11 ms·

The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors (2016)

68 points by areoform 5y ago

ggm 5y 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...
- jcun4128 5y 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.
  - TeMPOraL 5y 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#Mechanisms_of_carcinogenicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos#Mech...
    - jcun4128 5y ago
      Yeah I was thinking about it, the particles would have to be able to transfer power to each other by contact. If it's a problem of corrosion maybe through induction. And some particles are specialized eg. an IMU or a battery, etc... spatial would depend on external direction probably IMU combo. But the manufacturing would be insane... scale and then hopefully it's cheap enough it could be like dirt. In the end what is it for, is it strong structurally. Clustering compute of each particle would be interesting too. Anyway at least you can model/simulate it, that would be a cool thing to design/program.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      I guess in the same way you orchestrate any cluster of bots: you give each an ID, design your structure on your server and then and then pass those instructions to the bots. They wouldn't be aware of each other in any "smart" way but you'd want to keep the logic as low as possible on the nodes so you have less compute power to miniaturise.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        I feel that's not robust enough - what if some of your bots are missing? When we're talking millions of microscopic robots, I think we need to assume that many will break down, get misplaced, or be in a position disadvantageous for it to fulfill a designated role. A robust system cannot rely on all the robots in a predetermined ID range/set to be there - it needs to work with what's actually available. Ideally, I imagine being able to point at a random pile of robots and make that pile do something, without knowing any of the IDs or health of individual cells up front. So I wonder, is there a way to design the system in such a way that individual robots don't need to be micromanaged, but instead they self-assign to the appropriate role/place, without having full knowledge of the shared goal? Imagine those experiments in making shapes from sand with standing audio waves, e.g. [0]. The grains of sand have no identity and no awareness. The person setting up the experiment doesn't care about what any individual grain of sand does. They just set up a pattern, encode it in a standing wave, and the sand moves to conform to it. I'm wondering if this kind of approach is possible, except with the robots moving on their own instead of being moved by air. And, as a next step, with a pattern being persisted in the pile of robots, instead of being supplied externally. -- [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w
  - timonoko 5y 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 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
    - gpderetta 5y ago
      gray-goo is self replicating smart sand.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  A Z80 wouldn't be powerful enough to handle decryption of WiFi traffic. But it's an interesting thought
- fake-name 5y 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 5y 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 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.
- flohofwoe 5y 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 5y 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.
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      True, but can multiple cores, pipelining, etc... really make up for another factor of 1000x? And most of this complexity exists because memory latency couldn't keep up.
- eru 5y 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 5y 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.
    - steerablesafe 5y ago
      The problem is that once the particles in your watch bounce around at the same rate (it is in thermal equilibrium with the environment) then it's statistically impossible to induce a net flow of energy from the environment into the device.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      The motion that winds a self-winding mechanical clock is the swinging motion of an arm. Swinging motion is directional, back and forth, i.e. predictable. Indeed, the very self-winding mechanism is possible only because of this predictable movement. Brownian motion is literally random diffusion. By comparison, it'd be like vibrating the watch in every direction. It wouldn't wind from such motion. No known mechanism exists that would.
      - eru 5y ago
        Macroscopic motions of the watch in random directions would probably still work. Because even random macroscopic motion still has less entropy than a room temperature watch.
    - xsor 5y ago
      Unfortunately not, this was a famous problem taught by Feynman in his physics lectures. Essentially the Brownian motion of the ratchet and pawl mechanism (used in your watch) will eventually prevent the mechanism from harvesting energy [0]. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
- twic 5y ago
  You want a fuel cell that burns glucose for power.
- zsmi 5y 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 http://pages.hmc.edu/harris/cmosvlsi/4e/lect/lect2.pdf (See slide 29) But the center will be a whole lot emptier.
- amenghra 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  I'm afraid the support structures around the chip didn't shrink at the same scale as the transistors.
FullyFunctional 5y ago
needs a [2016] in the title
Rochus 5y 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 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 https://patents.google.com/patent/US1745175
- causi 5y ago
  There's a difference between patenting an idea and actually building a working device.
  - Rochus 5y 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.
    - analog31 5y ago
      As I understand it the patent is only valid if it shows that the idea can be reduced to practice.
      - Rochus 5y ago
        No. It must be novel, non-obvious and "useful", which obviously was considered to be fulfilled by the patent office. The patent describes how the invention can be used instead of tubes.
        analog31 5y ago
        Doesn't there need to be a preferred embodiment? Not debating, just curious.
        5y ago
ableal 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900 P.S. The "Mick & Brick" book: https://www.amazon.com/Bit-slice-microprocessor-design-John-Mick/dp/0070417814 https://www.amazon.com/Bit-slice-microprocessor-design-John-...
- kjs3 5y 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 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210917072141/https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors http://web.archive.org/web/20210917072141/https://spectrum.i...

