4 ms·

AMD Athlon K7 Easter egg has a revolver and map of Texas etched onto the chip

batch12 3y ago
> The gun and speeding bullet? Well, that's anyone's guess. Seems like a Superman reference to me.
- qclibre22 3y ago
  Fastest gun in the west?
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    As an europoor my American geography is rusty but afaik Texas isn't really in the west, but more in the middle-south, no?
    - serf 3y ago
      Texas at one point in history represented the frontier-border for 19th century US expansion.
    - placatedmayhem 3y ago
      "The West" refers to everything west of the Appalachian Mountains or the Mississippi River. It comes from the early eras of the USA when those portions of the country were unexplored and perceived to be "wild". This is related to why the "Midwest" starts at Ohio.
    - quantumfissure 3y ago
      It's arbitrary. We generally refer to "West" as 'West of the Mississippi River'. Mid-West as Ohio-ish to around the Mississippi River (i.e. Midwest (Ohio, Indiana); Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois)). A lot of us still refer to Texas; Iowa; Nebraska; Missouri; etc... as just 'mid-west'. California, Oregon as 'West Coast'; Washington as 'Upper/Northwest Coast'; Arizona/New Mexico as Southwest; and Wyoming/Nevada as West. Goes back to the days of expansionism in the early to mid-1800's, Texas and the Mississippi River were the "East/West" dividing line. Texas, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma also have the standard 'west' cartoon and movie stereotype (cowboys; saloons; tumbleweed; desert; etc...). In the mid-west it's more field or forest. And freezing cold wind. Lots of freezing cold wind.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        I was born and raised in Idaho and have lived in Seattle for over 10 years and I have never heard anyone say “Upper coast”. Washington is part of the “west coast” or “northwest”.
        quantumfissure 3y ago
        I didn't mean "Upper Coast", I implied Upper West Coast with my slash, which is a common referral to northern Oregon and Washington around here. Probably not clear in my reply.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Ah, understood. Where is "here"? I have literally never heard "Upper West Coast" in my life.
        quantumfissure 3y ago
        Eastern PA, Upper West Coast is what I've typically learned it's called. Interchangeable with Northwest Coast. To be fair, it's also normal to say redup; youse; jawns; werter; hoagie. Regional dialects are nuts.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      I live in Houston. Let me try to frame this for you. Texas as an idea is considered part of the American west, but as with most things it's more complicated than that. Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso, at the western edge. Eastern Texas starts out looking like the rest of the southeast -- lush, green, piney. The coastal part, or at least the part closer to Louisiana, is very like Louisiana with plenty of wetlands and live oaks and whatnot. But that thins out quickly, and within a couple hundred miles Texas starts to look more like "movie Texas" and becomes more stereotypically West. (A fun flip side to all this is that a simple majority of Texans -- which is to say, just slightly more than 50% -- live in the metro area of Houston or the combined metro area of Dallas-Ft Worth. The bulk of the rest live in and around Austin or San Antonio. Almost NO ONE lives in Texas between San Antonio and the western side of the state, comparatively speaking.)
      - gottorf 3y ago
        > Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso In fact, Austin, the state capital, is farther away from El Paso than it is to any of the states (or country) that Texas borders. Or put another way: El Paso, which is in the middle of a desert, is closer to the Pacific Ocean (via the Gulf of California) than its own state capital. While we're on the subject of the vastness of Texas, Big Bend National Park is a true wonder and definitely worth a visit.
      - emptybits 3y ago
        > Texas is absurdly large I love your state and hope to be there for the 2024 Total Eclipse in April. (RV parking for a night, anyone, lol?) But yeah, driving the great state of Texas takes some time, doesn't it? o_O I was surprised when I started to scroll maps and trip plan .. and I'm saying this as a Canadian -- most of our 10 provinces and all of our 3 territories are bigger in area than Texas but a whole lot less populated. Looking forward to Texas splendour...
        ubermonkey 3y ago
