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The book "California, a History" by Kevin Starr(p266) compares the 4004 and the ENIAC and says the 4004 was "one sixteenth of an inch long". Is this correct?
~~A. Reader —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.105.63.69 ( talk) 01:48, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm a little unsure about the following passage, deleted (and slightly modified) from a previous revision of this article:
If someone cares to do research on this, feel free :-). It would certainly be an interesting anecdote. Wernher 23:35, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
After a careful editor changed the 4004's maximum clock speed to the proper value of 740 kHz, someone changed it back to the widely quoted but completely incorrect value of 108 kHz. I've just fixed it again, and I added a stern explanatory comment explaining why 740 kHz is correct and should not be changed.
Unfortunately, the incorrect value of 108 kHz is all over the place now, including within some very reputable sources. Even Intel's own pages on the 4004 list it. But Intel's original 4004 data sheets all say that its minimum clock period is 1350 nanoseconds, which means the maximum clock speed is 740 kHz. (I have checked data sheets from 1971, 1973, and 1977; they all agree on this.) The only possible explanation for the widely-quoted value of 108 kHz is that the first page of these data sheets don't list a clock speed, but instead list a 10.8 microsecond instruction cycle. (This instruction cycle requires 8 clock cycles.) At some point a writer must have somehow misinterpreted this value as a 108 kHz clock speed.
Hopefully my comment in the page will keep this from happening again here, but correcting the whole world is going to take a while. :-)
-- Colin Douglas Howell 00:13, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I corrected the russian page of Wiki (4004) after reading of Intel's datasheets and laughing ;-) This Colin Douglas's note is acknowledgement of my version of Intel's boosters mistake. Jem222 ( talk) 11:08, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
I believe you are right that the 740kHz makes more sense, but it isn't completely obvious that the instruction cycle rate isn't reasonable. Most processors now have an internal PLL clock multiplier, and are commonly described in terms of that rate, which is also often the instruction cycle (one instruction per clock) rate. Many early processors generate a two or four phase clock from the external clock input. (Or with a separate clock generator chip.) If the 4004 does that, then the lower rate may be more correct. What clock rate is used for the most FFs inside the 4004? Gah4 ( talk) 17:11, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
"The Intel Trinity" has both 740kHz and 108kHz in it. There are a lot of details that you don't find in other sources, but I believe also other errors. Gah4 ( talk) 07:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not a big fan of these "who was first" fights; in my view, they often obscure the real significance of the events in question. But I also don't like the current phrasing, which implies that the 4004's status as "first microprocessor" may not be fully deserved and that other similar devices already existed. This seems like an unnecessary distortion of history.
The idea of using large-scale integrated circuits to shrink computer processors had certainly occurred to many people, of course, but the Intel designers do seem to have been the first to make a one-chip processor intended to be generally applicable to a variety of problems and to introduce it to a broad market.
To make this clear, I would describe the 4004 as "the first commercial single-chip microprocessor".
-- Colin Douglas Howell 01:40, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Added a reference that has interesting including multiple viewpoints of people who were there at the time. Link in the main article is to the author's homepage. Alternative link: http://home.tx.rr.com/gep2b/schaller_dissertation_2004.pdf Also compare discussion to wording on intel's 4004 site, which I am inclined to think of as 'simply not truthful', but then, they do it for the marketing. Anyway, enjoy the read. It appears to be very well researched. 85.178.88.27 02:09, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
The paper can be found on the Computer History Museum web site: http://corphist.computerhistory.org/corphist/documents/doc-487ecec0af0da.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by GilCarrick ( talk • contribs) 17:09, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
I moved the "adware warning" against http://www.intel4004.com/ from the ext lk description itself into an intra-section footnote: "Site has been reported to contain adware/ spyware." If someone cares to investigate this further, please do so. -- Wernher 22:52, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
http://www.intel4004.com/images/blank_trans.gif
, this has privacy implications although whether this web bug can be classified as adware and/or spyware I am unsure. Perhaps this issue has something to do with the bad blood between Faggin and Intel (just my little theory). If someone cares to investigate this even further, please do so.
Slark
17:04, 3 April 2006 (UTC)The problem has been solved. We got rid of the offending counter.
The 4004 marked the 4004BC of modern computing.
I removed Image:Intel-4004-schematics.png from the article because it was 1.5MB, which is far too large to appear in an article. Could someone who knows how to do images please replace it with a small thumbnail. 58.179.129.241 00:48, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
In the second paragraph of the Intel 4004 article (as of 12/7/2006 at 10AM EST), it is written:
As for the 4004 itself, it was largely a commercial failure and had very little impact on the electronics industry as a whole.
