The 4004 was the world’s first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960, 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 architecture with just over 2,300 transistors in an area of only 3 by 4 millimeters. With its 4-bit CPU, command resister, 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than 5.5 million transistors performing hundreds of millions of calculations each second numbers that are sure to be outdated fast.
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