The Intel 4004 was among the first microprocessors and one of the first to use the MOS silicon-gate technology. In the decades long race to build bigger CPUs, it’s been mostly forgotten.

Four decades ago today -- November 15, 1971 -- Intel placed an advertisement for the first single-chip CPU, the Intel 4004, in Electronic News (Opens in a new window).Designed by the fantastically ...

For the record, it’s true that Intel only saw the 4004 as something useful for controlling traffic lights. In fact, they saw the 8080 the same way.

Intel writes that the fingernail-sized 4004 "delivered the same computing power as the first electronic computer built in 1946, which filled an entire room." But we've come a long way since then.

The hacking pro's latest project was the self-imposed challenge of getting Linux to run on an Intel 4004 from 1971. It was Intel's first commercial chip and predates Linux by two decades.

Intel’s original CPU, the 4004, was built as a calculator chip, but an incredible system has been built around it that can run Debian.

The final hardware uses the 4004 (overclocked to 790 kHz) along with several other period-correct support chips from Intel's MCS-4 chipset. It includes a VFD display to show Linux output and can ...

The 4-bit Intel 4004 from 1971 predates the modern PC and the x86 CPU, but that doesn't mean it can be used to run Linux... very, very slowly.

That machine had a 32-bit MIPS R3000 processor running at 8 MHz; the Intel 4004 works in 4-bit nibbles and runs at 790 KHz. Yes, that's 0.79 MHz.

The Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, was released in 1971. With 2,300 transistors packed into 12mm2, it heralded a revolution in computing. A little over 50 years later, Apple’s ...

Each one allows them to do more calculations. The original Intel microprocessor from 1971, the 4004, had about 2,000 transistors. Now Intel’s chips have billions of transistors.