Based on my extensive research on 4004 history, I find this statement quite surprising, and would be interested in seeing evidence to support this claim. Intel's very next microprocessor, the 8008 was indeed a commercial failure. But in the case of the MCS-4 family (4001, 4002, 4003, 4004), you have to consider that commercial failures rarely spawn a family of compatible follow-on products like the 4040 microprocessor, or two generations of interface chips, like the 4008, 4009, and the later 4289 memory interface chips. Nor does one find IC date codes on chips that are commercial failures that extend 15 years from the first date of manufacture (in this case 1971-1986). National Semiconductor second-sourced the 4004 as the INS4004. I don't have hard production numbers, but my understanding is that over a million Intel 4004s were made.
It is well recognized by now that other companies were working on microprocessor technology at the same time, and that the notion of the microprocessor was "in the air." Intel's 4004 team didn't "pull an Einstein," they just got to market first with a microprocessor you could buy off-the-shelf and program yourself. William Asprey's journal article The Intel 4004 Microprocessor: What Constituted Invention?, published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1997) gives a great overview of the historical context and considers whether the birth of the microprocessor was a revolutionary or evolutionary milestone in the history of technology.
Sure, let's give credit where credit is due. Let's list any and all the other companies and projects that were working on microprocessor technology around the same time. A stable Wiki that we can all agree on is the best thing we can offer the world.
Disclosure: I am not now, nor was I ever an employee of Intel. Though I have done exhibit design for the Intel Museum as an independent vendor, I am committed to as accurate a portrayal of history as possible. --Tim McNerney
I too would agree.
The statement that the 4004 was a commercial failure is an unfair opinion.
Busicom paid for its development (largely), and gave Intel an incrediable market opportunity. Let's not forget that Busicom, using the NCR brand, produced millions of desktop calculators using their version of the 4004.
I added "A curious coincidence" because I thought that the story of the naming of the 4004 was interesting and also the coincidence with the date 4004 B.C. surprising. viuz 22:19, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Elvia -- Thanks for all of your contributions to this page. I teach Computing at Bennington College and we've discussed the design of the 4004 at length. We designed and built our own CPU in TTL last year, and one of the students dedicated it to Federico. But mostly, I just wanted to say that your contributions to the documentation and history of the 4004 are excellent. Joe 04:09, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
So, um, what of the 4001, 4002, 4003 chips? Are they supposed to represent each of the three years following Genesis, then? Could just be that they were the first four in a new line of "4000-series", 4-bit devices... Not everything has to have biblical consequences or even be related back to it. I don't go about finding ways to relate the Motorola 68k to events that (supposedly!) happened 70,012 years ago then add a reference to them on its page... 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 18:06, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Silly how an article about microprocessors tolerates any sort of numerology. Go home, idiots! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.13.42.35 ( talk) 00:45, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
I removed the following:
This seems to be comparing add time (10.8us on 4004 vs. 200us on ENIAC, although that is closer to 18.5). This is an unfair comparison as the 4004 is adding only 1 digit in this time and ENIAC is adding 10 digits (single precision) or 20 digits (double precision). Also ENIAC was parallel in 1946 and could be doing additions in up to 20 accumulators at the same time.
By my calculations they are from roughly comparable to ENIAC being somewhere over 10 times faster; although this would require actual 4004 code for 10 digit addition to be certain which probably required several instructions per digit, not just one.
I don't believe any fair comparison of the two machines could be done in one single number like this. -- RTC 00:13, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I found the text was originally inserted as the following:
While this is more realistic, I still don't believe a single number can accurately and fairly compare the two machines. -- RTC 00:27, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
There's the statement in the article that the 4004 was not a "single chip microprocessor", as "contrary to popular belief". I find this somewhat confusing; admittedly, the 4004 was not a "stand-alone" chip, of the later sort that included RAM, ROM, and/or IO multiplexing, but did anyone ever think it was? As I recall the times, the chip was the first to be a microprocessor on a single chip - the fact that the RAM or ROM was separate isn't relevant, really. Ofc, even the very newest Pentiums still don't contain memory. Anyways, I think this needs clarification, but I wasn't sure how to fix it. Is there a distinct category called "single-chip micro" which specifically refers to having all major functions onboard a single chip? I'm not familiar with the semantics here, but clearly the 4004 was the first processor on a single chip. Eaglizard 21:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
Some more is discussed in [1] The address and data are multiplexed on a single 4 bit bus. The 4001 and 4002 demultiplex the address (the high digit is a mask option). Instead, one could externally demultiplex the address and data, and interface to more usual ROM and RAM. The voltage levels for clock inputs are different from those for data inputs, requiring special clock drivers and, for optimal clock frequency, complicated timing. Gah4 ( talk) 07:38, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that any time I've seen the definition of a (micro)processor, aka CPU, in the past, it's always been the part which performs various operations on data presented at its inputs, and then provides the result at its outputs. Where it comes from, where it goes to, is immaterial. Memory (ram, rom, disk, paper tape, stuff coming out of a users brain and into a keyboard) is decidedly external - you could possibly even argue that a pure CPU doesn't even require any internal registers beyond the bare minimum to enable a Turing-complete instruction set, let alone cache - and so are clock and sync pulses. Remember how the oldest, somewhat experimental micros could be single-stepped by hitting a switch that sent a single pulse, similar to what could be done with minis and mainframes? The USER became the clock generator. But they still had proper 8080 CPUs inside. The 4004 is a single piece of silicon in a single ceramic- or plastic-plus-connectors package that can (request and) receive data through the connectors, and thrust it out again the same way after doing stuff to it. It counts.
