In November, 1971, a company called Intel publicly introduced the world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 (U.S. Patent #3,821,715), invented by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor. After the invention of integrated circuits revolutionized computer design, the only place to go was down -- in size that is. The Intel 4004 chip took the integrated circuit down one step further by placing all the parts that made a computer think (i.e. central processing unit, memory, input and output controls) on one small chip. Programming intelligence into inanimate objects had now become possible.
The Intel 4004 Microprocessor
The 4004 was the world's first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960s, many scientists had discussed the possibility of a computer on a chip, but nearly everyone felt that integrated circuit technology was not yet ready to support such a chip. Intel's Ted Hoff felt differently; he was the first person to recognize that the new silicon-gated MOS technology might make a single-chip CPU (central processing unit) possible.
Hoff and the Intel team developed such an architecture with just over 2,300 transistors in an area of only 3 by 4 millimetres. With its 4-bit CPU, command register, decoder, decoding control, control monitoring of machine commands and interim register, the 4004 was one heck of a little invention. Today's 64-bit microprocessors are still based on similar designs, and the microprocessor is still the most complex mass-produced product ever with more than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each second - numbers that are sure to be outdated fast.
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