All of today's mighty CPUs owe a debt of gratitude to the Intel 8080, which just turned 50

pcgamer.com:

Just six years after its founding, Intel created a milestone in the history of computing. Instead of making chips for very specific purposes, it designed a processor that could be used in any scenario. Launched as the Intel 8080, it would go on to be recognised as the world's first general-purpose microprocessor and 50 years on, Team Blue is celebrating the success of the little chip.

For anyone relatively new to the world of gaming PCs or just computers in general, it's probably hard to picture just how much processing technology has changed over the years. But as someone who's four years older than the Intel 8080, I've been fortunate to live through the advancements and experience them first-hand on appearance.

My first IBM PC was powered by an Intel 8080, though by that time it was already 15 years old. It was an 8-bit processor, not too dissimilar to the Zilog Z80 chip that I'd spent many years programming before getting a PC. There was a good reason for that similarity: Both processors were designed by Federico Faggin, who left Intel in 1974 to set up Zilog.

Anyway, leaping forward to the present, Intel has marked the 50th anniversary of the 8080 with a short blog and a somewhat spurious infographic, in which some of the specifications of the world's first general-purpose processor are compared to those of Intel's latest Core Ultra 200S chips.

For example, where an Arrow Lake CPU comprises 17.8 billion transistors, with a minimum feature size of 3 nanometres, the Intel 8080 housed up to 6,000 transistors and a feature size no smaller than 6 micrometres. Or, if you want to use the same scale as the Core Ultra chip, the old processor had 0.000006 billion transistors and a minimum feature size of 6,000 nanometres.

Naturally, the modern CPU is quite a chunky fella in comparison to the old boy, with a total die area of 243 square millimetres. The Intel 8080 was just 20 square millimetres. But while Arrow Lake takes up 12 times more area, it does pack in roughly