BTW, if it required a 4008 and 4009 to work, however were you supposed to use the original 4001-thru-4004 lineup without them? ;) In any case, their assignments mirrored what we still see today; the 4001 was the BIOS ROM, 4002 the RAM, 4003 the keyboard PIC and video card, and the serial/parallel port (or USB) connector tasks were split between all three of the "support" chips. Very very few microprocessors can be used just as they are without SOME kind of additional cardware... I think the term you're hunting for instead is either "microcontroller" or "system on a chip".
(And the designers weren't going for that - they were instead looking to replace the separate cards of a backplane minicomputer (the CPU card - sometimes itself split into separate parts with e.g. the ALU taking up a whole slot - the memory card(s), the terminal interface card etc) with a single chip apiece. They probably didn't even think of the 4004 itself as the most significant part of the whole setup at the time, but instead the accomplishment of making EACH of those things, that previously required a square foot of PCB with an edge connector and requiring an inch-plus of clearance, fit into a device that was small enough to swallow. The further concatenation of all those parts into a single unit would take a while longer still.) 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 18:20, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I recently viewed a video by the Computer History Museum in which Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin talked about the 4004, and at one point Federico says, "... the most remarkable application, of which I feel very ... proud, is the 4004 is one of the few artifacts that have gone beyond the asteroid belts in Pioneer 10 ... It's a major piece of artwork up in space". This wiki article states that it's just a myth, however. Was Federico kidding around? -- MP64 ( talk) 07:20, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I have found a reference to the possibility of the 4004 on Pioneer 10: http://www.opencores.org/forums/cores/2002/05/00059 According to Dr. Larry Lasher of AMES Research Center that the 4004 was not used on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. http://home.comcast.net/~jsweinrich Jweinrich ( talk) 15:26, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
Here stated http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html that Pioneer 10 computers had 16-bit and 18-bit word sizes. Not 4-bit as 4004. Avivanov76 ( talk) 16:26, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
The MCS-4 manual states there was some publicly availble 4004 software:
Is any of this still available? A quick search of the usual places didn't turn up anything useful (but intel400.com again/still has an infection). Dugong.is.good.tucker ( talk) 16:19, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I am not an expert, but various articles, googling, and a patent listed on the page suggest that mazor should be mentioned as one of the designers.
He was a co-recipient of the kyoto prize for the 4004. AllanGottlieb ( talk) 01:07, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
would it be accurate to say the 4004 is the ancestor of all the current x86 based chips produced today? after all, some of the same people worked on the 4004 and the 8008, which led to the 8088, the 8086, 286, 386, 486, pentium, itanium, etc, and thus all the AMD chips as well which were copies of x86, at least in instruction set and addressing, if not more? Decora ( talk) 10:39, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
Why does today's main page list 60,000 instructions per second when it says 92,000 here?!? CapnZapp ( talk) 21:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
60 - its average power (for mix of 1 or 2-cycle instructions), 92 (on 740 kHz) - its maximum. Jem222 ( talk) 11:17, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
Is it possible to overclock this CPU to achieve higher speeds? General Heed ( talk) 18:10, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
not really a chip to overclock. you can find manuals online that also include performance dependent on temperatures and voltages. the 4004 maximum temperature is not too high. the chip is too small to add a heat sink.
