8 ms·
Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype
- userbinator 4y agoThis is comparable in transistor count to an 80386 (273k for the '030 vs 275k for the '386). Notable because a clickbaitingly-titled article yesterday caused people to ponder the size of an 80386 built with discrete components: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762543
- aurizon 4y agoI remember when that came out. The Batwing was so greedy they priced themselves out of the race to give the parts distributors a load of easy $$. Sadly the price stopped all the builder/proto EE's from buying them and the corporate $$ was not enough to overcome Intel, and there was Gates's DOS and the CPM guy got into a bar fight(fatal) and the grand monopoly was born. The Apple guys did a good job bootstrapping Apple in a garage ( like HP) - even so IBM nearly crushed them except for the fact that Gates kept the right to sell DOS as well as IBM could. IBM tried to branch the ecosystem with their proprietary funny bus, Micro-Channel Bus. Zenith and a number of industry fools followed IBM down that rabbit hole - the earth fell in - they all died. Billions wasted buying selling stuff. Once MS Windows emerged, they all bit the dust. IBM even tried to fork Windows - badly - they all died too...
- unwind 4y agoIs it correct to assume that "The Batwing" is a reference to the Motorola M-logo [1]? Might not be obvious to all so worth asking. :) [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+logo https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+logo
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoSounds like you're talking about earlier history; 68000, not 68030. This is 10 years later.
- moosedev 4y agoHa, I (like the commenter on the post) thought this was going to be some insane modern hobby project until I clicked through. It's in fact a set of period photos of the original (industrial) prototype. Very cool either way. Some context for the unfamiliar: The 68030 is a historical 32-bit CPU from the Motorola 68000 series, following the original 68000, the 68010, the 68020, and their various variants. Besides a bunch of 80s Unix workstations and pre-PPC Macs, it was used in several later/higher-end Commodore Amigas and in Atari's final computer, the Atari Falcon. Unlike the 1MHz prototype in the fine article, the production chips ultimately ran from ~16MHz to ~50MHz, as I recall. Comparable in processing power and historical era to Intel's i386, as another commenter said.
- ajross 4y agoActually the '030 was sort of a flop in the workstation market. NeXT used them, but all the big Unix vendors swung hard to RISC right as the '030 reached market. The iconic 68k workstation was and remains a Sun-3 68020 box with Sun's own MMU. And while it's true that at release the 68030 was very competitive with Intel (but not SPARC or MIPS), by the release of the 486 two years later they'd lose that crown and never get it back. Their window turned out to be too small.
- firecall 4y agoThe G3 was competitive, wasnt it? Benchmarks at the time claimed it was 2x faster than the PII. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1998-04-27-1998117112-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1998-04-27-19981171... So true or not, it must have at least been in the ballpark! As I Mac user at the time, I remember the G3 providing a measurable performance leap!
- Maakuth 4y agoG3 was PowerPC though, not 68k. ARM is actually the fourth Mac ISA, after 68k, PowerPC and x86!
- 4y ago
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoWow, wire wrap. That could be a nightmare to debug, because the contact between the wrap and the post could be flaky. And if you had to change something, you often had to cut a wire, but you couldn't remove it, because there was too great a chance of disturbing something else in the rat's nest of wires. But that left obsolete wires with cut ends, and they could also on occasion make contact. It's amazing that anything ever got working at all...
- stevenwoo 4y agoI remember around 1996 we made a prototype that was a single board about 14x12 inches IIRC and after a certain point of adding things, the digital stuff started behaving erratically. When we looked at the 5V DC line it had started approaching a sine wave shape from 2V-5V, so we switched out a lot of discrete chips for an FPGA and started over to get our prototype working again. I only did the software and wonder if we could have got it working with just wirewrap cause this 68030 seems like a lot more stuff.
- RustLove 4y agoWirewrap is actually very reliable. From Wikipedia: > Wire wrap construction can produce assemblies which are more reliable than printed circuits: connections are less prone to fail due to vibration or physical stresses on the base board, and the lack of solder precludes soldering faults such as corrosion, cold joints and dry joints. The connections themselves are firmer and have lower electrical resistance due to cold welding of the wire to the terminal post at the corners. It was used on satellites until fairly recently.
