Siliconpr0n: High Resolution Chip Maps

https://siliconpr0n.org/map/

by lelf • 5 years ago

290 78 5 years ago

siliconpr0n.org

seattle_spring• 5 years ago

ooh check out the 386i bare all

jmspring• 5 years ago

Shitty name for an informative site.

Something1234• 5 years ago

This is the greatest name of all time. It's whimsical. It's full of internet humor and without the suits.

rektide3• 5 years ago

first, silicpr0n would be funnier, because it rhymes better/is more glib.

disclaimer, before heading on: i'm not sure how i feel about it to be honest. it's ok i suppose. decent. but it feels uninspired, at this point: traditional, expected.

yes, i love the site, what it does, what it shows. the name itself doesn't titilate me further, doesn't add to my enjoyment- i think. although i enjoy a little glibness, a little playfulness. it still is kind of manufactured. abandonedporn, architectureporn, cableporn, conduitporn, engineeringporn, futureporn, .... how many varieties of thing-"porn" do i need?

my core meta-analysis? i do think the whole internet is as a local maxima where attaching -pron or -porn or -pr0n to the end of any subject is how we say "pretty pictures". i get it, it gets the point, "in your dreams", but like, we're deep into Simulacra & Simulation territory, third degree: simulacra now precedes reality, the signified becomes meaningless. porn itself, real porn, is often unreal, often part simulation, but it still is second order, still signified a real. unmooring ourselves from sex, using porn to just mean, "hardly believable attractive take" on a thing, it's a direct enough disassociation, it makes sense. but it's also tiring to me, exhausting, that we have no other frames of desire or beauty we can hitch ourselves to.

i wouldn't mind finding some other ways to anchor ourselves, meaning. i want whimsy, i think there is "something" added by the playfulness, the bending of meaning. reviewing, i think i'm being kind of cantankerous in my assessment. but it does seem like we're low on good options. that this space could use some inspiration & opening.

johndmcmaster5• 5 years ago

The topic has come up a few times and I'm not opposed to changing it. If a good replacement name came up and someone helped with logos etc I'd change it

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

Just wanted to comment on the usability of directory listings (Apache server?). No javascript bs, no UI frameworks, no SPA garbage, just good ol folder listing in HTML. Glorious, fast and shall I say, impeccable?

In 2021, this would be a "card" based page, about 6 cards visible, rounded corners, and it would have fucking infinite scroll, ofcourse with spinners to let you know its processing. God, help us.

Edit: I should clarify, I like JS for form submission and a few things. If you're building Google Docs competitor, by all means, go for SPA and big JS frameworks. That's what they're designed for.

airstrike• 5 years ago

Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu) Server at siliconpr0n.org Port 443, as a matter of fact

astrange• 5 years ago

It's pretty good, but Apache tries to cut off long filenames and isn't Unicode-aware when it does this, so it looks untidy because names come out at apparently random lengths…

drocer88• 5 years ago

See here to fix the long filenames: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_autoindex.html

NameWidth=[n | *]

    The NameWidth keyword allows you to specify the width of the filename column in bytes.

cdubzzz• 5 years ago

Eh. It’s pretty terrible on mobile, though. I can’t read or click anything without zooming and a page load for each directory resets the zoom. I would say the content isn’t really relevant for mobile users but the images themselves actually work pretty well on my device. Far better than the site itself.

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

It's actually pretty decent on mobile IMO. Pinch and zoom is easy to do, atleast on the iPhone. Then you just scroll naturally. The entire page doesn't move on you.

I agree with you in general, its not great on mobile, but it's not terrible. Far better than hamburger menu'ed UI that I see in the wild that seems to show 1 card at a time and hijacks the scroll mechanism.

