Ken Shirriff

What is the board with a kajillion holes in it behind the esp32 called? https://kn100.me/posts/desksniffer/pbfront.webp It looks like it could come in handy for many esp32 projects. p.s. In case the author comes across this comment - Absolutely superb write-up, your writing style reveals your curious and positive attitude, it's totally inspiring! I wish I could easily subscribe to future publications, like the emails I get from Ken Shirriff of https://righto.com. Also, your C++ is clear and easy to read, good job. Cheers. Edit: @Klathmon, thanks for the info, that was very fast :)

If you're into that kind of stuff I recommend: - watching https://www.youtube.com/c/CuriousMarc - reading Ken's blog/twitter http://www.righto.com/ / https://twitter.com/kenshirriff

Anything that Ken Shirriff writes (http://www.righto.com/) is excellent. He's a UC Berkeley EE/CS PhD who likes to restore and reverse engineer interesting hardware. His writing is so clear. (minor disclosure - I worked in the CS department at UCB when he was a PhD student but I didn't really know him, and I strongly doubt he remembers me.)

Worthwhile content. If this was your blog https://www.righto.com/ you wouldn't have to work hard to promote it.

Ken Shirriff's blog: http://www.righto.com/ He does amazing teardowns, reconstructions, and analysis. 10/10 would definitely read again.

A few of mine: - https://www.windytan.com/ (windytan: signal processing) - https://www.righto.com/ (Ken Sheriff: IC reverse engineering, vintage computing, misc) - https://jvns.ca/ (Julie Evans: software development, particularly networking) And even though it's not a written blog, a special mention goes to Ben Eater's website, which links to his fantastic YouTube series on building an 8-bit CPU from logic chips, and on building a 6502 computer. - https://eater.net/

> 55 nanometers per transistor. Way off from the 2 nanometer feature size. Cool. Following along here, I consider that transistors require multiple "features", and these days the more complicated transistor structure has enabled the increase in speed while lowering the power requirements. Power is also now a set of characteristics, the power needed to change transistor state, and the leakage current that remains when the transistor is not switching. Not just a simple NPN junction FET anymore. Then I think about those great microchip analyses on Ken Sheriff's blog. How very different transistor layouts show up in circuit designs. I can only imagine that modern high performance SOC design is even more complex. https://righto.com 55 nanometers per transistor sounds like a useful number to me.

For anyone wondering why this is done like so instead of literally counting transistors: Transistors with 2,3,.. gates are functionally identical to 2,3,.. transistors connected in series, but take chip area that is only a small fraction larger than 1 "normal" transistor. Counting those as either 1, or as multiple (by number of gates) would skew stats in a less-then-useful way. That is - among other quirks. Ken Shirriff [1] has some excellent articles that touch the topic of what exactly counts as a "transistor". [1] http://www.righto.com/

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions. Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article. In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN: Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/ Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/ There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write…

HN hasn't focused on those topics in a long time, they rarely are on the front page. Skip the top 20 articles and you'll start to see some interesting content instead of all the VC & AI drivel. Hackaday is a content aggregator site that usually has more content on these topics - https://hackaday.com Or there are still some good old blogs out there with RSS feeds http://www.righto.com/ http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/ https://blog.ret2.io/

If people are interested in the DX7's technical details, I've done some work reverse-engineering it, and some of Yamaha's other FM synths: https://ajxs.me/blog/tag/DX7.html Ken Shirriff has also done some amazing work analysing the DX7's sound chips: https://www.righto.com/2021/11/reverse-engineering-yamaha-dx7.html A really awesome documentary on the DX7 by MadFame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXt_NXjc7oY There are a lot of software emulations of the DX7 that are quite realistic, like the amazing Dexed. Here's one that deserves a lot of credit for how accurate it is: https://github.com/chiaccona/VDX7

I'm not sure that content exists any more in any reasonable quantity. Occasionally a video will pop out which is interesting from someone but generally it's all below average. The attention dynamics have focused all content onto retaining viewers and reinforcement metrics around that. This normalised everything into mediocrity and delivering longer content with no meat. The only thing notable left in my mind which I await with interest is Ken Shirriff's blog: http://www.righto.com ... oh and Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com

A few years ago I bought an 8086 chip on eBay and it turned out to be fake, a random logic array chip relabeled as an 8086. It made for interesting die photos at least. It hardly seems worthwhile for someone to fake a chip that gets sold for $3.80. https://www.righto.com/2020/08/inside-counterfeit-8086-processor.html

Ah, righto! Also I see you elaborated more on this aspect in article on that fake 8086. For anyone interested: https://www.righto.com/2020/08/inside-counterfeit-8086-processor.html As always: great stuff!

