Chip Letter Links No. 20 : Intel i960, John Goodenough, RISC-V in Terraria, Loongson, AT&T Microworld and more
Great links, images and reading for 9 July 2023
Hi everyone and thanks for subscribing. This is one of our regular series of posts with links, images and articles of interest, inspired by Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook.
Each edition starts with a beautiful die image. This week it’s a comparison of Nvidia G80, G84 and G86 dies, courtesy of Martijn Boer.
Intel i960
Regular readers of The Chip Letter will know that I’m a huge fan of Ken Shiriff’s work. Every post on the righto.com blog is a treat and his latest, on the Intel i960, which featured briefly in The RISC Wars Part 1 : The Cambrian Explosion, Ken has outdone himself.
The i960 is an interesting CPU. It has a RISC instruction set architecture but carries forward some of the ideas that Intel developed in the failed iAPX432 project.
For a while the i960 was the best selling RISC processor in the world.
Eventually, of course, the overwhelming success of the x86 series of processors (the 80386 in particular) meant that Intel, essentially lost interest in the i960.
Ken’s post tells the story in as much detail as one could want. A fascinating read.
Inside AMD’s Labs
If you’ve ever wondered about what firms like AMD need to do with their designs once they come back from the Fab, then this video is for you. A fascinating ‘behind the scenes tour’ of AMD’s Labs, looking at testing, thermal and failure analysis.
John Goodenough
Sad to report that Nobel Prize winner John B Goodenough has died aged 100.
Not a household name, Goodenough touched the lives of billions of people, through his work on the development of Lithium-Ion batteries. He became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history when he won the prize in 2019, along with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for their work on batteries.
“I’m most proud of the fundamental studies that I’ve done, but I’ve gotten recognition for the battery that I did because people made money on it and when people make money on it when then you become important ….”
iAPX432 Update
On the subject of the iAPX432, many thanks to a Chip Letter reader who pointed out this fascinating ‘Silicon Genesis’ project video interview with Gordon Moore, including comments on the iAPX432:
Ah, the 432, which was a very aggressive shot at a new microprocessor. I guess, to a significant extent, I'm personally responsible for that in that when we'd completed the 8080 which was a landmark microprocessor I sat down with some of our designers and said "look, we probably have one more chance to start over and do this right." So unfettered by anything we've done in the past, compatibility or anything, go out and make the right microprocessor.
Now, it has been reincarnated a couple of times since then and much of the stuff is still embodied in our 960 family of microcontrollers, but not at all the full, blown stuff that was initially involved in the 432 project.
Link to our original post on the iAPX432 below.
RISC-V Inside Terraria
Creating a microprocessor within a game isn’t new. To the best of my knowledge, though, this is the first time that anyone has created a RISC-V compliant processor inside a game, in this case, Terraria.
The Semiconductor Trade War
An interesting post from Joey Politano focusing on the economic implications of the ongoing trade war in semiconductors between the U.S. and China.
After the break, a site with great, in-depth, analyses of processor architectures, the launch of one of the most important chips of the last decade, and a new and extremely accurate PC emulator.
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