Intel 8080 CPU Chip Development
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Anecdotes Intel 8080 CPU Chip Development Stanley Mazor Editor: Laurie Robertson Within a year of the introduction of Intel’s first 8-bit CPU number of input and output signals we could have on chip, the 8008, in April 1972 I was working on the design other types of chips such as the 8008 CPU chip. specification for a faster and more capable CPU chip, the Intel’s strategy of pioneering the memory market- 8080. Here, I describe the development of the 8080 chip place was risky. The adoption in the marketplace of RAM that helped launch the personal computer industry. I memory chips as a replacement for core memories was will also address two common complaints about the slow. As a consequence of slow sales of RAM chips (our 8080’s architecture—its lack of register symmetry and standard products), we accepted a couple of custom chip the absence of an index register. projects to augment our standard part business. The development of the first 8-bit CPU chip at Intel was for Background Datapoint Corp.2 Although it was a ‘‘failed’’ custom Intel had declared its corporate objective to be ‘‘the project (ultimately, Datapoint never used it), the 8008 most profitable semiconductor company, ever.’’ To meet was announced as a standard Intel product in April 3 that objective, we focused on chips commanding higher 1972. We realized that selling CPU chips promoted selling prices rather than lower end ‘‘commodity’’ chips memory chip sales, since at least 8 RAM chips were such as TTL (transistor-transistor logic) gates. When Intel needed for every 8-bit CPU chip. Furthermore, users’ started, our only business was memory chips.1 We sold main memory needs were always increasing because of them in high volume to a few customers (which required application software demands. only a small engineering staff and a small sales force) to As a technology-driven company, Intel had a good meet our profit goal. understanding of the memory chip market. The goal was As a memory chip company, we used IC packages with to lower the cost per bit and improve data access times. few (16-18) leads, but with a lot of transistors in the chip: During my 15 years at Intel, we often adopted newer this represented a high gate-to-pin ratio. (It’s noteworthy semiconductor technologies to get higher chip densities that if you double the number of bits within a shift that benefited these two market objectives. For example, register memory chip, its package leads are unaffected. If during the two-year development period of the 8008 CPU chip, memory densities increased by a factor of four you double the number of bits in a RAM memory chip, 4 you only need to add one more address pin.) So, memory and speeds doubled, in accordance with Moore’s law. chips efficiently manage the number of pins on the package. Saving pins lowered our costs and improved our A new CPU profits. However, these memory chip packages were the Federico Faggin, who ran the (‘‘small machine’’) non- only ones available to the Intel engineers and limited the memory chip design group at Intel, wanted to make better CPU chips. He hoped to double the performance of the 8008 by using a newer, n-type metal-oxide semiconductor (NMOS) process. However, the existing Editor’s Note: Laurie Robertson design masks couldn’t be used without some re-engi- It is with sadness and much regret that we report neering. Reluctantly, Intel management agreed, and the death of our friend and colleague, Laurie authorized Faggin to make some ‘‘modest’’ improve- Robertson, who was the editor of the Anecdotes ments in the 8008 while re-laying out the new mask set. department. Laurie was one of those rare individuals We were thereby given license to revisit the 8008 who was both a practitioner of computer science and processor’s instruction set and specification. a student attending school. She was an employee of I understood the 8008’s limitations and was interested the MITRE Corporation and was about to take her in making improvements in the next-version CPU chip doctoral qualifying exam in the Science, Technology, design. I’d programmed the 8008 myself, and also served and Society Program at Virginia Tech. Because of this as liaison to several contract programmers who developed background, Laurie was especially good in working software for our CPU product line. As an applications with Anecdote writers—in helping to shape a story, engineer, my job was to find new ways of using our guide an argument, or find a gem of an idea that technologies, to look for market opportunities, and to get needed to be shared with the world. We will miss