A lot of "Not designed for mobile" fear stems from early days of smartphones in 2010-era which still lingers today. Things have changed. Screens have gotten much better in resolution, responsiveness has improved and touch experience on modern phones is exceptional.

asddubs• 5 years ago

all they really need is a viewport tag to fix that. Weird that no one has bothered to do that yet, seems like it would be a one line pull request

ObsoleteNerd• 5 years ago

At least for iOS: Double-tap in the white space between the directory links and the dates, it’ll fit to the screen nicely.

kayson• 5 years ago

That's so easy to solve with css. See something like https://github.com/Vestride/fancy-index

Specifically: https://github.com/Vestride/fancy-index/raw/main/after_mobil...

mgraczyk• 5 years ago

I think it's fine.

The time it took me to double-tap zoom was less than the time it would have taken for an SPA to load over my weak ass T-Mobile connection

modeless3• 5 years ago

I don't know why people are terrified of zooming. Frankly, zooming to use a desktop site is better UX than 90% of mobile sites. All you have to do is ensure your text lines aren't too long, which is good practice anyway.

Maybe it's because iOS don't have a one finger zoom gesture like Android? I wonder why Apple never added that one?

ashas451• 5 years ago

Totally perfect apart from the fact I don’t have a fuckin clue what most of this shorthand and naming means. Sort of detail someone might include on of those silly cards or newfangled js dohicky

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

Lol, I empathize. Some description of what these folders mean would be helpful.

mnem• 5 years ago

If you go up to the main site, you can get to the wiki which has descriptions. For example: https://siliconpr0n.org/archive/doku.php?id=type

gorkish• 5 years ago

They aren’t using it, but the Apache directory listing module does have support for descriptions that will be displayed beside the file names.

sillysaurusx3• 5 years ago

Does anyone know which framework they're using to load the images google-maps style? https://siliconpr0n.org/map/intel/4004/m0_200x/#x=1603&y=145...

I doubt it's a custom framework, but view source just shows uninformative compressed javascript and no info.

I'd like to display my high resolution ML images in a similar way.

adamhearn• 5 years ago

Looks like LeafletJS: https://leafletjs.com/

Maha-pudma• 5 years ago

I couldnt agree more, I use ublock in advanced mode (even on mobile) and I was expecting to have to enable multiple scripts, which nearly always consist or analitics and ads, to be able to use this thing. Nope, all first party scripts, brilliant.

Better folder descriptions maybe but other than that perfect!

KronisLV• 5 years ago

Quick question: is there a particular reason why the table and the other elements aren't centered in the browser by default? Even this site seems to do that to some degree, which improves the usability at least somewhat.

AFAIK that would require just a text-align rule for the title and margin-left: auto; and margin-right: auto; for the table, which seems a bit more readable on wide screens.

Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/y447V3g.png

4ad• 5 years ago

I really dislike centered websites. That means that if I change the width of the browser window, the position of the website elements changes. So when I make the window bigger for ONE annoying tab that requires more width, it changes ALL other tabs. This is horrible for my muscle memory.

Also, I arrange my windows such that overlapping windows don't hide important stuff underneath them. So I can see essential elements of a site even with chat windows on top. But if the website position changes on browser window width change, this invalidates ALL my other windows. It's simply awful.

I want degrees of freedom to be independent, otherwise they are far less useful.

People want centered websites because they are using browser windows that are far too wide, usually full screen. Just use a narrow browser window and left-aligned websites will look just fine. You'd think that with everyone having a narrow smartphone, websites would work well with narrow browser windows, but no, usually they use a different (bad!) layout on desktop browsers. I really hate this.

based2• 5 years ago

By default, to me, it is not sorted by date in the correct order.

johndmcmaster5• 5 years ago

Glad you are enjoying! I've aggregated some question responses below to try to clarify a few things.

Browsing the /map directory directly isn't intended to be informative in the way people are looking for. It's more of a file store that just happens to be browsable for advanced users. Rather this information is intended to be from the wiki which has more detail and is searchable etc. See for example: https://siliconpr0n.org/archive/doku.php?id=mcmaster:raspber...

