8 ms·
The 50th anniversary of the launch of the Intel 4004
- bookofjoe 5y agohttps://archive.ph/oeL7t https://archive.ph/oeL7t
- billsmithaustin 5y agoThe wood textured patch is a nice touch. More electronic components should feature wood paneling.
- kabdib 5y agoTed Hoff (who designed the 8008, amongst other chips) worked at Atari Corporate Research in the early/mid 1980s, before Atari went under. He had a small stash of 8008 processors. Every now and then he'd get a letter from someone absolutely desperate to find a replacement for a failed one, usually from some spooky defense-related organization. Whereupon Ted would pluck an 8008 out of the protective foam, carefully package it and mail it off. (These days you'd probably do an in-circuit emulation or some FPGA magic).
- klelatti 5y agoI don’t think you can really say that ‘Hoff designed the 8008’. The architecture / ISA came from CTC and Federico Faggin actually designed the chip. There may be an Intel document somewhere that says Hoff designed it but it’s probably the same situation as the 4004 where they wrote Faggin out of history after he left to found Zilog.
- klelatti 5y agoSlight correction - I mis-remembered and it was Hal Feeney who did the logic design (his initials appear on the chip) but Federico Faggin led the implementation team. http://www.righto.com/2016/12/die-photos-and-analysis-of_24.html http://www.righto.com/2016/12/die-photos-and-analysis-of_24....
- carabiner 5y agoCan't help but think this is a planted puff piece while Intel is being hammered by Apple.
- djmips 5y agoYou are being downvoted but it absolutely is a puff piece.
- cottsak 5y agoit doesn't really matter right? Intel are so screwed
- systemvoltage 5y agoYou can help yourself by reading it as an inspiration from technologies that changed the world, regardless of what the current situation is. Computer chip and more fundamentally, the invention of transistor is to be reflected not through the lens of Competitor A vs. Competitor B, but through the appreciation of science, engineering, and all the people that made it happen.
- biggieshellz 5y agoI suspect they picked that chip because tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of its launch (Nov. 15, 1971).
- notreallyserio 5y agoThis conspiracy goes back further than I'd feared.
- carabiner 5y agofucking lol
- dang 5y agoThe article makes that clear in its second sentence, and it makes a better title too, so I've moved it above.
- vmh1928 5y agoI'm going with Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce as giants who's shoulders we stand on. A particular generation of chip is just one stepping stone of the many along the way. https://www.keranews.org/health-science-tech/2014-09-12/on-this-day-in-1958-a-ti-engineer-invented-a-chip-that-changed-the-world https://www.keranews.org/health-science-tech/2014-09-12/on-t... Also, a quibble, it's Halon not Argon. Nobody sprays water around a room full of burning electrical equipment. Halon is no longer being manufactured for greenhouse reasons (afaik.) Alternatives being worked on: https://www.firetrace.com/fire-protection-blog/why-is-halon-banned https://www.firetrace.com/fire-protection-blog/why-is-halon-...
- pengaru 5y ago> Also, a quibble, it's Halon not Argon. Nobody sprays water around a room full of burning electrical equipment. But... Argon isn't water? What do you mean? Argon is also used for fire extinguishing in datacenters, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Argon.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Argon.jpg
- nostrademons 5y agoI think he's saying that datacenters would not have water sprinklers and would instead use Halon fire extinguishers. He's wrong and you/Wikipedia are right, BTW. Halons were banned in 1994, before datacenters became commonplace. Argon and other inert gas fire suppression systems (of which Halon is one, but a banned one) are used instead.
- nemo 5y agoHalon used to be the standard for data centers using gaseous fire extinguishers in the mainframe era. See: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaur-pen.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaur-pen.html The op's a bit outdated, but not completely wrong. Even now a lot of data centers use various halon replacements rather than Argonite, though there are a number of different gaseous fire suppressants used in data centers these days.
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- adamnemecek 5y agoDoes anyone have a source for the claim “ Most of the wealth created since 1971 is a result of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor”.
- turbocon 5y agoI don't think it a hard fact statement, more of a "I believe this to be so, isn't this incredible!" type of statement.
- spurgu 5y agoHaven't read the article but my immediate thought is that it's kind of obvious if you simply replace it with "microprocessors". I don't know about the historical significance of the 4004 though.
- nostrademons 5y agoThe 4004 was the first commodity-off-the-shelf microprocessor.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoI think you mean Commercial Off The Shelf - COTS
- randomifcpfan 5y agoThe article title is not very accurate. The 4004 was an evolutionary dead-end. The later, unrelated, 8008 design was a much more important chip. But the 4004 was the first successful COTS microprocessor, which is why it is remembered.