the 4004 chip usually has multiple 4004 chips with even more of the matching rom,ram and IO-modules on the same board. The 4004 chip is a multi-processor chip by being only 4-bit. Synchronization is more important on 4-bit instruction sets and a higher synchronization frequency will easily randomize some communication processes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.13.42.35 ( talk) 00:55, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Historical articles on the MCM/70 appear to suggest (perhaps incorrectly) that the 8008 was also supported by the MCS-4. Does anyone know for sure? If this is wrong I'd like to set the record straight. Maury Markowitz ( talk) 11:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
The 8008 8-bit CPU architecture and chip set were originally created by Datapoint Corp. for use in their Datapoint 2200 intelligent terminal, and later designed into a chip by Intel. The MCS-4 4-bit architecture and chip set were originally created by Intel for use in Busicom Corp. family of calculating machines, and consisted of 4 chips: CPU (4004), ROM with I/O (4001), RAM with I/O (4002), and I/O (4003). The 8008 required standard memory components and there were no dedicated I/O chips. The instruction sets of the two processors were quite different, and the MCS-4 did not support the 8008. The only relationship between the 8008 and the 4004 was their use of the same manufacturing technology and design methodology, originally developed for the 4004. viuz — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.18.188.109 ( talk) 21:39, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
A distinction should be made between the early original MCS-4 documents, and later recollections — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.18.188.109 ( talk) 22:14, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
Please explain where and why. I remove the banner till this is done. Audriusa ( talk) 09:58, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
OK, could it just have one each of the 4001 and 4002, or more? If so, how many? And was this any different with the 4008/4009 or 4289? (I'm trying to do a thought experiment over whether you could make any kind of "useful" home computer from it beyond the level of the electric typewriter/very very early word processor - with limited (magtape-based) editing capabilities - I've otherwise heard it was integrated to. 40/256 bytes is a bit limited... 1K/4K, now we're getting somewhere, up to Atari 2600 or Sinclair ZX81 levels) 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 18:44, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
There is a 12 bit address bus, I believe addressing four bit nybbles. But separate instruction and data space, though I am not sure where the partition is. It might be the high bit, so 2048 nybbles instruction, and 2048 for data. There is one reference, I believe on a page linked from here, that the busicom has five 4001 ROM chips, including the optional square root ROM. Gah4 ( talk) 17:25, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
A computer with 4*4004 chips addresses 5120 bits of data-random-access-memory and 32768 bits of program-random-access-memory. A 4004 chip addresses 8 memory banks, that are 4002-ram chips. It has 16 4-bit registers. Each 4004 chip has its 12 bits for its stack, 4 bits for its "accumulator" and 1 bit for its "carry". (from a 4004 manual) 77.13.42.35 ( talk) 01:17, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
This article, like many retrocomputing articles, is written in the past tense. Seems to me that 4004 chips still exist, so past tense isn't necessary when referring to the processor. It might still be for some other statements, such as design decisions, people or places. Is there a wikipedia rule on tense in articles? Gah4 ( talk) 17:30, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
I put a citation needed tag after the claim that the 4004 was predated by the TMS 1000. The citation in the Microprocessor article, from the Smithsoninan, says that the TMS 1000 was developed "about the same time that Intel fashioned the first microprocessor", actually giving credit to Intel for the first microprocessor. That citation also has a disclaimer that says it is not guaranteed to be accurate. Rsduhamel ( talk) 19:47, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
(Sock puppet of banned user trying to imply that because Busicom commissioned a calculator architecture from Intel they were co-inventors of the microprocessor.) It seems to me that this depends somewhat on the actual input from Busicom. As well as I know it, they did more than just commission (supply money for), but actually did much of the design. One could see what the patent says, for example. Gah4 ( talk) 23:31, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
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(stated importance of this chip in the first paragraph. The average Wikipedia reader would have no idea this chip is central to the development of the computers in their lives.) As well as I know it, like with many inventions, the time was ripe for it. If not intel, someone else would have done it soon enough. Society tends to miss this, for example, in the case of the telephone and incandescent lamp. Well, without the 4004, we might be using descendants of the 6800 and 68000, instead of ones that can trace back through the 4004, 8008, 8080, 8086. Gah4 ( talk) 01:02, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
How true is the Tadashi Sasaki thing anyways? As far as we know Ted Hoff came up with the idea of the microprocessor but Sasaki seems to imply in this interview ( https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Tadashi_Sasaki) that he trasmitted the idea a unnamed woman had (feels wrong to not recognice the woman to begin with if it were true) to Robert Noyce in 1968, what's weirder is that he implies that he accepted the opinion of the majority that formed the brainstorming session at the time, wich he says was a mistake. So did he heard the idea, found it nice, but not nice enough to consider it but then trasmitted the idea to Intel. Feels a weird sequence of events, and more so when the busicoin schemes after all that were completely divorced from that woman's ideas. I think or there is something badly translated, he is lying, comfused or the original story of the 4004 needs a retelling. Mirad1000 ( talk) 21:49, 28 January 2023 (UTC)
In Talk:Microprocessor#Intel_4004/TMS1802NC_Dispute there is discussion about which one was first. The 4004 is better known as being commercially available, though the 8008 was more available. Gah4 ( talk) 02:34, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
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The book "California, a History" by Kevin Starr(p266) compares the 4004 and the ENIAC and says the 4004 was "one sixteenth of an inch long". Is this correct?