        I don't think it happens much with North Americans, but it's pretty common for folks from farther away (Europe, Asia) to think they could "day trip" between Texas cities, or out to Big Bend or whatever. It's just not reasonable. The distances are too far. I have done a day trip to Austin before, for a business meeting booked on short notice, but that's 170ish miles one way. It sucked. And no, rail isn't really a usable thing. In 30 years in Texas, I have FLOWN from Houston to Dallas more often than I've driven there.
    - jprete 3y ago
      The other answers are good, but calling Texas part of "the West" can be justified even now on the basis of population density. The median north-south population line has not reached the Mississippi even as of 2020 - it's in southwestern Indiana. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_States_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_...
      - nocoiner 3y ago
        Wow! Never seen the Great Migration depicted like that before. Fascinating.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    The reference is to Superman, who was often described in Golden Age comics as "faster than a speeding bullet".
BenoitP 3y ago
Fun factoid: Chips need to have patterns, even where there is nothing to print! This is because you want the acid etchant to be consumed the same way everywhere. So you choose a random repeating pattern that has the same density as your other signals density; it will serves no purpose other than consuming nitric acid. But you have freedom in choosing the exact shape. Source: a friend of mine working at a chip company 20 years ago. They considered disparaging the competition billions of time in tiny 250nm letters. It occurred right after a patent dispute where it was highly likely they had reverse-engineered part of their design. A disdainful message only their competitor would read, to the tune of "we know you're cheating, and fart in your general direction". It was mostly a joke though, they did not go through with it. ---- AMD's one is only in one corner of the chip, so I don't think it applies here. ---- EDIT: this was a long time ago. Seems like filling has evolved quite a lot [1]. Timing, signal integrity, and probably capacitance too are so constrained nowadays you can no longer write a personalized message to your competitors. [1] https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/materials/fill/advanced-smart-fill/ https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/materials/fill...
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Then why no anime girls etched in chips yet?
  - diggan 3y ago
    Seems we're slowly getting there, we've only gotten as far as to making the casing/fan covers "anime inspired" so far, ignoring individual custom mods of course. - Radeon RX 7900 Sakura - https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/yeston-rx-7900-xtx-sakura.b9981 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/yeston-rx-7900-xtx-sak... - MAXSUN Geforce RTX 4070 Ti iCraft Limited Edition - https://www.amazon.com/Geforce-iCraft-OC-Graphics-Computer/dp/B0BTNSS6GG https://www.amazon.com/Geforce-iCraft-OC-Graphics-Computer/d...
    - BenoitP 3y ago
      Chips was a mistake
scrlk 3y ago
The Soviets used to reverse engineer and clone DEC VAX computers. When the DEC engineers heard about this, they added a message in Russian to one of their CVAX CPUs: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best" https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
- bewaretheirs 3y ago
  The message was no doubt a parody of the Hallmark (greeting card company) advertising tagline of "When you care enough to send the very best".
- xattt 3y ago
  «Когда вы заботите довольно воровать настоящий лучшей» Doesn’t parse grammatically, but close enough.
- Throw73747 3y ago
  Soviets replicated all sort of stuff, 8bit controllers, all the way up to i386.
  - greenyoda 3y ago
    They even cloned IBM mainframes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM
- 486sx33 3y ago
  Maybe you touched upon the real meaning here.. attention competitors DONT MESS WITH TEXAS (bang!)
accrual 3y ago
This is especially fascinating to me because I have such a K7 chip right next to me! I never had one in their heyday but built a K7 rig last year to test AGP 8x cards. It's a pretty impressive chip and my fastest retro CPU. Paired with a fast AGP card, it handles HL2 and Doom 3 pretty well. These were the last 32-bit chips from AMD before they introduced AMD64 to the world with the Athlon64. They would eventually gain dual-channel DDR memory with KT880 chipset, the last mainstream 32-bit AMD consumer chipset in 2004. [0] [0] https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/724-via-kt880-chipset/ https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/724-via-kt880-chips...
- M95D 3y ago
  I also have mine right next to me, but instead of upgrading to KT880, I downgraded to KT133 board with an ISA slot for my Sound Blaster 16. I really wanted a KT133A with 133MHz FSB, but no luck. Those boards are so hard to find.