- nostrademons 5y agoThe article explains it's reasoning - most of the wealth created since 1971 has been in the finance, tech, and globalization sectors. Other sectors have been shrinking, but people in finance, tech, or globalization have been doing great. (I assume he's measuring "wealth" as in "net change in revenue", where this statement is roughly correct.) Those three sectors are essentially dependent upon the microprocessor - tech obviously so, but finance is basically the province of computer models these days, and globalization is enabled by the communication, data storage, and algorithmic improvements made possible by software.
- sys_64738 5y agoThought it was the 6502.
- sxv 5y agoI was certain it was going to be the Pringle.
- tibbetts 5y agoThe real change was Intel shifting from manufacturing commodity RAM to creating microprocessors. The 4004 was a major factor. But it was the corporate strategy change, leading to 8008, 8088, etc which really drove the success of Intel and the microcomputer.
- k20CuozQmk 5y agoThank you, WSJ with ad banners and paywalls is practically unusable with the Tor Browser.
- dang 5y agoWe detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29222398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29222398.
- rm999 5y ago>Google is about to introduce a next-generation Tensor chip, updating the ones found in the company’s Pixel 6 phones. It is basically an artificial-intelligence accelerator in your pocket, allowing your phone to adapt to you—your own personal neural network to train. Is this accurate? Everything I've read online only discusses the tensor chip for inference (running the neural network to make predictions), not training a new model for that specific device. For example this blog only discusses how they are making inference faster: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/11/improved-on-device-ml-on-pixel-6-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/11/improved-on-device-ml-on-p....
- nostrademons 5y agoGoogle announced Federated Learning about 4 years ago: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo... I work adjacent to some teams using it. It's not idle research speculation; there are consumer product teams actively commercializing it. (IMHO - speaking only for myself and not my employer - Federated Learning will be the most important invention to come out of Google, and its primary beneficiary will be someone other than Google, in the same way that the Alto was the most important invention to come out of Xerox but made a lot of people other than Xerox rich. It lets you build machine-learned models off of billions of devices without having centralized infrastructure or data storage, which finally makes the convenience and functionality of modern consumer software compatible with decentralized architectures and user privacy.)
- ffhhj 5y ago> made a lot of people other than Xerox rich But this time Google should be able to peek into what other people do with its invention and get rich too, right?
- nostrademons 5y agoPotentially, but that's not what killed Xerox (who had a decade head start on Microsoft and Apple and had full visibility on what they were doing in the marketplace for another decade before GUIs became commonplace). They fell victim to the Innovator's Dilemma: when a new technology comes out that fundamentally rewrites the rules about who your customers are and how markets should be organized, existing market leaders cannot maintain their lead. That's because their market itself gets restructured - where previously one market with a dominant firm and set of existing customers used to exist, now oftentimes new markets with new dominant firms and a new set of customers exist. Basically it rewrites all the assumptions that the business is structured around.
- anyfoo 5y agoThe 4004 is very interesting in just how mind-bogglingly odd it is. It's well worth reading the (very short) data sheet[1], or at least skim the available instructions. I wrote a tiny 4004 program for one of the emulators out of curiosity, and it was a wild experience. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110601032753/http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/DataSheet/4004_datasheet.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110601032753/http://www.intel....
- 8bitsrule 5y agoHmmm. That's only 11 months after the first microprocessor -- Ray and Bill Holt's Central Air Data Computer for the F-14 -- flew for the first time. (Dec 1970) [https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-of-the-first-microprocessor-f-14/ https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-of-the-first-micr...] The 4004 might have been first if Intel hadn't been sidetracked to consider a CPU chip for Datapoint. Then TI got involved. [https://web.archive.org/web/20150512143915/http://thetrendythings.com/read/26815 https://web.archive.org/web/20150512143915/http://thetrendyt...]
- klelatti 5y agoIt’s not really a microprocessor if it needs several chips for the CPU. I’d agree with Ken Shirriff that it’s between TI and Intel. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-...
- trasz 5y agoI’d argue that 1. It wasn’t a microprocessor, and 2. There is no point counting “secret hardware”, same way we don’t include never released prototypes.
- klelatti 5y agoSad to see another article that gets the roles of those involved in the creation of the 4004 confused. Wikipedia gets it almost right: > The chip design, implemented with the MOS silicon gate technology, started in April 1970, and was created by Federico Faggin who led the project from beginning to completion in 1971. Marcian Hoff formulated and led the architectural proposal in 1969, and Masatoshi Shima contributed to the architecture and later to the logic design. Need to add that Stan Mazor worked with both Hoff and Faggin on the design.