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The Intel 8008 Processor
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The Intel 8008 was an early CPU designed and manufactured by Intel, introduced in April, 1972.
The chip (limited by its 18 pin DIP packaging) had a single 8-bit bus and required a very large amount of external logic to support it. For example the 14-bit address, which could accesss 16K bytes of memory, needed to be latched by some of this logic in an external Memory Address Register (MAR). It could access 8 input ports and 24 output ports.
While a little slower (in terms of MIPs) than the 4-bit Intel 4004 and Intel 4040, the fact that it processed data 8-bits at a time and could access significantly more RAM actually gave it 3 to 4 times the true processing power of the 4-bit chips.
For controller and CRT terminal use this was an acceptable design, but it was too difficult to use for most other tasks. Some early computer designs (e.g. the Mark-8, the MCM 782 APL, the NBI Hantu, and the R2E Micral) were based on it, but most would use the later and greatly improved Intel 8080 instead. |
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