Wow, I just got the strangest sense that Isaac Asimov predicted all of this in his early works, computer brains designing more intricate computer brains.

How long until a giant shiny globe is ruling the world? (I bet never, but that was some good sci-fi (: )

Matt here, disregard that, I suck cocks.

As someone who designs modern chips, the answer is an emphatic NO! This chip ran around ~700 Khz. Modern chips run at 1+ Ghz. This chip also had 4000 transistors, vs. 2 billion (2,000,000,000!) for some of Intel’s chips. We still do a fair amount of “by-hand” optimization for really timing-critical paths, but for the most part you have to rely on synthesis tools to turn your design into actual gates. Laying out 2 billion transistors by hand is an impossible task, and the machines that actually make the chips are not even capable of doing arbitrary shapes/orientations.

On the bright side, you could probably make a 128,000 core chip using 4004′s nowadays =)