The Intel 4004, considered the world’s first commercial microprocessor, is 50 years old today. The processor was first commercially advertised on November 15, 1971, and it came into being as a result of a company request for a custom chip for their printing computer. In the intervening 50 years until today, we are on the cusp of massive quantum computing, in which the Intel 4004, as can be rightly said, has advanced steadily.
It is quite interesting to note the differences in technology between chipsets released by Intel back in November 1971 and today in November 2021. Currently, the benchmark for comparison is the 12th generation Intel Alder Lake processor. In comparison, while the 12th generation Alder Lake chip has billions of transistors, the Intel 4004 has 2300 – a fairly limited number by comparison.
The Intel 4004 was also made on the Silicon Gate processor, which was 10 microns in size. Meanwhile, Intel’s latest 12th generation Alder Lake processors are based on a 10nm process, which is 1/1000th in size. The 4004 had a starting clock speed of 108 kHz and a peak frequency of 750 kHz, while the Alder Lake chip today reaches 5.2 GHz. The silicon wafer diameter on the 4004 was 2 inches, and the Alder Lake chip size was 300 mm.
The Intel 4004 was a tremendous achievement in engineering because it had the same processing power as the ENIAC, or electronic numerical integrator and calculator. The latter is widely considered to be the world’s first electronic computer, and when it was built in 1946 it took up an entire room. After a gradual evolution over the 25 years after ENIAC, the 4004 could show the same performance, but the size of a fingernail.
“Looking back to 1970, it was clear that microprocessors would change the way systems were designed, switching instead from using hardware to using software. But the speed at which microprocessors have evolved over time and been adopted by the industry has been really amazing,” said Federico Faggin, one of the co-inventors of the 4004 microprocessor.
Together with Faggin, Intel engineers Ted Hoff and Stan Mayor worked on the chip. Since then, 28 generations of Intel processors have appeared, which also laid the foundation for Moore’s law. The latter stated that by doubling the number of transistors every two years, the cost of personal computers would be halved over the same period of time.