Chip Letter Links No. 4: Chip War, ASML, DEC, Virtual Lorenz and more
Great links, reading and images for 5 October 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.
Quote of the Week
"The global chip industry manufactured more transistors last year than the combined quantity of all other goods produced by all other industries in all of human history."
This comes from Chris Miller whose book ‘Chip War’ was released yesterday. I’m part way through and it’s a great read so far (non-affiliate Amazon link here). I’ll be doing a full review shortly.
Miller also appeared on the ‘Behind the Markets podcast’ in a wide ranging discussion. It’s definitely worth a listen.
Spotify link here.
ASML’s Secret
Few companies are more important to the development of semiconductor technology than ASML. So it was interesting to see a new documentary appear this week from Dutch public broadcaster vpro.
It’s largely about ASML’s people but we do to look behind the scenes at ASML’s manufacturing processes.
I enjoyed the reference to ‘Our friends in Portland’. I wonder who that could be?
Digital.com
Digital.com used to be the homepage of the former minicomputer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
It’s now an aggregator of reviews for web hosts. It has a wistful tribute though to DEC with a short history and a timeline for the former minicomputer manufacturer. It’s headed “The Tragic Tale of DEC”. It’s all rather sad really.
Link here.
Poll Result
The winner of the poll in the ‘What’s coming next’ was the Inmos Transputer. So look out for a post on the parallel processing pioneer soon!
Virtual Lorenz
The Lorenz ciphers were the machines used by the German Army during World War II to encrypt messages. Famously, the Colossus computers at Bletchley Park were used to decipher messages encoded using the Lorenz machines.
It’s now possible to see a virtual version of the Lorenz in action at the Virtual Colossus website. It’s lots of fun!
Here it is in operation and a direct link.
Mystery Car
The answer to the ‘mystery car’ quiz question in the last Chip Letter Links is RISC-II, the second RISC processor from David Patterson’s team at the University of California at Berkeley.
A sports car for a processor that was designed to ‘go faster’.
John Cocke and the IBM 801
As with buses, you wait for years for an article on the IBM 801 and two appear at the same time! Within a couple of days my piece, Paul McLellan’s article (written but not published before mine appeared) on the 801 appeared on his ‘Breakfast Bytes’ blog, which is worth checking out for lots of good articles.
There was also a good discussion on Hacker News, with a lots of informed and detailed commentary, and an interesting clarification which I’ll add to the post in a footnote.
It’s really worth a browse. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion.
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