~~A. Reader —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.105.63.69 ( talk) 01:48, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm a little unsure about the following passage, deleted (and slightly modified) from a previous revision of this article:
If someone cares to do research on this, feel free :-). It would certainly be an interesting anecdote. Wernher 23:35, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
After a careful editor changed the 4004's maximum clock speed to the proper value of 740 kHz, someone changed it back to the widely quoted but completely incorrect value of 108 kHz. I've just fixed it again, and I added a stern explanatory comment explaining why 740 kHz is correct and should not be changed.
Unfortunately, the incorrect value of 108 kHz is all over the place now, including within some very reputable sources. Even Intel's own pages on the 4004 list it. But Intel's original 4004 data sheets all say that its minimum clock period is 1350 nanoseconds, which means the maximum clock speed is 740 kHz. (I have checked data sheets from 1971, 1973, and 1977; they all agree on this.) The only possible explanation for the widely-quoted value of 108 kHz is that the first page of these data sheets don't list a clock speed, but instead list a 10.8 microsecond instruction cycle. (This instruction cycle requires 8 clock cycles.) At some point a writer must have somehow misinterpreted this value as a 108 kHz clock speed.
Hopefully my comment in the page will keep this from happening again here, but correcting the whole world is going to take a while. :-)
-- Colin Douglas Howell 00:13, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I corrected the russian page of Wiki (4004) after reading of Intel's datasheets and laughing ;-) This Colin Douglas's note is acknowledgement of my version of Intel's boosters mistake. Jem222 ( talk) 11:08, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
I believe you are right that the 740kHz makes more sense, but it isn't completely obvious that the instruction cycle rate isn't reasonable. Most processors now have an internal PLL clock multiplier, and are commonly described in terms of that rate, which is also often the instruction cycle (one instruction per clock) rate. Many early processors generate a two or four phase clock from the external clock input. (Or with a separate clock generator chip.) If the 4004 does that, then the lower rate may be more correct. What clock rate is used for the most FFs inside the 4004? Gah4 ( talk) 17:11, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
"The Intel Trinity" has both 740kHz and 108kHz in it. There are a lot of details that you don't find in other sources, but I believe also other errors. Gah4 ( talk) 07:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm not a big fan of these "who was first" fights; in my view, they often obscure the real significance of the events in question. But I also don't like the current phrasing, which implies that the 4004's status as "first microprocessor" may not be fully deserved and that other similar devices already existed. This seems like an unnecessary distortion of history.
The idea of using large-scale integrated circuits to shrink computer processors had certainly occurred to many people, of course, but the Intel designers do seem to have been the first to make a one-chip processor intended to be generally applicable to a variety of problems and to introduce it to a broad market.
To make this clear, I would describe the 4004 as "the first commercial single-chip microprocessor".
-- Colin Douglas Howell 01:40, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Added a reference that has interesting including multiple viewpoints of people who were there at the time. Link in the main article is to the author's homepage. Alternative link: http://home.tx.rr.com/gep2b/schaller_dissertation_2004.pdf Also compare discussion to wording on intel's 4004 site, which I am inclined to think of as 'simply not truthful', but then, they do it for the marketing. Anyway, enjoy the read. It appears to be very well researched. 85.178.88.27 02:09, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
The paper can be found on the Computer History Museum web site: http://corphist.computerhistory.org/corphist/documents/doc-487ecec0af0da.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by GilCarrick ( talk • contribs) 17:09, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
I moved the "adware warning" against http://www.intel4004.com/ from the ext lk description itself into an intra-section footnote: "Site has been reported to contain adware/ spyware." If someone cares to investigate this further, please do so. -- Wernher 22:52, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
http://www.intel4004.com/images/blank_trans.gif
, this has privacy implications although whether this web bug can be classified as adware and/or spyware I am unsure. Perhaps this issue has something to do with the bad blood between Faggin and Intel (just my little theory). If someone cares to investigate this even further, please do so.
Slark
17:04, 3 April 2006 (UTC)The problem has been solved. We got rid of the offending counter.
The 4004 marked the 4004BC of modern computing.
I removed Image:Intel-4004-schematics.png from the article because it was 1.5MB, which is far too large to appear in an article. Could someone who knows how to do images please replace it with a small thumbnail. 58.179.129.241 00:48, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
In the second paragraph of the Intel 4004 article (as of 12/7/2006 at 10AM EST), it is written:
As for the 4004 itself, it was largely a commercial failure and had very little impact on the electronics industry as a whole.
