11 ms·
The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor
- R0b0t1 5y agoThere was a modern greenfield Russian CPU that was in the news a while back. Did it get abandoned or eaten by a GRU?
- throw1234651234 5y agoProbably the former. In either case, it would be interesting to see computer chips evolve independently and try to compete.
- narrator 5y agoThere's the various Elbrus chips that are only really used in defense applications. The best stuff Russia can make domestically is on 90nm process tech: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-2S%2B#Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-2S%2B#Technology They have some stuff done on TSMC 28nm too: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15823/russias-elbrus-8cb-microarchitecture-8core-vliw-on-tsmc-28nm/ https://www.anandtech.com/show/15823/russias-elbrus-8cb-micr...
- ahartmetz 5y agoWow, the die shot! It looks like an eerie caricature of then-contemporary chip designs. I have seen blocky hand layouts, and modern (presumably) auto layouts that look like bacteria cultures. But I have never seen warped and slanted blocks.
- dogma1138 5y agoI think it’s a mask diagram not a die shot, in any case these features are common for that era especially for the metal layers / ic traces look at die shots of a Z80 and it’s clones.
- ahartmetz 5y agoAh, yes. What do I know... but this Russian CPU still looks much more "weird" than a Z80! The Z80 has 90 and 45 degree angles, this thing also has like 10 degree angles, and wavy structures, and big curves, and triangles.
- Treblemaker 5y agoI'm curious to see where you see the odd angles. When I zoom in sufficiently all the shapes seem to resolve to segments of 90 and 45 degree angles.
- ahartmetz 5y agoWell OK, there is only one triangle - in the upper left corner. The other things I mostly see in the center and right of center. Especially in the blue lines - power and clock or so?
- dogma1138 5y agoHere is an 8080 the topology isn’t that much different https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Z4RzZ24yNqU/WF4ffuFFN4I/AAAAAAAA-pI/ol-npvcvl_YKk8IRVgkO4qN7RMcqcRCMwCHM/w9999/8008-die-adjusted.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Z4RzZ24yNqU/WF4ffuFFN4I/A...
- krastanov 5y agoI could not find it on ddg/google right now, but I remember seeing some absolutely beautiful plant/vine-like trace routes done by the soviet auto-routing tools of past ages. I feel a bit sad that the 45degree aesthetic is the only one that survived today.
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- Dork1234 5y agoI also thought 45 degrees is used to reduce ESD, provide the best use of die space, and reduce stress on the metal with high current. Maybe all of that is a myth? Any other angle doesn't have the same benefits.
- picture 5y agoAny-angle routing may actually be better for use of space and reducing stress. I sometimes get more traces packed around a bend with any-angle. And most polymide PCBs are any-angle or at least super rounded with teardrops, having sharp transitions of any type would act as weak points.[1] ESD really doesn't make sense, maybe you meant EMI or EMC? There's nothing particularly special about 45 degrees other than the ease of modeling [1]: Some macbook trackpad, note the polymide/flex substrate and rounded tracks. This isn't fully any-angle like what TopoR does though https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_MacBook_Pro,_model_A1278_-_trackpad_-_connector-8395.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_MacBook_Pro,_m...
- marcodiego 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- the-dude 5y agoParent is downvoted for only providing a link, but : TopoR is a free-angle PCB autorouter ( it has other tricks too ). It is of Russian origin and commercial software!
- jepler 5y ago> These 1806VM2 are still being made by Angstrem, if you need to build a PDP-11 computer to run Tetris on, or repair a Buran shuttle you may have laying around. wow!
- rbobby 5y agoPDP11's were pretty great machines. Using RSTS/E (resource sharing time sharing... Eeeee!) you could really stretch things out. The process memory was limited to 32kb (maybe 64kb... can't recall) and the OS's executable system supported seamless overlays. Basically as needed the OS would swap in different code segments (min 4k?). With careful planning you could build some pretty big applications... so long as you could get descent separation. You *could* swap overlays over and over and over... but this would kill any sort of performance... best to swap in a "AR" overlay, and when the user switches to "GL" swap that overlay in. The machine language was also pretty nice. Several addressing modes were program counter relative which was amazing (eg. JMP to 1500 words from current PC) . When I first learned that that windows loads an executable and then goes through and fixes up memory addresses so JMP instructions (et al) would work I could hardly believe it. If only the x86's had decent support for a PC relative addressing mode :) And the Digital Equipment Corp documentation! Glorious. A wall of shelves, 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, filled with 3 inch binders explaining everything in detail! Shivers!! Microsoft's online documentation is the closest thing in quality to the old DEC stuff.
