the US National Medal for Innovation, for their work on the Intel 4004 processor more than 40 years ago.



The history of the creation of the i4004 processor is amazing in places - all the participants of its development had to, literally, invent something at every step. It all started because of the simple “it's not logical” when Busicom placed an order for the production of 12 chips for its calculator. It was the desire to reduce the number of microcircuits, creating a single microprocessor, and to miniaturize the entire architecture led to the appearance of the i4004 chip.



Ted Hoff and Stanley Meizor proposed a new microchip architecture, and the work on translating the sketches into life, that is, the chip, was performed by Italian physicist Federico Fagin, who worked at Intel as the chief designer of the MSC-4 systems. It was he who developed (while working in Fairchild) the MOS silicon gate technology, which made it possible to create a new, not existing until 1970, method for designing logic chips.



The processor, which was created as a result of the collaboration of brilliant engineers, could execute 60,000 (on average up to a maximum of 93,000) instructions per second, despite the fact that it had been produced for 15 years, it never became popular with the general public. Glory came only to its architectural “great-grandchild” - i8080, but Intel's merit in unifying and creating just a small microchip turned out to be appreciated and led to the right development strategy, which we are seeing today.



In order to understand what a tremendous way has been covered in these forty years, it’s enough to mention a few facts about i4004: the processor was created for the Busicom calculator with a built-in printer and had 2,300 transistors (for comparison, the Intel Core Duo of the second generation has 400,000 times more). The 4004 processor worked with a synchronization frequency of 740 kHz, which is more than 5000 times less than the modern central processors manufactured by the company. The technical process used to produce the i4004 was 10 micrometers (µm), and the most modern Intel processors are created using the 32-nm process technology, which is approximately 300 times less linear, resulting in an increase of 100,000 times the area.



In order to imagine the scale of change, it suffices to give one simple example: the size of a modern processor is 216 square millimeters. If it were made using forty-year-old technology, its size would be a rectangle 7 _x 3 meters. It would hardly fit into the apartment, not to mention a laptop.





^{Electronic News magazine cover from November 1971, which talked about the creation of the first commercially available microprocessor as a separate chip and the arrival of a new era in computing}



I will not lie if I say that no industry in the world is developing at such a pace as the creation of microprocessors. In many ways, this is a merit of Intel and the people who were busy creating the first microprocessor, the anniversary of which we celebrate today.



In the 71st year, when i4004 was created, Intel was only three years old. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the pioneers of the microprocessor industry of that time, hardly imagined the scale of the changes that would occur due to the efforts of their company in the future. Then the production of one transistor on a chip cost about $ 0.02 - today this figure shows an extra five zeros and is $ 0.0000002, which allows the company to produce powerful processors at an affordable price.



Thanks to Moore's law, which we know as a postulate in a simplified form: “the number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every two years”, Intel literally pushes the technological mix forward, remaining at the forefront of progress thanks to new technologies, as well as reducing the technological process when creating processors.



According to numerous studies, Intel’s share of microprocessors in the market is about 80% - you can calculate for yourself how many of the million PCs shipped every day ( 2010 data) are completed with an Intel central processor. And these numbers will only grow in the future, with the advent of new device form factors (such as ultrabooks ) and the entry of portable devices (primarily tablet computers ) into the market. According to Forrester, by 2015 there will be about 2.5 billion personal computers in the world, and first of all this figure is growing at the expense of the emerging markets of Brazil, China and Russia.



Today, the i4004 is the subject of affectionate love of collectors who seek out the first chips (as in the photo at the beginning): white-gold chips with gray marks on the white part (the original case). These microprocessors, without a release date, were the very first in everything. They will remain forever out of time, proving that human insight and striving for progress are truly inexhaustible.



PS In the IT-Galaxy community, they talk about the chronology of the development of processors, from i4004 to the second-generation Core 2 Duo: 1 part , 2 part .