Similarly if you can find additional information the wiki such as image conventions (https://siliconpr0n.org/archive/doku.php?id=conventions) and additional copyright info (ex: https://siliconpr0n.org/archive/doku.php?id=tommi:start)

I'm looking over people's suggestions and trying to see if there is anything I can take in to improve the site. Thanks for the feedback and feel free to reach out to me directly if you want to contribute something directly!

PS: yes I know there is some crufty stuff on there like search is doing weird stuff right now with the side bar. I upgraded the wiki software recently and haven't yet been

arthurcolle• 5 years ago

Could you actually go out and build one of these based on these pictures? Just curious

praveen9920• 5 years ago

This is listed here in the same site. https://siliconpr0n.org/wiki/doku.php?id=capture

sahin• 5 years ago

We need thisisnotarealchip

mhh__• 5 years ago

AI generated microarchitecture could be fun, although I assume they do something similar already (What's the optimal cache parameters, number of execution pipelines etc. etc.)

abhayb• 5 years ago

Finally a place for new desktop wallpapers after http://exoteric.roach.org/bg/

Also I would describe your server situation as "brave" and "a mood" (I mean that in the very best possible sense)

And finally, a question: what other interesting stories does the creator have to tell?

johndmcmaster5• 5 years ago

Thanks!

This is a good starting point: http://uvicrec.blogspot.com/2015/12/lab-explosions-and-accid...

rektide3• 5 years ago

somehow printing & printers came up in hn a couple months ago, and there were some supporters of not owning printers: just buy whatever prints you need.

maybe they're still right, but i feel like this demonstrates well why i'd want a decent slightly-wide-format cost-effective printer: a rotating selection of cpu print outs, to hang on the walls.

monsieurbanana• 5 years ago

That seems exactly like the kind of use case where you would really want to just buy high quality prints to hang on your walls, not the printer.

rektide3• 5 years ago

At ~$10 per print, I feel a little weird about spending the money, time & time again, to get photos.

But buying a $1000 Epson with an EcoTank- it comes with two free years of ink, and will be cheap to run after that- it might/might not make financial sense. 100 photos is a lot to print out. But I feel like it's something that I'd want to use, would be happy to use, am incentivized to use. Where-as I would be hestitant to keep throwing $10 after prints, that I wasn't super sure about. Buying my own printer lets me leave the scarcity model behind. It frees me from the act of deliberation. It gives me faster turn around, to experiment.

I'm not sure why people keep foisting what seems like such terrible & limiting advice on me, to not invest in ownership, not invest in myself. It's confusing. It's not backed up with arguments. This is the 3rd time I've had this exact same encounter on HN. I welcome some healthy questioning, but no one has given me any arguments, anything to go on.

I should probably start by ordering some prints. See how that goes. Sample the idea. But even throwing $60 at some prints- it feels like a lot of money, that could be better invested.

DonHopkins2• 5 years ago

Here's some historic Vintage VLSI Porn that I posted 6 years ago, from Lynn Conway's famous VLSI Design course at MIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722

DonHopkins on Jan 9, 2015 | on: Design of Lisp-Based Processors Or, LAMBDA: The Ul...

I believe this is about the Lisp Microprocessor that Guy Steele created in Lynn Conway's groundbreaking 1978 MIT VLSI System Design Course:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.html

My friend David Levitt is crouching down in this class photo so his big 1978 hair doesn't block Guy Steele's face:

The class photo is in two parts, left and right:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jp...

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jp...

Here are hires images of the two halves of the chip the class made:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c...

The Great Quux's Lisp Microprocessor is the big one on the left of the second image, and you can see his name "(C) 1978 GUY L STEELE JR" if you zoom in. David's project is in the lower right corner of the first image, and you can see his name "LEVITT" if you zoom way in.

Here is a photo of a chalkboard with status of the various projects:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20E...

The final sanity check before maskmaking: A wall-sized overall check plot made at Xerox PARC from Arpanet-transmitted design files, showing the student design projects merged into multiproject chip set.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%...

