Intel 8080

The Intel 8080 was an early microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. The 8-bit CPU was released in April 1974 running at 2 MHz, and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor CPU design.

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The processor was second-sourced by several major manufacturers, among which were AMD, Mitsubishi, NatSemi, NEC, Siemens, and Texas Instruments.

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The Intel 8080 was the successor to the Intel 8008 (this was due to it being assembly language source-compatible because it used the same instruction set developed by Computer Terminal Corporation). The 8080's large 40 pin DIP packaging permitted it to provide a 16-bit address bus and an 8-bit data bus, allowing easy access to 64 kilobytes of memory. It had seven 8-bit registers (six of which could be combined into three 16-bit registers), a 16-bit stack pointer to memory (replacing the 8008's internal stack), and a 16-bit program counter.

Microprocessor: A microprocessor (abbreviated as ?P or uP) is a computer electronic component made from miniaturized transistors on a single semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) (aka microchip or just chip). The central processing unit (CPU) is the most well known microprocessor, but many other components in a com...

Intel: :The following article is about the multinational corporation; intel is also an abbreviation for intelligence, used in reference to military intelligence and espionage....

8-bit: 8-bit CPUs normally use an 8-bit data bus and a 16-bit address bus which means that their address space is limited to 64 kilobytes; this is not a "natural law", however, and thus there are exceptions....