Technology has advanced a lot in recent years as it has brought us a series of really big changes that have allowed a large number of currently existing sectors to evolve, but if we talk about processors, there is one that represented a big change as it was the world’s first truly functional microprocessor. In this case we are not talking about 4004 or 8008, but rather about Intel 8080which has turned 50 this year, a moment that the company has used to reflect and compare what current CPUs are like with what was its first microprocessor really commercial.
There are a large number of reasons why a company like Intel can be celebrating even though they are not currently going through their best moment, and that is that during their journey they have developed some of the components that represented a before and after in the industry. Some of their most legendary processors are beginning to reach an age that is beginning to inspire respect, since although we know that it is a technology that has really been with us for a relatively short time (if we compare it with many others), half a century is a fairly considerable magnitude.
Intel celebrates half a century of its first truly functional processor
In recent years we have seen how processors have included a series of changes in their architecture, making them much more powerful than their previous generations and even implementing several different types of cores within the same silicon. But we cannot forget those who started it all, for this reason Intel is celebrating, since its 8080 processor “made the microprocessor market a reality” according to Federico Faggin, Intel’s chief designer of this microprocessor and its predecessors.
This 8-bit chip was much more efficient, more powerful and more flexible than the first ones presented by the brand, the Intel 4004 and the 8008as it was capable of 290,000 operations per second (10 times more than the 8008), while with the 40-pin configuration it had, it made it easier to connect to other components compared to the 18-pin design of the 8008, while It also integrated the functions of the support chips needed by the previous two, making it a true single-chip microprocessor.
Now, fifty years later, the company once again mentions this chip that became the pillar of a large number of devices, such as the first commercialized arcade game that incorporated a microprocessor, personal computers of the time such as the MITS Altair 8800 and even the first electronic cash registers that incorporated this Intel 8080.
For this reason and as a reason for celebration, the company has taken a look back so that we can see what the differences are between this CPU and the most current ones, something that shows us the large number of changes they have had over the years, Transistors, for example, have gone from between 4,500 and 6,000 that these microprocessors incorporated to about 17.8 billion, being the most impressive figure with which we can see the advances they have made in the last 50 years.