One of the wafers just off the HP fab line containing the MIT'78 VLSI design projects: Wafers were then diced into chips, and the chips packaged and wire bonded to specific projects, which were then tested back at M.I.T.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s....

Design of a LISP-based microprocessor

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031

ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-514.pdf

Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:

http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg

We present a design for a class of computers whose “instruction sets” are based on LISP. LISP, like traditional stored-program machine languages and unlike most high-level languages, conceptually stores programs and data in the same way and explicitly allows programs to be manipulated as data, and so is a suitable basis for a stored-program computer architecture. LISP differs from traditional machine languages in that the program/data storage is conceptually an unordered set of linked record structures of various sizes, rather than an ordered, indexable vector of integers or bit fields of fixed size. An instruction set can be designed for programs expressed as trees of record structures. A processor can interpret these program trees in a recursive fashion and provide automatic storage management for the record structures. We discuss a small-scale prototype VLSI microprocessor which has been designed and fabricated, containing a sufficiently complete instruction interpreter to execute small programs and a rudimentary storage allocator.

Here's a map of the projects on that chip, and a list of the people who made them and what they did:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp...

1. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen Jorge Rubenstein: Charge flow transistors (moisture sensors) integrated into digital subsystem for testing.

2. Andy Boughton, J. Dean Brock, Randy Bryant, Clement Leung: Serial data manipulator subsystem for searching and sorting data base operations.

3. Jim Cherry: Graphics memory subsystem for mirroring/rotating image data.

4. Mike Coln: Switched capacitor, serial quantizing D/A converter.

5. Steve Frank: Writeable PLA project, based on the 3-transistor ram cell.

6. Jim Frankel: Data path portion of a bit-slice microprocessor.

7. Nelson Goldikener, Scott Westbrook: Electrical test patterns for chip set.

8. Tak Hiratsuka: Subsystem for data base operations.

9. Siu Ho Lam: Autocorrelator subsystem.

10. Dave Levitt: Synchronously timed FIFO.

11. Craig Olson: Bus interface for 7-segment display data.

12. Dave Otten: Bus interfaceable real time clock/calendar.

13. Ernesto Perea: 4-Bit slice microprogram sequencer.

14. Gerald Roylance: LRU virtual memory paging subsystem.

15. Dave Shaver Multi-function smart memory.

16. Alan Snyder Associative memory.

17. Guy Steele: LISP microprocessor (LISP expression evaluator and associated memory manager; operates directly on LISP expressions stored in memory).

18. Richard Stern: Finite impulse response digital filter.

19. Runchan Yang: Armstrong type bubble sorting memory.

The following projects were completed but not quite in time for inclusion in the project set:

20. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen, Jorge Rubenstein: In addition to project 1 above, this team completed a CRT controller project.

21. Martin Fraeman: Programmable interval clock.

22. Bob Baldwin: LCS net nametable project.

23. Moshe Bain: Programmable word generator.

24. Rae McLellan: Chaos net address matcher.

25. Robert Reynolds: Digital Subsystem to be used with project 4.

Also, Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape) was one of Lynn Conway's students, and she taught him how to make his first prototype "Geometry Engine"!

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.ht...

Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9]

Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University):

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp...

[...]

The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20].

[...]

For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!)

9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980.

[...]

The above is all from Lynn Conway's fascinating web site, which includes her great book "VLSI Reminiscence" available for free:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/

These photos look very beautiful to me, and it's interesting to scroll around the hires image of the Quux's Lisp Microprocessor while looking at the map from page 22 that I linked to above. There really isn't that much too it, so even though it's the biggest one, it really isn't all that complicated, so I'd say that "SIMPLE" graffiti is not totally inappropriate. (It's microcoded, and you can actually see the rough but semi-regular "texture" of the code!)

This paper has lots more beautiful Vintage VLSI Porn, if you're into that kind of stuff like I am:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/Photos/PDF...