68 points by areoform 5y ago

ggm 5y 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...

jcun4128 5y 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.
- TeMPOraL 5y 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#Mechanisms_of_carcinogenicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos#Mech...
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    Yeah I was thinking about it, the particles would have to be able to transfer power to each other by contact. If it's a problem of corrosion maybe through induction. And some particles are specialized eg. an IMU or a battery, etc... spatial would depend on external direction probably IMU combo. But the manufacturing would be insane... scale and then hopefully it's cheap enough it could be like dirt. In the end what is it for, is it strong structurally. Clustering compute of each particle would be interesting too. Anyway at least you can model/simulate it, that would be a cool thing to design/program.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    I guess in the same way you orchestrate any cluster of bots: you give each an ID, design your structure on your server and then and then pass those instructions to the bots. They wouldn't be aware of each other in any "smart" way but you'd want to keep the logic as low as possible on the nodes so you have less compute power to miniaturise.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I feel that's not robust enough - what if some of your bots are missing? When we're talking millions of microscopic robots, I think we need to assume that many will break down, get misplaced, or be in a position disadvantageous for it to fulfill a designated role. A robust system cannot rely on all the robots in a predetermined ID range/set to be there - it needs to work with what's actually available. Ideally, I imagine being able to point at a random pile of robots and make that pile do something, without knowing any of the IDs or health of individual cells up front. So I wonder, is there a way to design the system in such a way that individual robots don't need to be micromanaged, but instead they self-assign to the appropriate role/place, without having full knowledge of the shared goal? Imagine those experiments in making shapes from sand with standing audio waves, e.g. [0]. The grains of sand have no identity and no awareness. The person setting up the experiment doesn't care about what any individual grain of sand does. They just set up a pattern, encode it in a standing wave, and the sand moves to conform to it. I'm wondering if this kind of approach is possible, except with the robots moving on their own instead of being moved by air. And, as a next step, with a pattern being persisted in the pile of robots, instead of being supplied externally. -- [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJAgrUBF4w
- timonoko 5y 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 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
  - gpderetta 5y ago
    gray-goo is self replicating smart sand.
hnlmorg 5y ago
A Z80 wouldn't be powerful enough to handle decryption of WiFi traffic. But it's an interesting thought
fake-name 5y 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 5y 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 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.
flohofwoe 5y 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 5y 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.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    True, but can multiple cores, pipelining, etc... really make up for another factor of 1000x? And most of this complexity exists because memory latency couldn't keep up.
eru 5y 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 5y 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.
  - steerablesafe 5y ago
    The problem is that once the particles in your watch bounce around at the same rate (it is in thermal equilibrium with the environment) then it's statistically impossible to induce a net flow of energy from the environment into the device.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    The motion that winds a self-winding mechanical clock is the swinging motion of an arm. Swinging motion is directional, back and forth, i.e. predictable. Indeed, the very self-winding mechanism is possible only because of this predictable movement. Brownian motion is literally random diffusion. By comparison, it'd be like vibrating the watch in every direction. It wouldn't wind from such motion. No known mechanism exists that would.
    - eru 5y ago
      Macroscopic motions of the watch in random directions would probably still work. Because even random macroscopic motion still has less entropy than a room temperature watch.
  - xsor 5y ago
    Unfortunately not, this was a famous problem taught by Feynman in his physics lectures. Essentially the Brownian motion of the ratchet and pawl mechanism (used in your watch) will eventually prevent the mechanism from harvesting energy [0]. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
twic 5y ago
You want a fuel cell that burns glucose for power.
zsmi 5y 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 http://pages.hmc.edu/harris/cmosvlsi/4e/lect/lect2.pdf (See slide 29) But the center will be a whole lot emptier.
amenghra 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Voyage
908B64B197 5y ago
I'm afraid the support structures around the chip didn't shrink at the same scale as the transistors.

FullyFunctional 5y ago

needs a [2016] in the title

Rochus 5y 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 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 https://patents.google.com/patent/US1745175

causi 5y ago
There's a difference between patenting an idea and actually building a working device.
- Rochus 5y 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.
  - analog31 5y ago
    As I understand it the patent is only valid if it shows that the idea can be reduced to practice.
    - Rochus 5y ago
      No. It must be novel, non-obvious and "useful", which obviously was considered to be fulfilled by the patent office. The patent describes how the invention can be used instead of tubes.
      - analog31 5y ago
        Doesn't there need to be a preferred embodiment? Not debating, just curious.
        5y ago

ableal 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900 P.S. The "Mick & Brick" book: https://www.amazon.com/Bit-slice-microprocessor-design-John-Mick/dp/0070417814 https://www.amazon.com/Bit-slice-microprocessor-design-John-...

kjs3 5y 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 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210917072141/https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors http://web.archive.org/web/20210917072141/https://spectrum.i...