CPU Shack

Haven't seen this one get recommended. http://www.cpushack.com/

Yes, it's Great Microprocessors of the Past, Section Seven: Weird and Innovative Chips (The "sections" seem like what are usually called chapters.) Seems like a really fascinating book! Table of contents here: http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu.html#tableofcontents

Diffusion is a step in manufacturing CPU dies. It generally refers to the following step: http://www.cpushack.com/EtchingWafers.html

This is cool! Is it anything like the Novix NC4016 Forth CPU, or a totally different approach? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860786 Any plans on making a radiation hardened version like the RTX2010? (Some of those are orbiting Mercury and Saturn and landed on Eros!) ;) http://www.cpushack.com/2013/02/21/charles-moore-forth-stack-processor… I love the idea of a VHDL VT100 "emulator"! How hard would it be to make a luxurious Ann Arbor Ambassador? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/export-termaaa-60/

follow-up http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/14/part-2-mini-mainframe-at-home-the-s…

Best independent source I can find is http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html#Sec4Part14. I noticed whilst writing a verilog implementation - seeing the @PC+ relative modes for immediate data made me dig out my PDP-11 reference card. The number of addressing modes has been halved, gaining a bit for register encoding, and the status register is now in the register file (R2), and R3 is used to generate various constants depending on mode. Compare and contrast: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11_architecture#CPU_registers * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430#MSP430_CPU

> I wonder where all those machines ended up. Would love to get one and play with them. A lot of them (probably the vast majority) simply got dumped, alas. I personally decided to dump a Challenge (basically an Onyx without the Reality Engine graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx). As in: I could have it if I wanted it, I used it for years but it had to go when it was obsoleted. I could have put the rack in my basement, but I'm not young anymore and it wouldn't be that many years before it would be a headache to get it out. So I said: "Sorry. Dump it." Smaller is more manageable of course - I have a number of O2, O2+, Indy computers and an Octane. And a Fuel. At work we had a bunch of Origin servers as well. All dumped. Back to the Onyx - when it came out in 1993 I had some access to one, I worked in the same computer room for weeks at the time on an off. Played with the various graphics demos, mostly. But I watched what the guys were doing with it. It was very impressive, a huge step up from anything else, and the sheer performance and memory bandwidth of the thing was one big reason I argued for getting an SGI Challenge for a later technical project. And I was right on that, as it turned out. Nothing else could do the job at the time (in this price segment, at least). As for the CPU speed - Like the R4000, the R4400 internal pipeline ran at a higher rate (internal multiplier): https://www.cpushack.com/MIPSCPU.html

I used to have it in my head that the Voyager probes were about as powerful as an Apple II computer. But it's hard to make a direct comparison as the probes have three computers made of two processors each, running at 1/20th or 1/6th the speed of an Apple. So it's not a one-on-one comparison in any way, but for discussion purposes: An original Apple II used a MOS 6502 8-bit word CPU clocked at 1.023 MHz and typically had 4Kb to 48Kb of RAM. It ran about 500,000 instructions per second [1]. Computer Command System (CCS) - two 18-bit word interrupt-type processors with 4096 words each of plated wire memory. It ran about 25,000 instructions per second. [2] Flight Data System (FDS) - two 16-bit word machine with modular memories and 8198 words each of memory. It ran about 25,000 instructions per second. [2] Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - two 18-bit word machines with 4096 words each of memory. The AACS ran about 80,000 instructions per second. [2] So maybe the total amount of computing power is equal? The total memory on a Voyager was about 32K [3], and since the word sizes were bigger, theoretically they could access larger chunks of memory in a single instruction? What's for sure is that a single CCS is at least an of magnitude less powerful than an Apple II. More info: 1) http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%20Manu… 2) http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html 3)…

A lot of SoCs in monitors have a 186-compatible core: https://www.cpushack.com/2013/01/12/the-intel-80186-gets-turbocharged-…

(expanding on this) A little bit old... but not that old in the scale of things... The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space https://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html (that is still 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470678 (this discussion is from 2020)

More info: System/370 capability in a desktop computer https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/IBM_Systems_Journal/233/ibmsj2303E.pdf A performance evaluation of the IBM 370/XT personal computer https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19890005611 https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/22/cpu-of-the-day-ibm-micro-370/

Details: The IBM AT/370 used standard bios on the motherboard, and the two 68k custom cards had their own bioses. The 68ks were very heavily modified by one of the motorola engineers. Its the second version of the AT Bios that was disgusting was verion 2, that ran on 6mhz 286s and prevented you from swapping the crystal for a 16Mhz/8Mhz speed up. The first version had bugs, and the third version was for the 8Mhz machines. ( still a few bugs ). This is the AT/370: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-based_IBM_mainframe-compatible_system… https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/22/cpu-of-the-day-ibm-micro-370/ https://anycpu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=350 There was one additional model of the IBM AT: THE IBM XT/286: An AT class mother board in an XT sized case. https://www.dosdays.co.uk/computers/IBM%20PC-XT-286%20(5162)/ibm5162.p…