> The gun and speeding bullet? Well, that's anyone's guess. Seems like a Superman reference to me.

qclibre22 3y ago
Fastest gun in the west?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  As an europoor my American geography is rusty but afaik Texas isn't really in the west, but more in the middle-south, no?
  - serf 3y ago
    Texas at one point in history represented the frontier-border for 19th century US expansion.
  - placatedmayhem 3y ago
    "The West" refers to everything west of the Appalachian Mountains or the Mississippi River. It comes from the early eras of the USA when those portions of the country were unexplored and perceived to be "wild". This is related to why the "Midwest" starts at Ohio.
  - quantumfissure 3y ago
    It's arbitrary. We generally refer to "West" as 'West of the Mississippi River'. Mid-West as Ohio-ish to around the Mississippi River (i.e. Midwest (Ohio, Indiana); Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois)). A lot of us still refer to Texas; Iowa; Nebraska; Missouri; etc... as just 'mid-west'. California, Oregon as 'West Coast'; Washington as 'Upper/Northwest Coast'; Arizona/New Mexico as Southwest; and Wyoming/Nevada as West. Goes back to the days of expansionism in the early to mid-1800's, Texas and the Mississippi River were the "East/West" dividing line. Texas, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma also have the standard 'west' cartoon and movie stereotype (cowboys; saloons; tumbleweed; desert; etc...). In the mid-west it's more field or forest. And freezing cold wind. Lots of freezing cold wind.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      I was born and raised in Idaho and have lived in Seattle for over 10 years and I have never heard anyone say “Upper coast”. Washington is part of the “west coast” or “northwest”.
      - quantumfissure 3y ago
        I didn't mean "Upper Coast", I implied Upper West Coast with my slash, which is a common referral to northern Oregon and Washington around here. Probably not clear in my reply.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Ah, understood. Where is "here"? I have literally never heard "Upper West Coast" in my life.
        quantumfissure 3y ago
        Eastern PA, Upper West Coast is what I've typically learned it's called. Interchangeable with Northwest Coast. To be fair, it's also normal to say redup; youse; jawns; werter; hoagie. Regional dialects are nuts.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    I live in Houston. Let me try to frame this for you. Texas as an idea is considered part of the American west, but as with most things it's more complicated than that. Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso, at the western edge. Eastern Texas starts out looking like the rest of the southeast -- lush, green, piney. The coastal part, or at least the part closer to Louisiana, is very like Louisiana with plenty of wetlands and live oaks and whatnot. But that thins out quickly, and within a couple hundred miles Texas starts to look more like "movie Texas" and becomes more stereotypically West. (A fun flip side to all this is that a simple majority of Texans -- which is to say, just slightly more than 50% -- live in the metro area of Houston or the combined metro area of Dallas-Ft Worth. The bulk of the rest live in and around Austin or San Antonio. Almost NO ONE lives in Texas between San Antonio and the western side of the state, comparatively speaking.)
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso In fact, Austin, the state capital, is farther away from El Paso than it is to any of the states (or country) that Texas borders. Or put another way: El Paso, which is in the middle of a desert, is closer to the Pacific Ocean (via the Gulf of California) than its own state capital. While we're on the subject of the vastness of Texas, Big Bend National Park is a true wonder and definitely worth a visit.
    - emptybits 3y ago
      > Texas is absurdly large I love your state and hope to be there for the 2024 Total Eclipse in April. (RV parking for a night, anyone, lol?) But yeah, driving the great state of Texas takes some time, doesn't it? o_O I was surprised when I started to scroll maps and trip plan .. and I'm saying this as a Canadian -- most of our 10 provinces and all of our 3 territories are bigger in area than Texas but a whole lot less populated. Looking forward to Texas splendour...
      - ubermonkey 3y ago
        I don't think it happens much with North Americans, but it's pretty common for folks from farther away (Europe, Asia) to think they could "day trip" between Texas cities, or out to Big Bend or whatever. It's just not reasonable. The distances are too far. I have done a day trip to Austin before, for a business meeting booked on short notice, but that's 170ish miles one way. It sucked. And no, rail isn't really a usable thing. In 30 years in Texas, I have FLOWN from Houston to Dallas more often than I've driven there.
  - jprete 3y ago
    The other answers are good, but calling Texas part of "the West" can be justified even now on the basis of population density. The median north-south population line has not reached the Mississippi even as of 2020 - it's in southwestern Indiana. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_States_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_...
    - nocoiner 3y ago
      Wow! Never seen the Great Migration depicted like that before. Fascinating.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  The reference is to Superman, who was often described in Golden Age comics as "faster than a speeding bullet".