her. customer feedback on our current products. Accordingly, Laurie’s friend and editorial board member, Anne I was in contact with some of our 8008 customers. Fitzpatrick, has agreed to serve as an interim editor of It so happened that one of the early Datapoint this department. Current and potential authors of engineers, Harry Pyle, worked on the architectural Anecdotes should correspond with her at the depart- specification of their 2200 computer and consequently ment address, [email protected]. on the 8008 CPU instruction set. Harry, who worked at Datapoint’s Texas headquarters, and I regularly commu- 70 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180/07/$25.00 G 2007 IEEE nicated by telephone to discuss architectural This is useful when external main memory is issues and enhancements. As the 2200 was ROM or Shift Register. But such an on-chip built with TTL, it had a slightly different stack uses valuable CPU chip real estate, instruction set than the 8008; over time, the however,anditsfixedsizereducesthepro- Intel and Datapoint’s processors started to grammer’s flexibility. The 4004 stack was 4- diverge. (I believe that a later model of the deep and the 8008’s was 8-deep (for remem- Datapoint computer system did use a Zilog Z- bering return addresses). However, 8008-based 80.) As ‘‘computer enthusiasts’’ Harry and I systems usually had substantial RAM memory, spoke without concerns about patents, trade and an improvement would be to delete the on- secrets, or competitive constraints, so I was chip stack memory and instead use part of the also able to consider Datapoint’s enhance- computer’s main memory as a last-in, first-out ments to their instruction set even though stack. (Later I would enjoy the irony of they weren’t using our 8008 chip. marketing this chip to our customers with the stack facility deleted from the chip, but touting 8008 issues it as a benefit—‘‘Now the stack can be as large as The primary weaknesses of the 8008 were you want.’’) its few package pins, its limited memory addressing modes, and its small on-chip stack. Super 8: Highlights and constraints As the chip architect of the 8008 and while 18-pin package still working for Ted Hoff, in the Applications The 8008’s 18-pin package, (used for Intel’s Research Department, I started to evaluate 1103 DRAM chip) reduced our manufacturing improvements to the 8008. I named the 8080 costs of this CPU chip, but customer systems project after the then-popular home movie containing the 8008 required a handful of format—Super 8. chips surrounding it to interface to memory Now, the dominant factors in IC chip systems. The costs of these extra chips, the design are the chip’s size (transistor count), added assembly costs, and printed circuit the power used, and the number of I/O pins on board space for these chips probably were the package. Any CPU chip designer must a net deficit compared with the cost savings of consider these factors when defining the CPU’s the cheaper CPU package itself. Additionally, architecture and instruction set; these con- straints determine the trade-offs that must be having only 18 pins to bring out a 14-bit 5 address and an 8-bit data bus required time made. The 8008 used about 2,000 transistors, division multiplexing of the 18 pins, and and the follow-on (8080) chip would have slowed the processor. However, by the mid- a budget of about 5,000 transistors assuming 1970s, calculator chips were coming into high- Moore’s law and using the latest NMOS pro- volume production, and there was an abun- cess. We could move up to a 40-pin package dance of 40-pin packages available that would and our power budget was under 1 watt. benefit a single-chip CPU if it were redesigned A main-memory-based stack needed an with a bigger package. additional stack pointer (SP) register within the CPU chip, and I had to determine the stack orientation in memory. Because most pro- Addressing modes gramming systems allocate the lower part of As a custom chip, the 8008 instruction set was memory for the start-up/boot software, I 95 percent specified by Datapoint. My boss at imagined the stack at the high end of memory Intel,TedHoff,addedregisterIncrementand and running ‘‘downhill’’—in this way, mem- Decrement instructions, but otherwise we ac- ory was filled from both top and bottom ends. cepted the instruction set more or less intact Stacks weren’t a new concept; I had used from Datapoint. The 8008 only had one way of them in several computers, and I knew the getting to main memory—indirect addressing memory stack would also be useful to a pro- through the HL (High/Low) register pair, which grammer for saving the CPU’s registers.