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How bad was the Intel iAPX 432 – let’s find out in practice
Back in the 80s there was such processor – the Intel iAPX 432. It was developed as a successor to the 8080 and initially even carried the codename 8800. Intel packed an enormous amount into it – a completely new architecture, nothing like its predecessors, and even some OS concepts baked right into silicon –…
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Speed up a program for the 50 years old processor by 180000%
Introduction In the previous year, I wrote the program, running on Intel’s first microprocessor – 4004, that computes the first 255 digits of π. But, unfortunately, I was not able to beat ENIAC’s achievement with 2035 computed digits 1. So let’s continue our journey. I picked the successor of 4004 – Intel’s 4040. This CPU…
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Calculating Pi digits on first Intel microprocessor (intel 4004)
Introduction One day I thought about the performance gap between the first Intel processor and modern machines. Of course, we can try to do some estimations empirically – we know clock rate and how the pipeline is organized and what features intel 4004 CPU has (but it would not be standard FLOPS, because there was…
