Chip Letter Links No.12: Nintendo Strategy, ASML Culture, Dekatron, Blinkenlights, RISC-V Summit
Great links, reading and images for 15 January 2023
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 10nm Raptor Lake CPU courtesy of Martijn Boer.
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Another Podcast - Why Are Chips Interesting Again?
Benedict Evans and Toni Cowan-Brown interview Jay Goldberg for a wide ranging discussion on the current state of semiconductors and how the semiconductor industry has changed over the years.
Incidentally, Benedicts’s weekly newsletter is definitely worth a look.
Chip of the Week: Nintendo’s Game Boy Color
What can a chip tell us about strategy?
Many readers will have owned or played on a Nintendo Game Boy Color. But why is the humble, Sharp-manufactured 8-bit CPU in this portable games machine from 1998 interesting?
Siliconinsider has a die shot of the Game Boy System-on-Chip. You can see the 8-bit CPU core as the middle section at the bottom.
It’s usually described as a derivative of the Zilog Z80 as in the tweet above. But that’s not quite correct! It’s actually a derivative of the Intel 8080 that adds some Z80 instructions but omits others and also adds some completely new ones.
Why do this rather than just using a plain Z80? Nintendo are well known for using older and cheaper hardware and squeezing the most out of it. The changes were optimisations to what was very much legacy hardware (the GBA came out in 1998 more than twenty years after the Z80 was first introduced in 1976).
For example, the Sharp CPU adds a small number of instructions that access a 256-byte section of memory more efficiently than using normal Z80 instructions. This is an approach similar to that used in the Z80’s great rival, the MOS Technology 6502.
The Sharp CPU lived on, to provide backwards compatibility, in 2001’s Game Boy Advance, alongside a 32-bit Arm CPU, and was only discontinued in 2008.
Nintendo’s ‘get the most out of legacy hardware’ is a strategy that has been incredibly successful over the years. The GBA sold over 118 million units over its lifetime. Not bad for a CPU that was more than twenty years old when it was introduced.
Blinkenlights
How great would it be to have an x86 emulator that allows you to see how running programs affect registers and memory, and even allows you to single step through programs.
This is what Justine Tunney has created with Blikenlights which supports both 64-bit x86 code and original Intel 8086 code.
Even better, Blinkenlights is a single program that runs on almost all desktop operating systems (Linux, Windows, MacOS or even FreeBSD).
From the Blinkenlights website:
Computers once had operator panels that provided an intimate overview of the machine's internal state at any given moment. The blinking lights would communicate the personality of each piece of software. Since our minds are great at spotting patterns, developers would intuitively understand based on which way the LEDs were flashing, if a program was sorting data, collating, caught in an infinite loop, etc. This is an aspect of the computing experience that modern machines haven't done a good job at recreating, until now.
The great thing about Blinkenlights is that it is a tool that is both extremely useful and is entertaining and fun. The underlying Blink emulator already outperforms the popular QEMU emulator too!
Harwell Dekatron
For a spectacular example of ‘Blinkenlights’ in real life we have the Harwell Dekatron.
The machine was originally situated at Harwell, just south of Oxford in the UK, and has distinction of being the world’s oldest working digital computer. Work started on building the machine in 1949 and it was first operational in 1951.
It was subsequently renamed as the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell). Now it has been restored and relocated to the UK’s National Museum of Computing.
It was known as the Harwell Dekatron as it used Dekatrons, a form of vacuum tube, for its equivalent of “Random Access Memory”. The Dekatrons, flashing red, feature prominently on the outside of the machine and give operators a clear view of the inner workings of the machine.
Here is a short video featuring the machine booting up, complete with hundreds of Dekatrons.
And here is a more detailed presentation on the machine and its restoration.
Blog Of The Week
Raymond Chen has a terrific blog on the Microsoft website documenting his involvement with the development of Windows, and much more, over more than 25 years.
Quoting from the blog.
Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 25 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007).
If you’re interested in the development of Windows then it’s a ‘must read’.
A couple of highlights processor related highlights:
The x86 architecture is the weirdo. I guess we knew that but good to have it confirmed!
The Itanium processor, part 1: Warming up. “The Itanium may not have been much of a commercial success, but it is interesting as a processor architecture because it is different from anything else commonly seen today.”
One word of warning. It may take some time as there are currently 665 pages of posts on the site!
ASML Culture
Coming next week we have Part 2 of our short series on the founding of ASML. Part 1 is here. In advance here is an short interview with René Raaijmakers the author of ASML’s Architects focusing on ASML’s Culture:
They have this culture of diving into the problem … You have to have a culture where nothing is hidden, and you have a very fierce discussion culture … ASML really has this culture of problem solving very quickly …
What follows - on RISC-V, the book of the week and some hints on a future post - is for paid subscribers. Please consider supporting The Chip Letter and becoming a paid subscriber.