Chip Letter Links No. 7: RISC Pioneers, Sophie Wilson, ASML Book, Finger Chips, Home Made Chips and More
Great links, reading and images for 27 October 2022
Hi everyone and thanks for subscribing. 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.
David Patterson Speech at Draper Prize Ceremony
A short (non emailed) post from earlier this week. Four pioneers of Reduced Instruction Set Computers were honoured with the award of the Draper prize earlier this year. Featuring a great speech on how RISC came about by David Patterson of RISC-V fame. One quote about the early days of the RISC vs CISC debate.
This seemingly clear engineering question was emotion packed in our computer design community, which we call computer architecture.
Link here.
Sophie Wilson on The Future of Microprocessors
One of those honoured with the Draper Prize was Sophie Wilson, famous as one of the original designers of the Arm architecture, and more recently as the chief architect of the Broadcom Firepath architecture.
Sophie gave a great talk to the RISC OS User Group of London last year on ‘The Future of Microprocessors’. Of course Sophie is still active at Broadcom so it’s really interesting to hear her perspective on the history and where things might be going next.
Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire?
Patterson and Wilson also appear on the list of architects asked, for a 2001 conference, to say which machines they admire the most.
The answers for Patterson and Wilson are:
Wilson : 6502
“Primarily the 6502. I learned about pipelines from it (by comparison with the 6800) and its designers were clear believers in the KISS principle. Plus the syntax of its assembler and general accessibility of it from the machine code perspective. I can still write in hex for it - things like A9 (LDA #) are tattoed on the inside of my skull. The assembly language syntax (but obviously not the mnemonics or the way you write code) and general feel of things are inspirations for ARM's assembly language and also for FirePath's.”
Lots of interesting discussion on other (some now long forgotten) architectures here.
Finger Chips
Every week we feature a die shot but how big are these dies in practice? Here is a short video from Fritzchens Fritz featuring an Intel coffee lake die. Link here.
Home Made Chips
You don’t need a billion dollar Fab to make semiconductors. Sam Zeloof is making integrated circuits in his garage. But Intel’s first Fab was probably closer in design to a very large garage than today’s Fabs.
Analog Computers in The Navy
In some ways, new Navy computers fall short of the power of 1930s tech
We featured an analog computer used to model a complete economy in Chip Letter Links No 3. Today we have mechanical analog ‘fire control’ computers used on battleships by the US Navy from 1930s right up until the 1980s. Though provoking article from Art Technica.
Link here.
ASML’s Architects
I’ve been reading a fascinating book on the early history of ASML. ‘ASML’s architects’ by Rene Raaijmakers is an in depth look at ASML’s story, from its start as part of the Philips conglomerate up to the mid 1990s.
Full review coming soon, but it’s been hugely informative so far. The only drawback is that it’s quite pricey. I hope a cheaper edition is available soon. Amazon (non-affiliate) link for the Kindle - with a free preview of course - here.
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Wafer-scale integration!! lol