Based on my extensive research on 4004 history, I find this statement quite surprising, and would be interested in seeing evidence to support this claim. Intel's very next microprocessor, the 8008 was indeed a commercial failure. But in the case of the MCS-4 family (4001, 4002, 4003, 4004), you have to consider that commercial failures rarely spawn a family of compatible follow-on products like the 4040 microprocessor, or two generations of interface chips, like the 4008, 4009, and the later 4289 memory interface chips. Nor does one find IC date codes on chips that are commercial failures that extend 15 years from the first date of manufacture (in this case 1971-1986). National Semiconductor second-sourced the 4004 as the INS4004. I don't have hard production numbers, but my understanding is that over a million Intel 4004s were made.
It is well recognized by now that other companies were working on microprocessor technology at the same time, and that the notion of the microprocessor was "in the air." Intel's 4004 team didn't "pull an Einstein," they just got to market first with a microprocessor you could buy off-the-shelf and program yourself. William Asprey's journal article The Intel 4004 Microprocessor: What Constituted Invention?, published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1997) gives a great overview of the historical context and considers whether the birth of the microprocessor was a revolutionary or evolutionary milestone in the history of technology.
Sure, let's give credit where credit is due. Let's list any and all the other companies and projects that were working on microprocessor technology around the same time. A stable Wiki that we can all agree on is the best thing we can offer the world.
Disclosure: I am not now, nor was I ever an employee of Intel. Though I have done exhibit design for the Intel Museum as an independent vendor, I am committed to as accurate a portrayal of history as possible. --Tim McNerney
I too would agree.
The statement that the 4004 was a commercial failure is an unfair opinion.
Busicom paid for its development (largely), and gave Intel an incrediable market opportunity. Let's not forget that Busicom, using the NCR brand, produced millions of desktop calculators using their version of the 4004.
I added "A curious coincidence" because I thought that the story of the naming of the 4004 was interesting and also the coincidence with the date 4004 B.C. surprising. viuz 22:19, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Elvia -- Thanks for all of your contributions to this page. I teach Computing at Bennington College and we've discussed the design of the 4004 at length. We designed and built our own CPU in TTL last year, and one of the students dedicated it to Federico. But mostly, I just wanted to say that your contributions to the documentation and history of the 4004 are excellent. Joe 04:09, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
So, um, what of the 4001, 4002, 4003 chips? Are they supposed to represent each of the three years following Genesis, then? Could just be that they were the first four in a new line of "4000-series", 4-bit devices... Not everything has to have biblical consequences or even be related back to it. I don't go about finding ways to relate the Motorola 68k to events that (supposedly!) happened 70,012 years ago then add a reference to them on its page... 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 18:06, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
Silly how an article about microprocessors tolerates any sort of numerology. Go home, idiots! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.13.42.35 ( talk) 00:45, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
I removed the following:
This seems to be comparing add time (10.8us on 4004 vs. 200us on ENIAC, although that is closer to 18.5). This is an unfair comparison as the 4004 is adding only 1 digit in this time and ENIAC is adding 10 digits (single precision) or 20 digits (double precision). Also ENIAC was parallel in 1946 and could be doing additions in up to 20 accumulators at the same time.
By my calculations they are from roughly comparable to ENIAC being somewhere over 10 times faster; although this would require actual 4004 code for 10 digit addition to be certain which probably required several instructions per digit, not just one.
I don't believe any fair comparison of the two machines could be done in one single number like this. -- RTC 00:13, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I found the text was originally inserted as the following:
While this is more realistic, I still don't believe a single number can accurately and fairly compare the two machines. -- RTC 00:27, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
There's the statement in the article that the 4004 was not a "single chip microprocessor", as "contrary to popular belief". I find this somewhat confusing; admittedly, the 4004 was not a "stand-alone" chip, of the later sort that included RAM, ROM, and/or IO multiplexing, but did anyone ever think it was? As I recall the times, the chip was the first to be a microprocessor on a single chip - the fact that the RAM or ROM was separate isn't relevant, really. Ofc, even the very newest Pentiums still don't contain memory. Anyways, I think this needs clarification, but I wasn't sure how to fix it. Is there a distinct category called "single-chip micro" which specifically refers to having all major functions onboard a single chip? I'm not familiar with the semantics here, but clearly the 4004 was the first processor on a single chip. Eaglizard 21:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
Some more is discussed in [1] The address and data are multiplexed on a single 4 bit bus. The 4001 and 4002 demultiplex the address (the high digit is a mask option). Instead, one could externally demultiplex the address and data, and interface to more usual ROM and RAM. The voltage levels for clock inputs are different from those for data inputs, requiring special clock drivers and, for optimal clock frequency, complicated timing. Gah4 ( talk) 07:38, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that any time I've seen the definition of a (micro)processor, aka CPU, in the past, it's always been the part which performs various operations on data presented at its inputs, and then provides the result at its outputs. Where it comes from, where it goes to, is immaterial. Memory (ram, rom, disk, paper tape, stuff coming out of a users brain and into a keyboard) is decidedly external - you could possibly even argue that a pure CPU doesn't even require any internal registers beyond the bare minimum to enable a Turing-complete instruction set, let alone cache - and so are clock and sync pulses. Remember how the oldest, somewhat experimental micros could be single-stepped by hitting a switch that sent a single pulse, similar to what could be done with minis and mainframes? The USER became the clock generator. But they still had proper 8080 CPUs inside. The 4004 is a single piece of silicon in a single ceramic- or plastic-plus-connectors package that can (request and) receive data through the connectors, and thrust it out again the same way after doing stuff to it. It counts.
