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Birth of the CPU |
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In 1971, M.E. Hoff Jr. (right), an engineer at Intel, invented the first programmable chip, the 4004, for a Japanese client of Intel's. This was the first central processing unit, or CPU. It contained 2,250 transistors on a chip of silicon 1/6 of an inch long and 1/8 of an inch wide and had an internal clock speed of 108 kiloHertz - or about 1/9,000 the clock speed of a 1 gigaHertz Pentium III. |
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