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Intel Releases 4004 Microprocessor Schematics

Posted by kdawson on Tue Nov 14, 2006 11:30 PM
from the 2,300-transistors-and-nothin'-on dept.
Intel Hardware
mcpublic writes, "Intel is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004, their very first microprocessor, by releasing the chip's schematics, maskworks, and users manual. This historic revelation was championed by Tim McNerney, who designed the Intel Museum's newest interactive exhibit. Opening on November 15th, the exhibit will feature a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004. To create a giant Busicom 141-PF calculator for the museum, 'digital archaeologists' first had to reverse-engineer the 4004 schematics and the Busicom software. Their re-drawn and verified schematics plus an animated 4004 simulator written in Java are available at the team's unofficial 4004 web site. Digital copies of the original Intel engineering documents are available by request from the Intel Corporate Archives. Intel first announced their 2,300-transistor 'micro-programmable computer on a chip' in Electronic News on November 15, 1971, proclaiming 'a new era of integrated electronics.' Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?"
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story

Related Stories

[+] Historians Recreate Source Code of First 4004 Application 159 comments
mcpublic writes "The team of 'digital archaeologists' who developed the technology behind the Intel Museum's 4004 microprocessor exhibit have done it again. 36 years after Intel introduced their first microprocessor on November 15, 1971, these computer historians have turned the spotlight on the first application software ever written for a general-purpose microprocessor: the Busicom 141-PF calculator. At the team's web site you can download and play with an authentic calculator simulator that sports a cool animated flowchart. Want to find out how Busicom's Masatoshi Shima compressed an entire four-function, printing calculator into only 1,024 bytes of ROM? Check out the newly recreated assembly language "source code," extensively analyzed, documented, and commented by the team's newest member: Hungary's Lajos Kintli. 'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.'"
[+] Origins of the Modern PC 99 comments
Homncruse writes "ComputerWorld dispels myths about the history of modern day computers — or, more appropriately, the invention of the first microprocessor. Contrary to popular belief, 'the [Intel] 8008 was not actually derived from the 4004 — they were separate projects.' In fact, the 8008 concept didn't originate from Intel (though they were eventually granted IP rights.) The article goes on to explain the events leading up to the invention and first intended use of the 8008 (a predecessor to the 8086, etc.), and how Intel was initially uneasy about the venture."
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  • Heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mitchell Mebane (594797) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:32PM (#16848446) Homepage Journal
    At first, I thought this was about Intel's new quad-core processors. How wrong I was. :P

    Wouldn't it be cool, though, if Intel did name the quad-core chips the 4004 series?
  • With a better FPU and a faster front-side bus, that chip could possibly be useful.

    As it is, I don't think it can even run a stripped down 1.0 Linux kernel.

    • Re:Does it run Linux? (Score:5, Funny)

      by gadzook33 (740455) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:53PM (#16848578)
      No, no, it's fine. You just need to cross compile with ARCH=4004; OPTIMIZE_FOR_CPU=4004; STRIP_EVERYTHING_EXCEPT_RESET_INCLUDING_THE_KERNEL =true.

      • Re:Does it run Linux? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mode13 (1023713) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @02:26AM (#16849284)
        I can see it now:

        From forums.gentoo.org / Architectures & Platforms / Gentoo on 4004 ...

        Yea, I just did a stage 1 install, it took 12865 hours but the binaries are TOTALLY optimized!

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by raynet (51803)
            Well, one could port the old Linux 8086 project to 4004, it doesn't need such silly things as MMU or 32bits CPUs, though I am not 100% if the project was ever finished. :)

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Try it out! The Java simulator on modern hardware should simulate it almost as fast as it ran 35 years ago in silicon.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      if you coupled it with a modern graphics card you should be able to use the 4004 to bootstrap linux into the graphics card and run it from there!
    • 640 addressable bytes of memory should be enough for anyone....

      • Re:how about minix ? (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 (641858) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @12:19AM (#16848742) Homepage Journal
        It couldn't run Minix, and it would be quite hard to port Minix to it. It already runs on 8086 CPUs, so it doesn't need an MMU (or an FPU). Originally it came with 40-bytes of RAM, which is certainly not enough for Minix. It supports 12-bit addressing though, so you can address 4K-words. Unfortunately, the word size is 4-bits, so that means you can only address 2KB of RAM, which is definitely not enough for Minix. For reference, Bash is about 284 times bigger than the entire address space of the 4004. If you tied it with a custom MMU chip, you could possibly extend this to 4096 segments of 4096 words, giving you 8MB of total address space. This would be enough for Minix, but you'd need to do a lot of paging, which would slow down the performance of the 4004 chip a lot. It would probably boot in under a week...
        • Operating systems are for sissies.

              • I would think that most devices like that use an AVR or a PIC. Certainly that's been my experience.

                They do now. But what did they use prior to that?

                Intel really did start something new with the 4004. Anybody who minimizes the effect it had is just plain silly.

                I had the 4004 manuals at the time, but never had the opportunity to play with the chips themselves. Of course, now it's easy to emulate one in software. I run Unix V5 and V7 on a simulated PDP-11, strictly for the hell of it.

                ...laura who wo

  • The days of the Nibble... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by msobkow (48369) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:34PM (#16848462) Journal
    I can't say I miss the days of the nibble and CPUs measured in kilohertz.

  • Zzzz (Score:4, Funny)

    by KNicolson (147698) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:35PM (#16848464) Homepage
    Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.

    And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.
    • I can imagine that one would... profit!

    • Re:Zzzz (Score:5, Funny)

      by Scarletdown (886459) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:38PM (#16848488)
      Get back to me once you've ported Linux to it.

      And imagine OGG supporting a Beowolf cluster of them in Soviet Russia.


      Well, Belgium! You had to go and use up most of the old standbys yourself. But you missed at least one...

      I, for one, welcome our 4 bit overlords.

  • Fast-forward (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jmv (93421) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:39PM (#16848500) Homepage
    Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?

    Who would have guessed chips produced 35 years later, would still inherit the brain-damaged ISA of the 4004. (OK, so the ISA probably didn't look too bad when it was for the 4004)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by the_humeister (922869)
      Actually, they're not the same. The 4004 has 46 instructions [pldos.pl]. The 8086 [wikipedia.org] has quite a bit more instructions and pretty much started us all on the x86 ISA, which weren't binary compatible with programs written for Intel's earlier processors.

      • Re:Fast-forward (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jmv (93421) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @12:08AM (#16848684) Homepage
        While not binary compatible, the 8086 [wikipedia.org] was a 16-bit improvement of the 8-bit 8080 [wikipedia.org], which was compatible with the 8008 [wikipedia.org], which AFAIK wasn't too far from the 4-bit 4040 [wikipedia.org] and the 4004 [wikipedia.org]... and that's why the space shuttle's boosters are sized according to a horse's rear end [astrodigital.org] and a 64-bit quad core CPU architecture that is influenced by the first 4-bit microcontroller.
        • Snopes says not quite [snopes.com]. Though the lesson of the story is true and profound.

          • Re:Railroad gauges (Score:5, Informative)

            by Cadallin (863437) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @04:04AM (#16849654)
            I really rather disagree with their conclusion. Although it was not "inevitable" the fact of the matter is that the rail road gauge that became dominant in the USA and Europe CAN be traced to the one adapted for rail use from carriages designed to fit on roads built to a standard specified originally by the Roman Legions based on the width of the asses of two standard war horses. That this is merely coincidental doesn't make it any less true, or less telling about the nature of beaurocracy and resistance to change. And the fact of the matter is that the standard does continue to affect rail shipping to this day, as it most definately determines what an oversize rail car or load is. Whether or not this actually had a direct impact on the Space Shuttle's SSRB's is less clear, although certainly they had to be designed so that they could be shipped from the factory to Cape Canaveral.

            The thrust of the point to me, is the very point that nobody sat around and actually considered what might be a good rail gauge to adopt for shipping lines, they just went ahead with a horribly odd standard that was already in existence.

            • Re:Railroad gauges (Score:4, Informative)

              by johnw (3725) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @04:15AM (#16849734)
              The thrust of the point to me, is the very point that nobody sat around and actually considered what might be a good rail gauge to adopt for shipping lines

              One man did. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did exactly that. He sat down and thought about what gauge to make his railway (The Great Western) and came up with 7 feet as a much more sensible value. He was entirely correct, but unfortunately his version was abandoned simply because far more people had used the existing default.

              John

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by rufty_tufty (888596)
                Not quite:
                Such a wide guage had a number of problems; namly its ability to turn corners fast (not much use for the north of england which is reasonably hilly and used for much of the frieght at the time because of the industry around there) and the difficulty of operating points on such a system. Not that these problems weren't solvable, but like all things in enginerring it's a compromise to best fit your current problem.
        • While not binary compatible, the 8086 was a 16-bit improvement of the 8-bit 8080, which was compatible with the 8008, which AFAIK wasn't too far from the 4-bit 4040 and the 4004

          Indeed. Does this instruction ring a bell? Decimal adjust accumulator DAA [pldos.pl]

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Technician (215283)
      Who would have guessed chips produced 35 years later, would still inherit the brain-damaged ISA of the 4004

      Didn't ISA come out with the IBM using the 8086? The 4004 was more suited to things like a calculator.

      I did look it up.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Arc hitecture [wikipedia.org]

      IBM PC XT ISA = Industry Standard Architecture released in 1981.

      The Intel 4004 processor was first fabricated in 1971 a decade before the ISA buss.

      http://www.intel4004.com/ [intel4004.com]

      Please don't re-write history. Blame IBM for ISA, n

  • 4004 tic tac toe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Salvance (1014001) * on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:40PM (#16848502) Homepage Journal
    The 4004 tic tac toe hardware from their unofficial site looks wicked ... http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jsweinrich/ [comcast.net]. I never thought I'd be drooling over electronic tic tac toe!
    • The 4004 has less than 2300 transistors, the lowest end Spartan FPGA (since I don't see the exact part # on there) is 40,000 gates (which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 160,000 transistors).

      You could do TTT in the FPGA on that board with room to spare. You could probably re-implement the 4004 ISA itself and his glue logic inside that FPGA.

  • 640k (Score:3, Funny)

    by Aehgts (972561) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:44PM (#16848522) Homepage Journal
    Ah, back in the good old days when 640K _was_ enough for anyone...

    • Re:640k (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Reality Master 101 (179095) <RealityMaster101&gmail,com> on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:55PM (#16848600) Homepage Journal

      Ah, back in the good old days when 640K _was_ enough for anyone...

      Dude, my first computer had 256 Bytes (not K -- *BYTES*) of memory (Built form the September 1976 issue of Popular Electronics -- Build Your Own Microcomputer, based on the COSMAC 1802 processor). 640K was beyond freaking imagination.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Billly Gates (198444)
        Offtopic but I heard Weirld Al sing in New York a few years ago with the parody turkey on rye (Or pastrami). Now chicken pot pie. You may want to search for that song instead.
    • 640KB would have been a luxury. The 4004 had a 12-bit address bus, and so it could address 4K-words. Each machine word was 4-bits long, so it could address 2KB of RAM. This wasn't a huge limitation, since it only shipped with 40 bytes of RAM, and no MMU.
    • Considering my first computer had 2K of RAM, I would consider 640K very nice.
      And yes, it was based on Z80.

  • a bit of relevant info.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by frakir (760204) <ockhamrazorNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:56PM (#16848606)
    pasted from http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/4004/index.html [slashdot.org]> :

    The first microprocessor in history, Intel 4004 was a 4-bit CPU designed for usage in calculators, or, as we say now, designed for "embedded applications". Clocked at 740 KHz, the 4004 executed up to 92,000 single word instructions per second, could access 4 KB of program memory and 640 bytes of RAM. Although the Intel 4004 was perfect fit for calculators and similar applications it was not very suitable for microcomputer use due to its somewhat limited architecture. The 4004 lacked interrupt support, had only 3-level deep stack, and used complicated method of accessing the RAM. Some of these shortcomings were fixed in the 4004 successor - Intel 4040.
    • Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but as I recall the 4004 wasn't a single-chip microprocessor. Depending on the chip set used, it took from two to four chips to put together a working microprocessor.

      Intel's first shur-nuff single-chip microprocessor was the gosh-awful, horribly slow 8008. They took so long to get past the 8008 and the only marginally better 8080 that Zilog brought out a much-improved, instruction set compatible version, the Z80, which dominated the microprocessor market for a nu

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by turly (992736)
        Dunno what you're smoking, fella, but Motorola never "got" the 6502. From this article [wikipedia.org]:

        The 6502 was designed primarily by the same engineering team that had designed the Motorola 6800. After quitting Motorola en masse, they quickly designed the 6501, a completely new processor that was pin-compatible with the 6800 (that is, it could be plugged into motherboards designed for the Motorola processor, although its instruction set was different). Motorola sued immediately, and MOS agreed to stop producing the

  • Digital archaeologists (Score:3, Funny)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:59PM (#16848620)
    wipe wipe
    "early gang bang porn, log it"
    wipe wipe
    "early vivid movie, looks like Jemma was young and need the money, log it"
    wipe wipe
    "some girl on girl stuff, log it" wipe wipe
    "holy crap I am taking this home"

  • This will cause a social revolution in Afghanistan. People will now be able to build their own 4004-based, and use them to download movies and MP3s against the will of the Taliban...

  • Era of Intel's Ways (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @12:13AM (#16848714) Homepage Journal
    Intel patented the 4004, which they tried to use to enforce a patent on the "microprocessor" generally - though Gilbert Hyatt [thocp.net] eventually won it, 20 years later.

    Does Intel still have a working patent protecting the 4004? And doesn't that patent include the schematics? What's the point of patenting an invention if other inventors can't tell whether they're reinventing what you've protected from "infringement"?
    • Well, you want a patent to be enforceable agaist others. So either you patent the entire microprocessor concept, or you patent one small invention that all microprocessors need to use. Intel probably patented the binary adder or something.
      • That's what I said.

        Though your story about documenting/dating work prior to filing a patent is wrong. Only if that documentation is either published or entered in certified notebooks obtained in advance from the PTO can the work prior to filing be counted as prior art defending from a later filing (but earlier than one's own filing).

        Trade secrets are unnecessary when that info is patented. That's the entire point of a patent.
  • The 8008 was the real start of the micro-computing revolution. The Scelbi Mark 8H was the first system to really draw people's attention. By the time they figured out what might be done with it, the 8080's were released. The Altair was built, BillyG and friends wrote a basic interpreter in 4Kbytes, and the rest is history.
  • I recall my father coming home from work (chemistry lecturer in higher education) and saying that he'd got access to calculators. A few weeks later I went over with him and played for a while on a Busicom, nixie tubes and all. This would be about 1972, I think, guessing from which building it was in.
    • Yes. You see, the original schematics were stored as an EBCDIC art file on punch cards. The chip design itself is remarkable, as it was to be the first chip built with sub-miniature vacuum tubes.

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