- monocasa 5y agoJumps have always been PC relative on x86. It's calls that can optionally not be. It's mainly the indirect calls that are troublesome. DEC documentation was something else though, agreed. My KD11-A came with everything you'd expect to be documented these, plus full schematics, plus microcode listing in source and flow chart form.
- zh3 5y agoPDP-11's (LSI-11's) were originally limited to 32k 16-bit words (64kb) but were exanded to 18bit addressing allowing up to 256Kb. The PC is only 16 bit though so 64k of code directly addressable at any one time (ignoring the reserved area for memory mapped hardware). The MMU was pretty simple so easy enough to access the extra memory without relying on the OS (simpler under RT-11 than RSTS/E). I still have shelves of DEC documentation (and a few PDP-11's).
- mikewarot 5y agoThe CMOS military version ran at 5 MHz and consumed 25 milliwatts which is pretty amazing. A CMOS 8088 would take about 10 times that. Source: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/space-harsh-environment/mil-std-883-products/mil-std-883-microprocessors-and-peripherals/80c88-cmos-8-bit16-bit-microprocessor https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/space-harsh-environme...
- chasil 5y agoThey should have copied ARM, but who knew at the time what could be done with 25k transistors? https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech...
- jacquesm 5y agoARM only properly started in '83, with first working silicon in '85, likely by then the predecessor to this project was already well underway. Besides, I think that they should get credit for making their own design rather than cloning someone else's.
- spicyramen 5y agoThe West normally lacks understanding what hard work, innovation and intelligence is a universal value. During my years at Stanford I had the opportunity to learn about the North Korea nuclear program and how the West never imagine the advancement they produced with very limited resources and without Russian help. Couple of professors visited the nuclear facilities as part of the UN investigation and were shocked with the intelligence, and innovation of Korean engineers. The rest is history and we have now a North Korea with nuclear capabilities
- DSingularity 5y agoIf you want a world where nations aren’t scrambling to acquire nuclear weapons, then maybe we ought to reign in a hegemonic superpower which has been invading and bombing countries since the end of WW2.
- doublepg23 5y agoI believe this Bad Apple Demo ran on a similar Russian PDP-11 clone. https://youtu.be/8Q1vN51o-Dg https://youtu.be/8Q1vN51o-Dg HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17965269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17965269
- FpUser 5y agoOMG. Sweet memories. I do not really play games but I spent countless amount of hours back in USSR Academy of Science playing Tetris on that DVK-1. Tetris to me is a form of meditation. My fingers know how to play and my mind can just float aimlessly ;) This was a pleasant payback as that DVK-1 had drank a healthy dollop of my blood when suddenly resetting in the middle of me writing a program when I was just about to save it.
- wk_end 5y agoThe PDP-11 ISA is one of the cleanest and most orthogonal there ever was, and served as the basis for the 68K family's design. This would have made for an incredibly fun micro.
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- seibelj 5y ago[flagged]
- chasil 5y agoI am compromised by Russians. Two decades ago, one walked into my life. I spun her into my best friend (at the time) and they were happy for many years (but divorced). Seeing them, we are all the same. The language may differ, but human wants and needs are mostly identical. We should be courteous and congenial to the needs and desires of others. That's all that I would like to say.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoActually this and other achievements really impress me, and Russia's computer program of course collapsed with the economy and everything else in 1990, which showed the evils of unrestricted capitalism.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
- Symmetry 5y agoPDP-11 clones are nice but I've always wanted more information on the Russian balanced ternary designs, how far they got going along that path. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary
- leeter 5y agoApparently pretty far, I've found various sources for why funding was cut from "The west was going binary so that was the order of the day" to "The space race". What was interesting was the hardware description I could find wasn't vacuum tubes but rather ICs and allegedly some sort of logic based on "Ferrite cores and diode ladders" which was apparently a major thing as it was vastly cheaper than transistors (super expensive at the time) or vacuum tubes (expensive and unreliable). How much of this is true or just what's on the russian computing museum's website I don't know. But the concepts aren't dead: https://hackaday.com/2014/10/07/hackaday-10th-anniversary-non-binary-computing/ https://hackaday.com/2014/10/07/hackaday-10th-anniversary-no...
- alexvoda 5y agoMaybe we will see some of that in a future version of Thunderbolt with PAM-3 encoding: https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/16858?cPage=3&all=False&sort=0&page=1&slug=intel-executive-posts-thunderbolt-5-photo-80-gbps-and-pam3-then-deletes-it https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/16858?cPage=3&all=False...
- ruslan 5y agoWe had a couple of БК-0010 computers in a club back in late 80th which were also based on 1801ВМx chipset. Those were quite popular home computers in USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK