[HN Gopher] The First Million-Transistor Chip: The Engineers' Story
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The First Million-Transistor Chip: The Engineers' Story
Author : rbanffy
Score : 49 points
Date : 2022-07-04 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| drmpeg wrote:
| I worked with Les Kohn at C-Cube Microsystems for a very brief
| time before he left the company in 2000. While he was there, he
| had completely redesigned the C-Cube MPEG-2 encoder architecture.
| The previous architecture required a giant board (12U VME) with
| 12 processors to encode an SD (720x480) image. His design only
| required one chip.
|
| The design was based on a microSPARC core with many special
| processing units (motion estimation, DCT/IDCT processing, etc.)
| glued on.
| cjsplat wrote:
| Processor in the Intel iPSC/860 and Paragon - early products
| aimed at massively parallel processing.
|
| These provided software seeds for the later Virtual Interface
| Architecture and hence iWARP, Infiniband and others.
|
| The 860 interrupt overhead and non-determinism may have been the
| critical items that forced commercial productization of direct
| user mode network fabrics.
|
| I remember conversations at the time about the total S/W overhead
| for TCP/IP, and OS people forced to develop for i860s talking
| about the system level pain they had to get in and out of the TCP
| fastpath.
| lisper wrote:
| This story omits any mention of the i860's predecessor, the i960:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960
|
| The i960 was a commercial success, the i860 was not.
|
| I used an i960 in my first startup back in the early 90s:
|
| https://flownet.com/gat/fnlj.html
|
| It was an absolute joy to work with, one of the most beautiful
| processor architectures I've ever seen.
|
| The i960 didn't quite have a million transistors, but it came
| close, with the high-powered CF version having 900,000.
|
| https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/olympusmicd/galleries/ch...
|
| To put these numbers in perspective, an M1 pro has 33 billion
| (with a b) transistors, so the equivalent of 33,000 i960s.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a very impressive piece of work. I've worked on a
| (much!) simpler SDLC card and wrote the firmware for it
| (someone else did the hardware), it was already quite a chunk
| of work to get that up and running and stable enough to process
| production data with. Eventually only several 10's of these
| were built but they worked until the whole system was
| decommissioned on account of obsolescence (more than a decade
| later).
|
| What you've built there would run circles around what I was
| involved in. Does the hardware still exist?
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks. Yes, I was pretty proud of what we built. We had two
| orders of magnitude price-performance advantage over the
| state of the art for about a year, but before we could get
| any significant market share, gigabit ethernet came along
| (and the price of fast ethernet dropped) and that wiped us
| out. But it was fun while it lasted.
|
| The hardware kind of exists. I have two prototype boards in
| my closet but they haven't been powered on in 30 years. I
| also don't know where the code for the device drivers is any
| more, though I have a box full of old hard drives that
| probably has it somewhere. Maybe some digital archeologist
| will dig it up some day.
|
| To give proper credit where it is due, the idea and hardware
| design for Flownet were the work of Mike Ciholas, who went on
| to found a very successful hardware design company [1]. I
| wrote the device drivers and did the marketing, which is
| probably one of the reasons we failed. Turns out I'm terrible
| at marketing.
|
| [1] https://www.ciholas.com/
| silasdavis wrote:
| The preamble in that flownet document is a wonderful
| description of busy wires and switched networks.
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks. CSMA/CD is a thing of the past. All networks are
| switched nowadays. FlowNet was among the first LAN
| designs to be exclusively switched.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Well, there are probably a couple of old timers on HN who
| really appreciate the kind of skill that it took, even
| though it doesn't show in your bank balance.
|
| It also makes me very grateful for the magic that goes on
| behind the scenes whenever I plug in a high speed USB
| device and it 'just works', the kind of wizardry involved
| for this sort of thing is highly underappreciated.
| lisper wrote:
| Very true. Ironically, my career has come full-circle and
| I am now working for Intel doing chip design (actually
| working on developing tools that do chip design). The
| process of producing modern state-of-the-art chips is
| truly mind-blowing.
| drmpeg wrote:
| I was also a big fan of the i960, and did many designs with the
| i960CF and I960RP. One of the i960CF based MPEG-2 encoder PCI
| cards from when I worked at Optivision in the 90's.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/184183208245
| tgflynn wrote:
| So whatever happened to this chip. It seems like a million
| transistor 64 bit CPU would have been revolutionary in the
| mid-80's, but I've never even heard of it.
| rwmj wrote:
| Byte magazine covered it: https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1991-01/page/n398/...
| ggm wrote:
| I think a few xterminal manufacturers targeted this chip. Ncd
| maybe? Or Labtam/Tektronix
| axus wrote:
| I liked the story, had not heard of this chip before. Wikipedia
| gives the rest of the story:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| In the early 90s I worked on a project that used the i860, two of
| them in fact. It was a terminal to display 3D graphics via the
| PEX protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHIGS)
|
| One of the things I recall about the i860 is the interrupt
| handler was a disaster. It was possible for it to take an
| interrupt in a state where one couldn't just reload the state and
| resume. Essentially the interrupt handler would have to inspect
| state for the problematic condition, then _simulate_ the
| instruction stream until it got back to a state which could be
| restored to the CPU.
|
| I was a hardware designer on the project so I didn't actually
| touch that code myself, but one of the software guys passed that
| on. I apologize to the i860 team if the story is overblown.
| Double checking this lore, wikipedia says a context switch took a
| minimum of 62 cycles and a maximum of 2000 cycles.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh that sounds like a hardware bug to me, was that the intended
| behavior?
| iasay wrote:
| It's about right. I was involved in a project to get rid of an
| i860 design (aerospace) and replace it with a PPC design. No
| one had anything nice to say about 7 years of keeping an i860
| design alive.
| baybal2 wrote:
| macintux wrote:
| Probably should have (1989) in the title; virtually all of the
| text was printed then.
| mepian wrote:
| This is the chip Windows NT (the main ancestor of today's
| Windows) was initially targeted for, the name NT was derived from
| the chip's codename N10 (or N-Ten).
| ivegotnoaccount wrote:
| Wait, wasn't Windows NT ("WNT") a pun on Vax MicroSystems
| ("VMS") a la "Windows is Better than Vax" since WNT VMS plus 1
| at each letter?
|
| That's the story In a always heard.
| my123 wrote:
| Both are true. It's a multi-level pun.
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