I really enjoy Ken Sherriff's posts about reverse engineering processors. https://www.righto.com/

> currently there are actually no modern x86 CPUs on the market. This feels like one of the stranger "no true Scotsman" arguments I've ever run across. Even the 8086 had microcode that translated the instructions as generated by the compiler/programmer into the instructions that would be processed: http://www.righto.com/2022/11/how-8086-processors-microcode-engine.htm… I would love to know what the person who wrote that stackexchange answer would say in response to the question, "so which x86 processors used 'real' x86 cores?" Because from the very beginning of x86, there's been translation of the front-door opcodes into internal opcodes via microcode.

Kens ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kens ) has a whole pile of Apollo related blog posts that make for fantastic reading: https://www.righto.com/search/label/Apollo

Have a look at https://www.righto.com/ This is the blog of Ken Shirriff (HN user: kens) who is reverse engineering an 8086 processor. You might find answers to many of your questions there.

Even the 8086 has significant microcode - great article: https://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-modrm-addressing.html

I read "Paperspace" as "paper space" so it reminded of this great article: http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.htm… Could someone do the same with some LLM to demonstrate a very simple example?

My favorite way to mine bitcoin! https://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.ht…

> Yes, "8-bit" refers to the ALU. By that definition, the Z80 would be a 4-bit CPU ;) https://www.righto.com/2013/09/the-z-80-has-4-bit-alu-heres-how-it.htm… ...but if you take the data bus width, then the 8088 would be an 8-bit CPU, which isn't quite right either... But you also can't take the address bus width, because modern "64-bit" CPUs can't actually address 64 bits of physical memory... I think it's best to treat the 'bit-ness' of a CPU or computer system purely as a marketing term.

Hmm, a minor quibble: "VLSI" would be normally more than 10k gates or 100k transistors on a single chip, wouldn't it? But the 8008 had only about 3500 transistors (I don't see an exact count in http://www.righto.com/2016/12/die-photos-and-analysis-of_24.html) and so probably about 1000–1500 gates, so I think it should be called "LSI" rather than "VLSI". A funny thing about the 8008 is that Intel's manual for its instruction set is unnecessarily shitty — even if you didn't know the history with Datapoint, the Intel manual is obviously not by the people who designed the instruction set because it's in hexadecimal, a tradition sadly followed by the 8080 and 8086 manuals. The Datapoint manuals, by contrast, are all in octal, making the machine code enormously easier to understand. (The H8 I grew up with used an Intel chip, but the front panel monitor program used octal.)

I wish Ken Shirriff [1], too, published a book like this. Such a treasure. [1] http://www.righto.com/

I would love a bit of explanation about why the shift register ICs were spread out so far on the circuit board. Your diagram [1] shows two sets right next to each other with a third set on practically the opposite side of the board. It would almost seem easier to have them all right next to each other so they could cleanly shift. Why the separation? 1 - https://static.righto.com/images/apple-shift-reg/board-labeled-w600.jp…

I think Ken Shirriff would have something to say about this. http://www.righto.com/

Apple's chargers are a lot better engineered than the cheap ones on Amazon. Ken Shiriff did a teardown of one.[0] However, he does point out the "Apple Tax" their chargers have: > Samsung sells a very similar cube charger for about $6-$10, which I also disassembled (and will write up details later). The Apple charger is higher quality and I estimate has about a dollar's worth of additional components inside. But it sells for $20 more. [0]: https://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.h…

This was one of the first posts by Ken that I saw and it got me hooked. He does such a great job at making tear downs like this interesting and accessible. He has a great companion article with a cheapo charger for comparison: http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.h… and a comparison of an Apple MacBook charger and a knock-off: http://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html Really fascinating stuff.

Ken's blog is great, as well as his work with CuriousMarc. Here's when he tried mining bitcoins by hand. http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.htm…

In fact, there's a whole series of great posts in this series: http://www.righto.com/search/label/alto