Chip Letter Links No.10: Transistor 75th Anniversary, CPU Duke, Wafer Scale, Quarter Scale Retro-computing
Great links, reading and images for 5 December 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 AMD 14nm Zen CPU courtesy of Fritzchens Fritz.
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Transistor 75th Anniversary
It probably hasn't escaped your attention that the 75th anniversary of the transistor is being celebrated at the moment.
There are some great resources at IEEE explore including a detailed description of how the first transistor actually worked. I particularly enjoyed the story of John Bardeen’s transistorised music box.
But of course, as with many important inventions, the story isn’t quite as simple as the headlines might imply. The first patents for the transistor were filed by Julius Lilienfeld almost twenty years before Bardeen and Brattain constructed one.
But Lilienfeld never created a working transistor, and so the credit (and the Nobel Prizes) went to Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley.
For a more in-depth look at the environment in which the transistor was created, I can strongly recommend ‘The Idea Factory’ by Jon Gertner. The book tells the history of Bell Labs including the period during which the transistor was invented. Here is Gertner talking about Bell Labs at the Computer History Museum.
It’s interesting to track the use of the word ‘transistor’ over time. With Google’s Ngram viewer we can see how often it and related words have been used in books over the period 1800-2019. The pattern for ‘transistor’ probably isn’t too unexpected. I’m puzzled though by the fall off in some of the other terms though in the last decade or so. Do I detect a slight uptick in 2019?
Link here.
IEEE also updates the story of the transistor in ‘State of the Transistor in 3 Charts’ showing how the transistor has shrunk. The progress in gate and metal pitch in recent years the second chart is particularly interesting (spoiler, of course, both are still very much in double figure nanometers).
Finally, don’t miss out on the ‘History of Transistors Museum’ which has is a huge resource on the history of the transistor.
CPU Duke’s CPU Collection
‘How many CPUs do you have in your home?’ is an interesting question that forces you to ponder how computing has become completely pervasive.
One correct answer is ‘Probably not as many as CPU Duke’ who has more than 1000 microprocessors neatly displayed.
CPU Duke’s whole twitter feed is a goldmine of CPU and die images. I particularly enjoyed seeing the recent photos on the setup used to analyse and photograph these CPUs.
Wafer Scale Retrocomputing
Dylan at SemiAnalysis has an interesting post on the progress being made by AI compute startup Cerebras in challenging Nvidia. Cerebras uses ‘wafer scale’ computing using all the dies in a single wafer.
But wafer scale computing isn’t new. One proponent over thirty years ago was Clive Sinclair of ZX fame and his company Anamartic who built wafer scale solid state disks. From a 1989 press release:
The Wafer Stack consists of two 6-inch wafers, each containing 202 1M-bit memory chips, together with proprietary Conlog configuration logic. The memory array is organised in a logical spiral from the outside to the middle of the wafer, and the Conlog logic not only enables the wafer at set-up to be program-med by external software to bypass any chips that failed altogether, but also to use the good parts of chips where only a handful of memory cells are no good.
Very little in computing is completely new!
Link to more information at the Centre for Computing History.
Quarter Scale Retrocomputing
If you have a Raspberry PI but want it to look more like a ‘grown up’ computer then why not make a case for it that looks like a computer from the 1990s? Fantastic collection here including a BeBox, an SGI Indy and a ViewSonic Monitor running Doom!
Link here.
I’d probably still opt for a Cray-1 though.
Twitter
Twitter still seems to be working! Do pop over and say hello whilst it still exists!
That’s it for this edition. Thanks for reading!
Photo Credit
The First Transistor
Unitronic, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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