BTW, if it required a 4008 and 4009 to work, however were you supposed to use the original 4001-thru-4004 lineup without them? ;) In any case, their assignments mirrored what we still see today; the 4001 was the BIOS ROM, 4002 the RAM, 4003 the keyboard PIC and video card, and the serial/parallel port (or USB) connector tasks were split between all three of the "support" chips. Very very few microprocessors can be used just as they are without SOME kind of additional cardware... I think the term you're hunting for instead is either "microcontroller" or "system on a chip".
(And the designers weren't going for that - they were instead looking to replace the separate cards of a backplane minicomputer (the CPU card - sometimes itself split into separate parts with e.g. the ALU taking up a whole slot - the memory card(s), the terminal interface card etc) with a single chip apiece. They probably didn't even think of the 4004 itself as the most significant part of the whole setup at the time, but instead the accomplishment of making EACH of those things, that previously required a square foot of PCB with an edge connector and requiring an inch-plus of clearance, fit into a device that was small enough to swallow. The further concatenation of all those parts into a single unit would take a while longer still.) 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 18:20, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
I recently viewed a video by the Computer History Museum in which Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin talked about the 4004, and at one point Federico says, "... the most remarkable application, of which I feel very ... proud, is the 4004 is one of the few artifacts that have gone beyond the asteroid belts in Pioneer 10 ... It's a major piece of artwork up in space". This wiki article states that it's just a myth, however. Was Federico kidding around? -- MP64 ( talk) 07:20, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I have found a reference to the possibility of the 4004 on Pioneer 10: http://www.opencores.org/forums/cores/2002/05/00059 According to Dr. Larry Lasher of AMES Research Center that the 4004 was not used on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. http://home.comcast.net/~jsweinrich Jweinrich ( talk) 15:26, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
Here stated http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html that Pioneer 10 computers had 16-bit and 18-bit word sizes. Not 4-bit as 4004. Avivanov76 ( talk) 16:26, 3 November 2012 (UTC)
The MCS-4 manual states there was some publicly availble 4004 software:
Is any of this still available? A quick search of the usual places didn't turn up anything useful (but intel400.com again/still has an infection). Dugong.is.good.tucker ( talk) 16:19, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I am not an expert, but various articles, googling, and a patent listed on the page suggest that mazor should be mentioned as one of the designers.
He was a co-recipient of the kyoto prize for the 4004. AllanGottlieb ( talk) 01:07, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
would it be accurate to say the 4004 is the ancestor of all the current x86 based chips produced today? after all, some of the same people worked on the 4004 and the 8008, which led to the 8088, the 8086, 286, 386, 486, pentium, itanium, etc, and thus all the AMD chips as well which were copies of x86, at least in instruction set and addressing, if not more? Decora ( talk) 10:39, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
Why does today's main page list 60,000 instructions per second when it says 92,000 here?!? CapnZapp ( talk) 21:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
60 - its average power (for mix of 1 or 2-cycle instructions), 92 (on 740 kHz) - its maximum. Jem222 ( talk) 11:17, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
Is it possible to overclock this CPU to achieve higher speeds? General Heed ( talk) 18:10, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
not really a chip to overclock. you can find manuals online that also include performance dependent on temperatures and voltages. the 4004 maximum temperature is not too high. the chip is too small to add a heat sink.
