The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors (2016)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors

by areoform • 5 years ago

68 67 5 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

ggm• 5 years ago

Some simple maths:

4004 had 2.5k transistors. 8008 had 3.5k. z80 had <10k transistors.

A modern 4 core ARM chip has 16b transistors, in 122mm^2 die area. So, if we scale current die area for 16b transistors to a Z80, on 10k, we get 1.6m scale factor. 122mm^2 scaled down 1.6m times. 16 x 10^9 / 1 x 10^4 == 1.6 x 10^6 == 1.6m

This size is of course slightly preposterous, but if we accept there is some linearity in die scaling at current VLSI scale, it becomes clear a Z80 will fit inside a hypodermic needle. Its within the size of current technology, to be injectable. Power would have to be an external RF source, or maybe we can exploit brownian motion, or have a motile tail and do some kind of strained-crystal voltage, run asynch clock, we can also do a tail for WiFi and do power and signal through RF.

Injectable VLSI is a research space. It has great potential for in-vivo monitoring. Subcutaneous, or intravienous is a detail at this point. (note, this is quite different to the boring RFID sealed in some bubble which people get subcutaneous, thats been a thing since pet-chipping and before. I'm talking active electronics here)

We maybe can't all suffer the bill gates injected 5G nightmare, but we could play a mario gameboy, inside our bloodstream. (The original gameboy was a custom CPU modelled on a Z80)

I'm fully vaxxed for C19. I wonder if I can hear the "tetris" theme inside...

jcun41282• 5 years ago

One thing that's scifi but would be cool is "smart sand". Using tiny parts that communicate with each other/interlock. Form larger units.

TeMPOraL6• 5 years ago

Obligatory raining on the parade: small enough smart sand might be a cancer risk, the way asbestos is (suspected to be)[0] - apparently our bodies really don't like having small, stiff objects poking at it from inside, causing mechanical damage.

That said, I'm all for "smart sand" and programmable matter. IIRC, the tricky bits are in making the individual smart particles to stick to each other, and then making them behave in a coordinated fashion.

It's an interesting challenge to think about: you have a thousand, or a million, small little robots - how to get them to do something useful as a group? If the robots can barely sense their environment, can barely move on their own, can't communicate with each other except maybe their nearest neighbors - how to make them work together in a controlled fashion? Say, I have this bag of "smart sand", I pour it on a table and want it to form into a cube when I press "Enter" on my laptop - how do I translate a bulk concept like "cube shape" into instructions for a random pile of tiny robots?

Does anyone know of good papers dealing with this problem?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos#Mech...

timonoko• 5 years ago

Smart sand that learns like neural nets. Recipe goes like this: Mix semiconducting grains and metal and solder bits. Apply electric pattern at one end of the bucket and shake the bucket until some useful pattern appears at the other end. Then you apply much higher current between those patterns. Solder bits melt and form more permanent neural routes. Repeat until the device works as expected.

gjvc• 5 years ago

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

hnlmorg4• 5 years ago

A Z80 wouldn't be powerful enough to handle decryption of WiFi traffic. But it's an interesting thought

fake-name• 5 years ago

The issue with this is while the transistors for the CPU scale like that, the structures to do wireless transmission don't.

If you go high enough in frequency that you can make it on the same scale as the CPU, you're in frequency ranges that are trivially absorbed by water. Which your device is surrounded by.

Sure, you can just keep upping the power of the applied field to get enough energy to the chip to do something useful, but it has this messy side effect of causing heating. If you're OK with boiling the bodily fluids of person the chip is in, it'll work great!

note, this is quite different to the boring RFID sealed in some bubble which people get subcutaneous, thats been a thing since pet-chipping and before. I'm talking active electronics here

RFID capsules are active. That's how they work. They're powered by inductive coupling into a coil in the device. Interestingly, their size is largely set by the power coupling requirements, so at least to some extent they are basically what you're trying to describe, only actually implemented within the constraints of reality.

Injectable VLSI is a research space.

Lol

kongin• 5 years ago

The issue with this is while the transistors for the CPU scale like that, the structures to do wireless transmission don't.

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

To go over it a bit more: the higher the frequency of radiation the smaller you can make the antenna. However in the frequencies we have the technology to send signals in, and don't intrinsically give you cancer, everything becomes more opaque when you increase frequency. As OP says, it's like trying to send a light flash from behind a concrete wall, when you can see it on the other side you're using enough energy to vaporise the concrete anyway.

This is basically the only reason why we aren't living in a surveillance dystopia to make the Matrix look tame. Thank you physics for limiting the amount of possible surveillance from smart dust.