Back in 2020, someone built a working model of a Cray-1.[1] Not only is it instruction compatible, using an FPGA, it's built into a 1/10 scale case that looks like a Cray-1. The Cray-1 is really a very simple machine, with a small instruction set. It just has 64 of everything. It was built from discrete components, almost the last CPU built that way. [1] https://www.cpushack.com/2010/09/15/homebrew-cray-1a-1976-vs-2010/

If we're going that direction, National Semiconductor had a 2 'core' COPS4 processor in 1981[1]. I have some in a tube somewhere (unused). [1] https://www.cpushack.com/2014/08/25/national-semiconductor-cop2404-dua…

How does the military version with radiation shielding in the form of a metal cap not cause shorts? It looks like it makes contact with all the pins.. https://www.cpushack.com/2023/12/21/the-first-mass-produced-dram-of-th…

it appears to be a real 80386SX embedded in the SoC, which also bundles the bridges, so i would not expect the math coprocessor from the 486, nor the amount of cache (this is an SX after all). see https://www.cpushack.com/ULi.html for more information on this (not new) SoC.

What do you mean by fake? TFA says it's a 386 processor [1]. It's just not a model from the 80s/90s. I wouldn't call that fake. [1]: https://www.cpushack.com/ULi.html

picoJava processors (Sun Microsystems) https://www.cnet.com/culture/sun-releases-complete-chip-design-for-fre… Patriot Scientific's Ignite processor family https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/02/chuck-moore-part-2-from-space-to-g… ARM Jazelle technology https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0222/b/introduction/about-t… https://www.eetimes.com/nazomi-offers-plug-in-java-accelerator-for-wir… It's all dot-com era stuff and Sun Microsystems also created a Java OS that could run directly on hardware without a host operating system. That's about it

Here's a nice CPUshack link detailing the CPUs that we have in space: https://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html

Why UAE and not Romania does indeed look like a question. Most pre-existing conditions are irrelevant in light of spending $7T. https://www.cpushack.com/2022/09/29/socialist-romania-computer-chips/

Apple has been working with Arm since 1987, when work on the Apple Newton started: https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-saved-apple…

Remember when for a while Azul tried to sell custom CPUs to support features in their JVM (e.g. some garbage collector features that required hardware interrupts and some other extra instructions). Although they dropped it pretty quickly in favor of just working on software https://www.cpushack.com/2016/05/21/azul-systems-vega-3-54-cups-of-cof…

It's not because of their temperature. One version of the SH3 (single issue, at 80 MHz) is speced at 260 mW. The SH4 used in the Dreamcast (dual issue at 200 MHz), seems to be 4W. Hitachi apparently had a trademark on "Cool Engine" for the SuperH (https://www.cpushack.com/CIC/embed/announce/HitachiSH7709.html).

Looking at the specs for the TI TMS9900, Zilog Z80, and the MOS 6502, the TI chip came in a 64-pin DIP and required +5V, -5V, and +12V power supply while the other two chips came in a 40 pin DIP package and only required a +5V power supply. The 6502 was cheap (<$30), the Z80 was more expensive at introduction, but looking at price lists, dropped down close to the same price as the 6502 within a few years. from https://www.cpushack.com/2015/02/05/ti-tms9900sbp9900-accidental-succe… " In 1978 a 9980 cost $30 while a TMS9900 cost $70." Also, in the comments from the above link: "Many years later, the processor architect for the TMS9995 (Karl Guttag) pointed out to me that whatever context switch benefits the WP offered were quickly outweighed by the required memory access cycles only a handful of instructions into an interrupt service routine. It was a false economy."

After the Newton was shut down, 1998, according to this: https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-saved-apple…

Hmm, section 4 https://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpu4.html is empty?

This is what springs to mind for me: * https://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html space shuttle used a 386 * https://www.cpu-galaxy.at/article/cpu_in_space.htm ISS still does too * https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/space-grade-cpus-how-do-you-se…

Related: https://cpushack.com/ULi.html https://www.dmp.com.tw/app/webcamera/pdf/m6117d.pdf

There was a 24 MHz 16-bit microcontroller out in 1985 or so: The Fairchild 9445 https://www.cpushack.com/2017/11/14/cpu-of-the-day-fairchild-f9445-the… It ran the Nova 4 instruction set. We were using it for a cutting-edge project: and all Digital Radio receiver, for EVLF communications to submarines in the 16 kHz range.

The TMS9900 architecture lives on in TI's MSP430 line of MCUs, and they're everywhere. You probably won't get through today without interacting with a bunch of things that have MSP430s inside. https://www.cpushack.com/2015/02/05/ti-tms9900sbp9900-accidental-succe… "Like many processor designs, the 9900 didn’t die, it provided the basis of TI’s current 16-bit MCU line, the MSP430 series. The MSP430s instruction set is heavily influenced by the 9900 and largely retains its memory architecture and orthogonal instructions."