Chip Letter Links No. 3: Virtual Data Center, AI Designs, Floppy Disks, MONIAC, Jobs, Chip Art

Great links, reading and images for 28 September 2022

This is one of a 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 we have the Nvidia Tesla P100 courtesy of Fritzchens Fritz.

Virtual 1960s Data Center

Want to experience what it was like in a 1960s data centre? Try ‘Virtual Flossie’ an interactive 3-D simulation of an ICT 1301 mainframe.

Nvidia Using AI to Design Parts

Rajarshi Roy @rjrshr

Arithmetic circuits were once the craft of human experts, and are now designed by AI in NVIDIA GPUs. H100 chips have nearly 13,000 AI designed circuits! How is this possible? Blog developer.nvidia.com/blog/designing… + a thread 🧵👇

The Last Person Standing in The Floppy Disk Business

Interesting article on the last manufacturer of ‘floppy disks’.

To quote from Hacker News:

Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.

Followed by:

And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.

And you can relive those retro sounds via YouTube:

Analog Computing

Can you use an analog computer to model a whole economy? Say hello to MONIAC!

Yann Giraud @yannbgiraud

A strange encounter. Most economists know what that is, right?

Quoting Wikipedia.

The MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer and the Financephalograph, was created in 1949 by the New Zealand economist Bill Phillips to model the national economic processes of the United Kingdom, while Phillips was a student at the London School of Economics (LSE). The MONIAC was an analogue computer which used fluidic logic to model the workings of an economy. The MONIAC name may have been suggested by an association of money and ENIAC, an early electronic digital computer.

Steve Jobs Opera

He led a dramatic life so I suppose an Opera about Steve Jobs was inevitable.

Chip Art Auto

Finally, this auto (Porsche?) features on a microprocessor I’m going to look at soon. Can you name the chip? Answer in next week’s Chip Letter Links.

Twitter

I’ve started to post more links on my twitter account. Please head on over and say hello.

Babbage @thechipletter

Fifty years of innovation 1971 to 2021. 2,300 to 57,000,000,000 transistors.