That said, you could still use chemical or physical means of communicating with microchips inside you, the issue is that you're very limited in how much information you can send without having them come in contact with some type of macroscopic io device.

flohofwoe2• 5 years ago

I wonder how much performance we got out of the 1.6m scaling factor. I'd guess somewhere between 10k and 100k faster, but nowhere near a million times?

rnentjes• 5 years ago

I would like to see that number as well, I actually expect it to be a lot more than a million.

Take 1000 times the clock rate, 4 cores, multiple instructions per clock instead of multiple clocks per instruction. Operations on 64 bits i.o 8 and the Z80 doesn't even have multiply or divide operators and would need to loop and add to do a multiplication/division. And then think about things like ARM SIMD instructions.

eru2• 5 years ago

You won't be able to exploit Brownian motion.

It's not about power (as in energy over time), but about free energy or entropy.

Brownian motion is essentially just heat. In order to get any useful work out of heat, you need two different temperatures.

amelius• 5 years ago

Why? Being bounced around by surrounding particles can be used to generate power. I once had a watch that could "recharge" by moving it.

twic• 5 years ago

You want a fuel cell that burns glucose for power.

zsmi• 5 years ago

Doesn't quite work like that. If the die needs to interact with the world, it needs a pad ring. That's a lot larger.

It will basically be like this die when students placed a small MIPS core. http://pages.hmc.edu/harris/cmosvlsi/4e/lect/lect2.pdf (See slide 29)

But the center will be a whole lot emptier.

amenghra• 5 years ago

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

908B64B197• 5 years ago

I'm afraid the support structures around the chip didn't shrink at the same scale as the transistors.

FullyFunctional• 5 years ago

needs a [2016] in the title

Rochus12• 5 years ago

Transistors, the electronic amplifiers and switches found at the heart of everything from pocket radios to warehouse-size supercomputers, were invented in 1947.

Is this true? Recently this article https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html pointed to the following invention of the field-effect transistor from 1925: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1745175

causi3• 5 years ago

There's a difference between patenting an idea and actually building a working device.

Rochus12• 5 years ago

The claim in the article was "invented in 1947"; a patent is by definition granted for an invention, regardless whether a working device was built or not.

cxr• 5 years ago

Although both patents were granted, no records exist to prove that Heil or Lilienfeld actually constructed functioning devices. <https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/field-effect-s...>

Rochus12• 5 years ago

It's still an invention by definition (patent law). Thanks for the article; notably the article makes no doubt that the invention by Lilienfeld would have worked; apparently he just didn't build it himself.

xyzzy212• 5 years ago

The patent exists but NOTHING was done with it and nothing was brought to market or practical use.

Ideas are cheap and worthless - it's the execution that matters. That execution in the context of a patent is a viable product or use.

MOSFETs were NOT viable until the 1960s. RCA made the first practical metal-gate CMOS that is known as the "4000 series" of logic parts. And even then, that technology didn't take off until all the other problems of mobile ions, threshold tuning, etc. were finally solved to give us CMOS as we know it today.

There are always wankers who point to this patent, but it really doesn't matter because it took another 50 years to achieve anything that mattered.

Rochus12• 5 years ago

There are always wankers ...

Gutter language does not make the argument more convincing.

dragontamer• 5 years ago

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

The cat-whisker detector is commonly described as the first solid-state device, discovered in 1874, patented in the early 1900s, and used in various experimental radios through the development of radio technology at that time.

Its not a "modern transistor design", but its solid state, its through a semiconductor... and its one step away from reliably amplifying. Its kinda funny that the physics to understand this thing were developed after its invention...

seiferteric• 5 years ago

That's a diode though, not a transistor.

ableal• 5 years ago

Outstanding piece. Towards the end, Ken Shirrif has a good discussion around this: "[...] Still others would allow these functions to be packaged in a few chips, which would collectively make up the microprocessor.[...]"

Along those lines, there was also a set of "bit-sliced" chips from AMD, which looked very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900

P.S. The "Mick & Brick" book: https://www.amazon.com/Bit-slice-microprocessor-design-John-...

kjs3• 5 years ago

Bit-sliced was certainly "interesting". It was the interim step from discrete logic processors to everything else. In addition to the Am2900 (and follow-on Am29300), there was the Intel 3000 line, the 74x181/381, MMI 5700, Fairchild 9000, Signetics 8x line, etc., etc. Many late 70s/80s/early 90s computers were bit-slice processors.

neonate• 5 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210917072141/https://spectrum.i...

The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors (2016)

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