A full color hires image of the chip including James Clark's Geometry Engine is on page 23, model "MPC79BK", upside down in the upper right corner, "Geometry Engine (C) 1979 James Clark", with a close-up "centerfold spread" on page 27.

Is the "document chip" on page 20, model "MPC79AH", a hardware implementation of Literate Programming?

If somebody catches you looking at page 27, you can quickly flip to page 20, and tell them that you only look at Vintage VLSI Porn Magazines for the articles!

There is quite literally a Playboy Bunny logo on page 21, model "MPC79B1", so who knows what else you might find in there by zooming in and scrolling around stuff like the "infamous buffalo chip"?

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.html

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSI.archive.spr...

jecel• 5 years ago

One interesting feature of the Lisp microprocessor is that it doesn't have an ALU. At that time an ALU was a very large part of a processor design and the idea was that Lisp didn't need it and not having one would allow the project to fit (barely) in the limited area allocated to each student.

You can define numbers from scratch in Lisp by using lists and having their length (for example) represent the number's magnitude.

If we define the empty list as ZERO, and the successor of a number N as (CONS 'S N) we can build a whole math library from there:

    (DEFINE ADD '(LAMBDA (A B)
        (COND
          ((NIL? A) B)
          ((NIL? B) A)
          (T (ADD (CONS 'S A) (CDR B)))
        )))

retrac• 5 years ago

Ah, the 70s. Hair got bigger and chips got smaller. Thank you for all this. It's both pretty, and educational.

mmastrac• 5 years ago

Ooh. I sponsored a decap of a Casio SK-1 chip a while back. I need to contribute the scans to this (although they need to be stitched together).

1MachineElf• 5 years ago

I've never looked at images like this before. Really cool. I don't know the nomenclature, but one question I have is, why are the points where metal contacts touch the IC so... complicated? For example:

There's a lot going on this AMD IC where the metal leads make contact with it. Not really sure what they are, just a bunch of wavy lines, maybe: https://siliconpr0n.org/map/amd/d87c51/mz_mit20x/#x=5299&y=1...

Btw, I think it's really cool how the URL changes depending on what part of the image is zoomed in on.

chronomex• 5 years ago

ESD protection Zener diodes, maybe?

kens2• 5 years ago

Those are output driver transistors. There's a pull-up transistor on one side of the pad and a pull-down transistor on the other. The transistors are interdigitated to make them large so they can provide high currents.

DonHopkins2• 5 years ago

Wow, the 4004 is a thing of beauty. Pity how it turned out.

https://siliconpr0n.org/map/intel/4004/m0_200x/#x=2688&y=202...

ece• 5 years ago

You can actually go see blown-up individual mask traces (how they made the chip) for at least some of the layers at the Intel Museum in Santa Clara.

edit (some more info): http://intel4004.com/current_intel_museum.htm

codegladiator• 5 years ago

haha that looks like a screenshot of a factorio game play

klelatti2• 5 years ago

Why a pity? Seems to have been the start of a good run for Intel.

mysterydip• 5 years ago

The 4004 could have performed much better than it did (up to 3x faster) if intel hadn't insisted on the 16 pin DIP. This limited how much data could be accessed per cycle and relied on shift registers etc to get full instructions and memory.

olejorgenb• 5 years ago

The watermark is really obnoxious. Did they really have to plaster it all over the image?

It's cool how "intel" (bottom right) and "FF" [1] (top right) is signed using the same process as the rest of the chip :D

[1] initials of Federico Faggin

zwegner• 5 years ago

If you like this, I'd highly recommend also checking out Fritzchens Fritz's flickr account: https://www.flickr.com/photos/130561288@N04/albums

There's a ton of gorgeous high resolution die shots of (mostly) modern chips, all in the public domain.

jzer0cool• 5 years ago

These die shots are all very pretty. Are people mostly interested in these just at the pure beauty of how so many circuitry can be packed into a small space and the feat of engineering, or for some other reason?

anewguy9000• 5 years ago

I'm dating one

gnunez• 5 years ago

Some hobbyists use these die shots to reverse engineer older chips, bypassing the need to decap the chips themselves. The craft is explained nicely in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHx-XUA6f9g.

arduinomancer• 5 years ago

Are the colours in these images real or added for effect in post?

kens2• 5 years ago

The colors are real, mostly generated by thin-film interference depending on the thickness of the layers. Some people boost the saturation to make it more dramatic, but I think John's photos are natural.

