Chip Letter Links No. 5: 4004, PiDP 10, Andy Grove, Decapping, UTM on the Mac and more
Great links, reading and images for 12 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 an Intel 14nm Coffee Lake CPU courtesy of Fritzchens Fritz.
The Chip Letter “Public Service Announcement”
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So from now on please expect two emails per week. A ‘Chip Letter Links’ post like this midweek with links, images and very short reading. And a longer read on a single topic at the weekend.
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Intel 4004
The first of these bonus posts - on the legacy of the Intel 4004 is on the website now and contains some of best links and reading on the history of the 4004.
Was the 4004 the first microprocessor? What in the 4004 constituted invention?
Follow the link for some answers.
PiDP 10
A PDP-10 in a box powered by a Raspberry PI.
When I made my PDP-8 replica, I felt that 12 bits should be enough for everyone. After a while, though, even the 16 bits of my PDP-11 replica felt constraining. So now: 36 bits! Why not afford yourself a full PDP-10? Thanks to 40 years worth of Moore's law, we're all millionaires now (when it comes to computer-buying power).
Link here.
Andy Grove Interview
A fascinating (and relatively short) interview with Andy Grove from 2005 on his time at Fairchild and the early days of Intel. A couple of quotes on manufacturing at Fairchild Semiconductor:
Almost nothing made it from R&D to manufacturing.
If you made a list of all the things that could go wrong they all did.
On the lessons learned in his time at Fairchild and Intel:
Those lessons need to be learned in other industries.
And finally:
It always helps to be a little lucky.
Link here.
UTM
If you use a Mac and want to experience historic architectures and operating system the UTM is an excellent option. It enables Mac users to run Virtual Machines with a number of different operating systems.
Here is an Intel Mac happily running Sun Solaris 9 on an emulated SPARC processor. It’s responsive and perfectly useable.
UTM offers the ability to run a range of architectures all the way from the Motorola 68000 to RISC-V. It works on Apple Silicon and well as Intel based Macs. It’s really slick, and as it’s based on the QEMU project, very solid. Highly recommended.
Decappping Chips
If you liked to see what is involved in producing die shots then the short video clip in the Tweet linked below gives a good overview. Spoiler: it often involves a blowtorch.
Follow EvilmonkeyDesignz on Twitter for more of this and some excellent die shots.
Quiz Question
Finally, a quiz question. What do the acronyms ECTEK, DISTEK, ESSCOTEK represent?
The answer will be revealed in this weekend’s post ‘Cash, Canadians and CPUs’.