Just six years after its founding, Intel created a milestone in the history of computing. Instead of creating chips for very specific purposes, they designed a processor that could be used in any scenario. Launched as the Intel 8080, it gained recognition as the world’s first general-purpose microprocessor, and 50 years later, Team Blue is celebrating the tiny chip’s success.
For anyone relatively fresh to the world of gaming PCs, or just computers in general, it’s probably challenging to imagine how much computing technology has changed over the years. However, as someone four years older than the Intel 8080, I feel fortunate to have been able to experience these improvements firsthand.
My first IBM PC was powered by an Intel 8080 processor, although it was already 15 years aged. It was an 8-bit processor, not much different from the Zilog Z80 chip that I spent many years programming before I bought the computer. There was a good reason for this similarity: both processors were designed by Federico Faggin, who left Intel in 1974 to found Zilog.
Anyway, quick forward to the present, Intel has done it we celebrated the 50th anniversary of 8080 with a compact blog and a slightly counterfeit infographic in which some of the specifications of the world’s first general-purpose processor are compared to Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200S chips.
For example, while the Arrow Lake processor consists of 17.8 billion transistors and the minimum element size is 3 nanometers, the Intel 8080 processor holds up to 6000 transistors and the element size is not less than 6 micrometers. Or, if you want to apply the same scale as the Core Ultra chip, the aged processor had 0.000006 billion transistors and a minimum element size of 6,000 nanometers.
Naturally, the state-of-the-art processor is quite massive compared to the aged processor, with a total matrix area of 243 square millimeters. The Intel 8080 was only 20 square millimeters. Although Lake Arrow is 12 times larger in size, it holds about three million times more transistors. Thank advances in silicon lithography for that, or in the case of Arrow Lake, thank TSMC.
Modern chip manufacturing allows transistors to be switched at ridiculous speeds throughout the entire processor, and the P-cores in processors like the Core Ultra 9 285K can reach clock speeds of 5.8 GHz. The Intel 8080 processor was initially launched with a clock speed of 2 MHz (0.002 GHz), although later versions could reach over 3 MHz.
However, the Intel 8080 processor wasn’t just for PCs, as it was used to power devices such as electronic cash registers and arcade machines, and in some respects that hasn’t changed. Intel processors are the norm in embedded systems around the world, although when it comes to gaming machines, that market is almost entirely owned by AMD.
I must say that I never quite got over my aged Intel 8080 processor and it put me off PCs in general for a few years. By the time I got back into the game, the CPUs of the day (think the original Pentium) were so much better that the 8080 seemed like an old relic. Which is true, of course, but the roots of state-of-the-art x86 architecture lie in the aged 8-biter, so it’s more than worthy of this celebration.
If you fancy seeing the Intel 8080 processor in action, then network emulator it does a great job and you can load up some code to play Space Invaders – which happens to be one of the best-selling arcade games of all time, all powered by a little 8080.