There's a color chart here: http://www.htelabs.com/appnotes/sio2_color_chart_thermal_sil...

johndmcmaster5• 5 years ago

Mostly yes (ex: through thin film interference as mentioned), but there may be significant color correction for things like halogen light yellow color. There are also techniques to produce colorful images such as DIC and using a confocal microscope (ex: the 4004 ones I believe are confocal)

rbanffy3• 5 years ago

I think they imaged the wrong side of the IBM z13.

https://siliconpr0n.org/map/ibm/z13s_cpu/mz_mit5x/

marcan_42• 5 years ago

That is a top layer shot of a flip-chip die. Every modern complex IC looks like that. Any time you see a pretty die shot with identifiable blocks of any kind of modern CPU or SoC, instead of a grid of balls, it's because someone has gone through the trouble of removing most or all of the metal layers which obscure all the circuitry. Otherwise it looks like that photo. Balls and power buses.

rbanffy3• 5 years ago

That makes a lot of sense - packing thousands of solder points around the chip as we did when a CPU had 40 pins is impractical now.

This must also simplify timing and routing as you can always use the closest ball to the point you want to connect the die to the external world.

Sad that the most beautiful parts are under all that stuff.

erwinh• 5 years ago

I'm thinking for a while already to make an art collection using chip designs as source material.

Does somebody know of a place to get open source publicly available design data files for chips?

tt433• 5 years ago

Throw in some post processing and these make good greebles/texture details

Panoramix• 5 years ago

How would I go about building an application for displaying very hi-res images like this? you know, allows to zoom, only load when it needs to, etc.

Is it a big project? I'm really clueless (I'm not a programmer as you can tell though I know my way around Python).

andrewf• 5 years ago

This site uses (1) prerendering different resolutions and (2) tiling.

(1) If you take a look under https://siliconpr0n.org/map/intel/4004/m0_200x/l1-tiles/ you'll see that the 1/ subdirectory has the most zoomed-out version of the chip image, 2/ has slightly higher-res images, and so on until 6/, which is full-resolution.

(2) Tiling means you might take a 12000x12000 (ie 144 megapixel) image, and split it into a 20x20 grid of 600x600 subimages (ie 0.36 megapixels each).

When you go to a URL like https://siliconpr0n.org/map/intel/4004/m0_200x/#x=2160&y=189... the site will (1) use the z=3 parameter to know it should be loading images from under https://siliconpr0n.org/map/intel/4004/m0_200x/l1-tiles/3/ then (2) do some arithmetic with the x+y parameters, and the browser window dimensions, to figure out which subimages actually need to be loaded from the server.

Zooming and panning can now be implemented by having your UI alter the x, y and z parameters.

I figured this out by opening the network tab (View -> Developer -> Developer Tools in Chrome) and watching the browser load files when I did things. Because all the files have simple names like "1.jpg", "2.jpg" inside a directory structure, I needed to hover over the filenames to see the full image URLs in a tooltip.

===

All of the above works with entire image files, which is good, because common file formats and APIs often won't let you do anything other than "load the entire file".

Some file formats allow you to load part of an image effectively. For instance, many PDFs will let you read page 53 by (a) reading enough of the header/index in the file (b) reading page 53, without needing pages 1-52 first. If you were writing something like a desktop image viewer you'd probably want to take advantage of this, but the details are likely to be very file-format-specific. You'd likely build on top of specialized libraries for TIFF, RAW, PDF and so on, rather than generic "load any image file" APIs.

Siliconpr0n: High Resolution Chip Maps

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