the 4004 chip usually has multiple 4004 chips with even more of the matching rom,ram and IO-modules on the same board. The 4004 chip is a multi-processor chip by being only 4-bit. Synchronization is more important on 4-bit instruction sets and a higher synchronization frequency will easily randomize some communication processes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.13.42.35 ( talk) 00:55, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Historical articles on the MCM/70 appear to suggest (perhaps incorrectly) that the 8008 was also supported by the MCS-4. Does anyone know for sure? If this is wrong I'd like to set the record straight. Maury Markowitz ( talk) 11:27, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
The 8008 8-bit CPU architecture and chip set were originally created by Datapoint Corp. for use in their Datapoint 2200 intelligent terminal, and later designed into a chip by Intel. The MCS-4 4-bit architecture and chip set were originally created by Intel for use in Busicom Corp. family of calculating machines, and consisted of 4 chips: CPU (4004), ROM with I/O (4001), RAM with I/O (4002), and I/O (4003). The 8008 required standard memory components and there were no dedicated I/O chips. The instruction sets of the two processors were quite different, and the MCS-4 did not support the 8008. The only relationship between the 8008 and the 4004 was their use of the same manufacturing technology and design methodology, originally developed for the 4004. viuz — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.18.188.109 ( talk) 21:39, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
A distinction should be made between the early original MCS-4 documents, and later recollections — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.18.188.109 ( talk) 22:14, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
Please explain where and why. I remove the banner till this is done. Audriusa ( talk) 09:58, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
OK, could it just have one each of the 4001 and 4002, or more? If so, how many? And was this any different with the 4008/4009 or 4289? (I'm trying to do a thought experiment over whether you could make any kind of "useful" home computer from it beyond the level of the electric typewriter/very very early word processor - with limited (magtape-based) editing capabilities - I've otherwise heard it was integrated to. 40/256 bytes is a bit limited... 1K/4K, now we're getting somewhere, up to Atari 2600 or Sinclair ZX81 levels) 193.63.174.211 ( talk) 18:44, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
There is a 12 bit address bus, I believe addressing four bit nybbles. But separate instruction and data space, though I am not sure where the partition is. It might be the high bit, so 2048 nybbles instruction, and 2048 for data. There is one reference, I believe on a page linked from here, that the busicom has five 4001 ROM chips, including the optional square root ROM. Gah4 ( talk) 17:25, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
A computer with 4*4004 chips addresses 5120 bits of data-random-access-memory and 32768 bits of program-random-access-memory. A 4004 chip addresses 8 memory banks, that are 4002-ram chips. It has 16 4-bit registers. Each 4004 chip has its 12 bits for its stack, 4 bits for its "accumulator" and 1 bit for its "carry". (from a 4004 manual) 77.13.42.35 ( talk) 01:17, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
This article, like many retrocomputing articles, is written in the past tense. Seems to me that 4004 chips still exist, so past tense isn't necessary when referring to the processor. It might still be for some other statements, such as design decisions, people or places. Is there a wikipedia rule on tense in articles? Gah4 ( talk) 17:30, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
I put a citation needed tag after the claim that the 4004 was predated by the TMS 1000. The citation in the Microprocessor article, from the Smithsoninan, says that the TMS 1000 was developed "about the same time that Intel fashioned the first microprocessor", actually giving credit to Intel for the first microprocessor. That citation also has a disclaimer that says it is not guaranteed to be accurate. Rsduhamel ( talk) 19:47, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
(Sock puppet of banned user trying to imply that because Busicom commissioned a calculator architecture from Intel they were co-inventors of the microprocessor.) It seems to me that this depends somewhat on the actual input from Busicom. As well as I know it, they did more than just commission (supply money for), but actually did much of the design. One could see what the patent says, for example. Gah4 ( talk) 23:31, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
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(stated importance of this chip in the first paragraph. The average Wikipedia reader would have no idea this chip is central to the development of the computers in their lives.) As well as I know it, like with many inventions, the time was ripe for it. If not intel, someone else would have done it soon enough. Society tends to miss this, for example, in the case of the telephone and incandescent lamp. Well, without the 4004, we might be using descendants of the 6800 and 68000, instead of ones that can trace back through the 4004, 8008, 8080, 8086. Gah4 ( talk) 01:02, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
How true is the Tadashi Sasaki thing anyways? As far as we know Ted Hoff came up with the idea of the microprocessor but Sasaki seems to imply in this interview ( https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Tadashi_Sasaki) that he trasmitted the idea a unnamed woman had (feels wrong to not recognice the woman to begin with if it were true) to Robert Noyce in 1968, what's weirder is that he implies that he accepted the opinion of the majority that formed the brainstorming session at the time, wich he says was a mistake. So did he heard the idea, found it nice, but not nice enough to consider it but then trasmitted the idea to Intel. Feels a weird sequence of events, and more so when the busicoin schemes after all that were completely divorced from that woman's ideas. I think or there is something badly translated, he is lying, comfused or the original story of the 4004 needs a retelling. Mirad1000 ( talk) 21:49, 28 January 2023 (UTC)
In Talk:Microprocessor#Intel_4004/TMS1802NC_Dispute there is discussion about which one was first. The 4004 is better known as being commercially available, though the 8008 was more available. Gah4 ( talk) 02:34, 24 June 2023 (UTC)