Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Noyce asked Ted Hoff, a soft-spoken engineer who’d arrived at Intel after an academic career studying neural networks, to handle Busicom’s request. Unlike most Intel employees, who were physicists or chemists focused on the electrons zipping across chips, Hoff’s background in computer architectures let him see semiconductors from the perspective of the systems they powered. Busicom told Hoff they’d need twelve different chips with twenty-four thousand transistors, all arranged in a bespoke design. He thought this sounded impossibly complicated for a small startup like Intel. As he considered Busicom’s calculator, Hoff realized computers face a tradeoff between customized logic circuits and customized software. Because chipmaking was a custom business, delivering specialized circuits for each device, customers didn’t think hard about software. However, Intel’s progress with memory chips—and the prospect they would become exponentially more powerful over time—meant computers would soon have the memory capacity needed to handle complex software. Hoff bet it would soon be cheaper to design a standardized logic chip that, coupled with a powerful memory chip programmed with different types of software, could compute many different things.