- deepspace 4y agoBack in the 80s / 90s, I worked for a company that made custom compute boards for military applications. The boards had to withstand the vibration levels, temperature extremes and other stresses encountered in a main battle tank. They were all wire wrapped. Frequencies were low, though-about 25MHz max.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
- doctor_eval 4y agoI’d like to see an M2 made out of wire wrap! How big would it be?! How fast could it be clocked? How much would it weigh? How much power would it draw?! Inquiring (and lazy) minds want to know.
- RustLove 4y agoThis wasn't entirely out of discrete components; they had PALs, presumably representing fairly large sections of the processor's internal subsections.
- YakBizzarro 4y agoThe modern equivalent is simulation on a series of big FPGA, probably this one https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/virtex-ultrascale-plus-vu19p.html#tabAnchor-productAdvantages https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/virtex-...
- andy_ppp 4y agoPresumably they don’t create the hardware in FPGA and just simulate the thing in software?
- an-unknown 4y agoSimulation in software is much slower than running the design in FPGAs.
- pjc50 4y agoM2 is 20 billion transistors. You'll get different answers depending on whether you're doing this as transistors or 74 series logic or whatever, but if we take discrete transistors and jam them in at 4 per square centimeter, that works out as 5bn cm^2 or half a square kilometer. Frequency will then be limited by propagation delay across a square of that size. Maybe a few hundred kilohertz? Power .. megawatts? There's going to be a visible heat haze shimmering over your half square kilometer of transistors.
- justinator 4y agoMind boggling.
- Donckele 4y agoAnyone know more about the “Tiejen brothers”?
- djmips 4y agoDon Tietjen and James Tietjen were brothers who worked at Motorola for a long time as I see their names in a 1979 document about the Design Philosphy of the 6809 and in Motorola patents as late as 1995.
- tasty_freeze 4y agoVery cool, but there is no way those boards are 24" x 24". As you can see in the photos, there are 24 ICs across the board (along the narrow width of the ICs). ICs are 0.3" DIPs, and worst case they are 0.5" center to center. Those boards are on the order of 12" x 12". Look at the folders on the shelf behind the cabinet -- those should give one the sense of scale. I recall interviewing an engineer from Data General around 1990 and he described work he had recently done. Data General had designed a workstation around the 68040, but Motorola was way behind schedule. So DG designed a discrete board set that ran the 68040 instruction set and they shipped it. He said it was faster than the production 68040 as well (at that date, anyway).
- zerohp 4y agoAre you sure that was DG? I have a daughterboard from an Apollo workstation that has a 50mhz 68030, 68881 and a bunch of logic that mates to a 68040 socket. I don’t think you could build a processor to run the 040 instruction set out of discrete logic without completely blowing your budget but you could build a 68040 bus adapter like Apollo did.
- tasty_freeze 4y agoNow that you mention it, I'm not confident. It was a one hour interview 30+ years ago, but that salient points are it was an east coast minicomputer maker. Apollo would be more likely now that you mention it.
- 0xmarcin 4y agoI tried to play with "manual" wire wrap tool. It's easy to buy thin wires for wrapping but it was extremely difficult to buy wire-wrap ready IC sockets. The difference is in the shape of the socket pins, the wire-wrap requires long rectangular pins but such sockets are extremely rare and expensive. So my adventure with wrapping ended rather quickly.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoI had a box-full until recently that I shamefully threw out :) Yeah, the pins were also quite strong (harder to snip with side cutters iirc), and square (or hex) because the wire needs to bite into the edge of the pin. You could get away with as little as three turns. They were long because you might typically make 3 or 4 connections per pin, so the height would soon stack up. It is really hard, but slightly possible to wire-wrap directly to the pins of old through-hole TTL logic if you have only one connection per pin. The main problem is that unless you use very fine wire and go gently the torsion will twist the IC pins off. It's also possible to use a mixed method of wrap and solder to make point-to-point simple digital circuits.
