40 years of Intel Microprocessors

On November 15, the Intel 4004 processor celebrated it's 40th birthday. Fledgling company Intel, which had just moved into it's first fully owned premises, launched the 4004 CPU with an ad in the November 15 edition of Electronic News. It was the world's first single chip microprocessor, and to many represents the birth of the modern microprocessor.

Possibly the world's most famous CPU, and certainly the first single-chip CPU to be produced commercially, it had a maximum speed of a mind blowing 740KHz! It had a 4-bit instruction set, could execute between 46,000 and 92,000 instructions per second, and could access 4KB of program memory and 640 bytes of RAM.

Packaged in a 16-pin DIP package, the chipset of the 4004 consisted of 6 chips. First, and best known, is the 4004 itself. Then there was the 4001 256-bit ROM, 4002 320-bit RAM, 4003 10-bit shift register, and finally the 4008/4009 standard memory and I/O interface set.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore famously predicted that transistor count in computer chips would double every 2 years. A 43 million percent increase from the 4004 to current 2nd generation core processors has pretty much followed that prediction, as to date the count has doubled on average every 25 months. An impressive feat, as it means the CPU in your PC has the same (or better) performance as a computer that only 40 years ago would have needed a decent sized conference room to house it, and a small power plant to run it!