The silicon wizards at Flylogic have certainly posted an interesting chip this time around. The Intel 4004 was the first widely used microprocessor. The logic gates are much larger than you’d find in modern chips. The unique feature is that each gate is designed to make the most efficient use of the silicon instead of the standardized shapes you find now. They’ve uploaded a full image of the chip.
For an introduction to silicon hacking, we reccomend [bunnie]’s talk from Toorcon and [Karsten]’s talk from 24C3. You can find many more posts on the topic in our silicon tag.
Looks like the map of a ZX Spectrum or C64 platform game.
Makes me wanna go watch Tron…lol
I wonder if optimizing modern chips as much as they did back then would result in any significant price/performance benefits.
i suspect i couldnt hurt any
until i can use it to check out the chicks on http://www.femmeteen.com then i guess i am not too interested :P
Spamming Twat.
uhh, it’s not my site you idiot.
@Vegas:
As someone who designs modern chips, the answer is an emphatic NO! This chip ran around ~700 Khz. Modern chips run at 1+ Ghz. This chip also had 4000 transistors, vs. 2 billion (2,000,000,000!) for some of Intel’s chips. We still do a fair amount of “by-hand” optimization for really timing-critical paths, but for the most part you have to rely on synthesis tools to turn your design into actual gates. Laying out 2 billion transistors by hand is an impossible task, and the machines that actually make the chips are not even capable of doing arbitrary shapes/orientations.
On the bright side, you could probably make a 128,000 core chip using 4004’s nowadays =)
>> uhh, it’s not my site you idiot.
Matt here, disregard that, I suck cocks.
@ C
Wow, I just got the strangest sense that Isaac Asimov predicted all of this in his early works, computer brains designing more intricate computer brains.
How long until a giant shiny globe is ruling the world? (I bet never, but that was some good sci-fi (: )
Twat did you say? this site is full of Noz’s…
I like pie.
The main thing to realise is that those chips were made without any CAD gear – layers were laid out using different coloured transparent tape on a big table
Мог бы долго с вами спорить на эту тему :)
i’m a faggot, fuck me!!!!