Someone has built a system with Intel’s first half-century-old CPU that can boot Linux – if you have a week to spare
Want your PC to boot faster? Well, if you find your computer to be having a slow boot time, how about waiting the better part of a week for the machine to boot? That’s the amount of time it takes a Linux PC with a old Thanks to the Intel CPU, you can keep your fingers tapping on the desk.
Tom’s Hardware marked this unconventional experiment, performed by a programmer, Dmitry Grinberg, who used the Intel 4004 to boot Linux (Debian, to be precise).
You may know that this is not just any processor, but Intel’s very first chip, and indeed the world’s first commercially produced microprocessor, which hit the market in 1971. Yes, it’s been over half a century since the Intel 4004 was released in all its 4-bit glory (followed by the Intel 8080, which later led to the famous 8086 processor, which ushered in the x86 era).
So how exactly does this silicon relic Debian boot? Very, very, very, very slowly, is the answer.
Indeed, Linux booting took 4.76 days and as Tom notes, it even took the old CPU about 16 hours to execute a directory overview command – ouch.
The full video of the Linux system booting is available on YouTube in unedited form, but even sped up to 120x speed, it takes 1 hour and 40 minutes to watch – in case you’re suffering from a bit of insomnia, and need some material before bed, perhaps. If you want the short 10 minute recording, check it out below.
Analysis: All the gory details
This is definitely one of those projects that falls into the “fun but pointless” category, which Grinberg fully admits. Frankly, it’s a miracle it can be done at all – remember, the Intel 4004 was a 4-bit processor that was originally developed as a calculator chip.
How on Earth was this feat accomplished exactly? Well, Grinberg’s extended blog post gives a full account, but if you do, be warned that it goes into a lot of technical detail.
In short, the programmer used a development board as the system with an Intel 4004 processor, clock generator, RAM, a ROM controller (and an ATMEGA48 acting as ROM), and then had to apply some emulation tricks and a lot of Linux optimizations.
In short, kudos to Grinberg, who has a bunch of other interesting projects to his name that are showcased on that blog site, including the innovative feat of hacking the PokéWalker (the PokéWalker was one of the most accurate pedometers ever made, can you believe that?).