- bluenose69 4y agoIt's too bad you missed out on the experience. It was a lot of fun, a sort of mixture of knitting and following a detailed map. I was doing it with circuit designs I had made myself, so I had the fun of that early stage of deciding what to hook up, where to place things on the board, and so forth. I laid it all out on paper, then made pin-connection tables (again, by hand) and checked everything over and over. Then it was on to the exciting stage of placing components on the board and wiring. To avoid confusion, it helped to lay the wires out very precisely, so all steps had to be done with care and frequent checking. Precision work like that is very absorbing. Time just goes by as you live in the moment -- a bit like getting lost in music or art. Beyond this relaxation-through-concentration element, the actual materials were beautiful. Gold posts, and silvery wires, each gleaming in the bright light I needed to see my work taking shape. The wrapping itself took a little bit of skill, and it was lovely to feel the coils going on, each precisely the same as another. Even stripping the insulation was fun, somehow. I had an electric wrapper, but I really preferred doing it by hand. More zen. All of this was in the 1970s, and was aimed at purpose-built scientific equipment in a university environment. All the materials are long-gone and I have no photographs of anything. Everything is lost to history, except for isolated memories of the great fun I had. And, bonus, it all worked in the end!
- tralarpa 4y agoReminds of the (older and much smaller) prototype of the Amiga chipset: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/journals/microsoft.media/lorrainechips.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/journ... Source (with even more interesting pictures): http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lorraine.html http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/lorraine.html
- mnw21cam 4y agoThe article describes the 68030 as a 68020 with an added MMU. One of my Amigas a while back had a 68EC030, which is described as a 68030 without the MMU. So, I'm wondering what the difference really is between the 68EC030 and the 68020.
- BoardsOfCanada 4y agoI too had an Amiga 4000/030 :) The 68030 added a minuscule cache (256+256) bytes, as well as more efficient bus.
- jhfdbkofdchk 4y agoslightly faster clock owing to the process shrink, and some changes to the bus. They doubled the cache by having a 256 byte cache for instruction and data separately. Instead of a unified 256 byte cache. Kind of a poor showing given they were released 3 years apart.
- kjs3 4y agoThe 68030 was a 68020 leaving out a couple of rarely used instructions (I don't recall what) and adding a sort-of-but-not-exact subset of the 68851 MMU, 256 byte cache and some bus interface improvements (sync access). That and process improvements made it more efficient than the 68020. Motorola also upped the clock speeds on the 68030 (up to 50MHz). The EC chips, at least at the beginning, had a defective MMU that was disabled and sold cheaper than a 'full' chip. Fine for the Amiga OS, or embedded stuff. I don't know if they ever made them without the MMU at all. The EC nomenclature extended to the 68040 and 68060, where it meant "no MMU or FPU", and added the LC nomenclature which means "MMU, but no FPU".
- jecel 4y agoThe software fad of the late 1970s was modular programming as seen in Ada or Modula-2. Intel supported that with its 286 and it was a key feature of the National 32016, so Motorola couldn't be left behind and added support in the 68020. Except that by the time the 68020 came out Unix and C were king and C's dirty hack solution to modularity (#include .h files) was now considered good enough. Intel and National kept full backwards compatibility (to this day, in the case of Intel) but Motorola quietly dropped the stuff from the 68030.
- marcodiego 4y ago> 18 24"x24" wirewrap breadboards This is still in the realm of what someone can manage entirely in the head. I'd love to have a service which I could send an HDL of something around this complexity and get the chip on my doorstep. I'd like it also to have a reasonable cost.
- tlb 4y agoIf it's all digital logic, you can do this now with FPGAs. Modern ones would have no trouble implementing something like a 68030, and the tools can synthesize it from Verilog. The great thing about FPGAs is that if you have a bug (which never happens to me, but I hear it happens to other people) you can fix it and recompile in minutes.
- pjc50 4y agoBy hand? Wirewrap? That's going to be $1k per board! For an actual chip, "shuttle service" does exist at even higher pricing.
- dboreham 4y agoThis is interesting. It sounds more like a "simulator in hardware" than a strict circuit prototype. Was it used mostly to debug the microcode ahead of tape out?
- abracadaniel 4y agoOff topic, but I’m always glad to see niche forums like this pop up. They’re a dying breed, but IMO a big part of what made the internet cool to begin with.