I recently shared ‘s terrific discussion on the Circuit podcast on semiconductors in Japan.

This week ‘s Substack provided an update on the opening of TSMC’s new fab in Kumamoto in Japan.

Interconnected

Japan's Semiconductor Red Carpet

Over the weekend, while I was recovering from jetlag after attending a wonderful three-day, closed-door conference on China hosted by the Salzburg Global Seminar, TSMC quietly opened its first chip f…

Read more

2 years ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Kevin Xu

It’s a fascinating report. Kevin particularly focuses on the contrast between the roll-out of the new TSMC fabs in Japan and its efforts in the US in Arizona.

The conventional wisdom is that it takes about three years to build a fab. Led by Kajima Corp., a 184-year-old construction company, the local workers got it done in 20 months! 

How did it happen? By working 7 days a week and running 24-hour non-stop shifts. And not just to build the fab, but nice dormitories and other infrastructures too. It’s the kind of intensity that TSMC is used to in Taiwan.

It’s the kind of urgency that TSMC is not getting with its investments in the US so far.

As a bonus, Kevin’s post alerted me to TSMC founder Morris Chang’s recent talk at MIT, entitled ‘Lessons of a life in Chips Manufacturing : Texas to Taiwan’.

The talk centres around a short history of the semiconductor industry and of TSMC. It’s fantastic to see him still active and enthusiastic at 92!

It’s definitely worth watching all the way through, but if you only have a few minutes here are two of his key slides, the first covering TSMC’s foundry business model …

… and the second, his (and perhaps TSMC’s) view of the world today.

“Nobody at Intel knows what to make of this thing,"

Very soon we’ll start a new series looking at the story of the development of chips dedicated to accelerating machine learning, with an initial post looking at the origins of Google’s first TPU.

But Google’s TPU development, starting in 2013, wasn’t the first project to create dedicated neural network chips. Intel, amongst many others, got there first. Decades earlier, in fact.

And reporting on Intel’s first effort was columnist, now turned podcast host, John C. Dvorak. Writing in PC Magazine:

While everyone worries about the next hot processor chip, a small team of engineers at Intel invented the 80170, the world's fastest and most powerful neural network on a chip. In processing power, it is something of a breakthrough, having achieved the theoretical intelligence level of a cockroach - no kidding.

I visited with the chip's developers, who admit that this analog computer possesses a frightening amount of processing power and has the company baffled. “Nobody at Intel knows what to make of this thing," I was told.

Neural nets aren't programmed — they're trained — like a dog. The programmer's job (if one can be called a programmer) is to organize the data in such a way that it can be analyzed over and over until the network discovers patterns and extrapolates data from incomplete data sets. Predicting weather and determining which horse will win the third at Belmont are perfect neural net applications.

But after the humor, and perhaps a degree of scepticism, there is a prediction that would take decades to come true.

Don't be left out. There's something big lurking beneath the surface of this technology.

When did the Intel 80170 appear? All the way back in 1989.

To put this into context, this is the year that Intel’s 80486 first appeared. A typical high end PC had an 80386 running at up to 20MHz and up to 16MB of memory.

The 80170 was quite different from these other Intel products though. It was an analog neural processor. According to Wikichip:

ETANN (Electronically Trainable Analog Neural Network) was one of the first commercial neural processors, introduced by Intel around 1989. Implemented on a 1.0 µm process, this chip incorporated 64 analog neurons and 10,240 analog synapses. The ETANN is also the first commercial analog neural processor and is considered to be the first successful commercial neural network chip.

We’ll look in more detail at the 80170, and other early neural network chips, in later posts. In the meantime, well done to John Dvorak on his prescience.

Subscribe now to receive future posts

A brief footnote. I discovered today that Dvorak is the nephew of August Dvorak, who invented the Dvorak keyboard layout.

If you’ve enjoyed this then you might like:

IBM may not be the force it once was, but it’s hard to overstate the impact that the firm has had on the development of the computer systems that we use every day. From S/360 series mainframes to the IBM Personal Computer. From DRAM to the hard disk drive, from RISC to the relational database. And, more widely, the company has had a remarkable influence on the world we know today, some of it good, and some, of course, very bad.3

So to mark the occasion here is a short film by Errol Morris, made in 2010 to celebrate the centennial of the founding of the firm.

This IEEE Spectrum article has much more on the early days of CTR and IBM.

I couldn't help think of this moment in computing history from 1981. For a long time it looked as though IBM would ‘win’ in ‘personal computers’. Today the tables have turned again, and Apple is led by an ‘ex-IBMer’.

On a personal note, IBM gave me my first real job. I wasn’t there long, but it was surprisingly fun and I have very fond memories.

Do share your thoughts on IBM, past, present and future.

Share

I’m sure that many of us have a dread of presenting to large audiences. Possibly also an equal dread of photos or video from much earlier in our careers resurfacing later on.

If you do you’re definitely not alone. I have experienced and have a dread of both.

I expect that even Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has experienced both too.

Why Satya? Well, here is a short clip of Nadella, aged 26, all the way back in 1993, doing a (live) technical demonstration. which was recorded on video.

What does Satya demonstrate? Moving data from an IBM AS/400 …

… to Excel.

That data is so, so much better in Excel!

It’s followed by a slightly awkward group Q&A as the whole team tries to squeeze into the camera shot. No social distancing in 1993.

Thirty years later, a lot has changed. The AS/400 has (mostly) gone (partly replaced by Microsoft’s own Azure?) but Excel is pretty much ubiquitous.

In a way I see this as symbolic of the transfer of power from IBM to Microsoft.

And here is Nadella talking about this at a much more recent Microsoft conference …

‘My daughter saw this picture and said who is that’.

Satya, we share your pain!