Fun factoid: Chips need to have patterns, even where there is nothing to print! This is because you want the acid etchant to be consumed the same way everywhere. So you choose a random repeating pattern that has the same density as your other signals density; it will serves no purpose other than consuming nitric acid. But you have freedom in choosing the exact shape. Source: a friend of mine working at a chip company 20 years ago. They considered disparaging the competition billions of time in tiny 250nm letters. It occurred right after a patent dispute where it was highly likely they had reverse-engineered part of their design. A disdainful message only their competitor would read, to the tune of "we know you're cheating, and fart in your general direction". It was mostly a joke though, they did not go through with it. ---- AMD's one is only in one corner of the chip, so I don't think it applies here. ---- EDIT: this was a long time ago. Seems like filling has evolved quite a lot [1]. Timing, signal integrity, and probably capacitance too are so constrained nowadays you can no longer write a personalized message to your competitors. [1] https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/materials/fill/advanced-smart-fill/ https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/materials/fill...

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Then why no anime girls etched in chips yet?
- diggan 3y ago
  Seems we're slowly getting there, we've only gotten as far as to making the casing/fan covers "anime inspired" so far, ignoring individual custom mods of course. - Radeon RX 7900 Sakura - https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/yeston-rx-7900-xtx-sakura.b9981 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/yeston-rx-7900-xtx-sak... - MAXSUN Geforce RTX 4070 Ti iCraft Limited Edition - https://www.amazon.com/Geforce-iCraft-OC-Graphics-Computer/dp/B0BTNSS6GG https://www.amazon.com/Geforce-iCraft-OC-Graphics-Computer/d...
  - BenoitP 3y ago
    Chips was a mistake

scrlk 3y ago

The Soviets used to reverse engineer and clone DEC VAX computers. When the DEC engineers heard about this, they added a message in Russian to one of their CVAX CPUs: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best" https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

bewaretheirs 3y ago
The message was no doubt a parody of the Hallmark (greeting card company) advertising tagline of "When you care enough to send the very best".
xattt 3y ago
«Когда вы заботите довольно воровать настоящий лучшей» Doesn’t parse grammatically, but close enough.
Throw73747 3y ago
Soviets replicated all sort of stuff, 8bit controllers, all the way up to i386.
- greenyoda 3y ago
  They even cloned IBM mainframes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM
486sx33 3y ago
Maybe you touched upon the real meaning here.. attention competitors DONT MESS WITH TEXAS (bang!)

accrual 3y ago

This is especially fascinating to me because I have such a K7 chip right next to me! I never had one in their heyday but built a K7 rig last year to test AGP 8x cards. It's a pretty impressive chip and my fastest retro CPU. Paired with a fast AGP card, it handles HL2 and Doom 3 pretty well. These were the last 32-bit chips from AMD before they introduced AMD64 to the world with the Athlon64. They would eventually gain dual-channel DDR memory with KT880 chipset, the last mainstream 32-bit AMD consumer chipset in 2004. [0] [0] https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/724-via-kt880-chipset/ https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/724-via-kt880-chips...

M95D 3y ago
I also have mine right next to me, but instead of upgrading to KT880, I downgraded to KT133 board with an ISA slot for my Sound Blaster 16. I really wanted a KT133A with 133MHz FSB, but no luck. Those boards are so hard to find.