6 ms·

AMD entered the CPU market with reverse-engineered Intel 8080 clone 50 years ago

197 points by ksec 10mo ago

ksec 10mo ago
If Intel decide to focus on Foundry, I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA open source or at least available for licensing. I dont want it to end up like MIPS or POWER ISA where everything is too little too late.
- holowoodman 10mo ago
  A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone. And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
  - fooker 10mo ago
    Software or microcode emulation works pretty well. So it would be faster and more efficient when sticking to the new subset and Nx slower then using the emulation path.
    - kimixa 10mo ago
      You could argue that microcode emulation is what they do now.
      - fooker 10mo ago
        True, the only part that can not be solved by microcode emulation is faster decoding. Most architectures other than x86 have fixed sized machine instructions now, making decoding fast and predictable.
  - ksec 10mo ago
    There are software compiled today without using MMX support. I was thinking the idea of something that is open or for licensing is an 86 ISA that is forward compatible. And for customers that requires strict backward compatibility they could still source it from AMD and Intel. i.e Software compiled for 86 should work on x86. The value for backward compatibility is kept with both Intel and AMD. If the market wants something in between they now have an option. I know this isn't a sexy idea because HN or most tech people like something shiny and new. But I have always like the idea of extracting value from the "old and tried" solutions.
    - Scoundreller 10mo ago
      Sadly over the past year, Spotify builds require AVX extensions. Had an issue updating my 2008 Dell semi-upgraded bench PC that has a Q9300 in it (no AVX on it) But thankfully I could install an old bin and lock it out from updating. Intel’s software development emulator might run the newest bin but variable how slow it might be. In other circumstances, the AVX extensions aren’t required but the app is compiled to fail if they’re not required: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pix02j/hotfix_for_cyberpunk_2077_removes_avx_cpu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pix02j/hotfix_for...
  - inkyoto 10mo ago
    > A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone. This isn't an issue in any way. Vendors have been routinely taking out rarely used instructions from the hardware and simulating them in the software for decades as part of the ongoing ISA revision. Unimplemented instruction opcodes cause a CPU trap to occur where the missing instruction (s) is then emulated in the kernel's emulation layer. In fact, this is what was frequently done for «budget» 80[34]86 systems that lacked the FPU – it was emulated. It was slow as a dog but worked.
- lloydatkinson 10mo ago
  They recently killed off their recent attempt; x86s.
  - tester756 10mo ago
    Wut? >AMD and Intel Celebrate First Anniversary of x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Driving the Future of x86 Computing Oct 13, 2025 Standardizing x86 features Key technical milestones, include: FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery): Finalized as a standard feature, FRED introduces a modernized interrupt model designed to reduce latency and improve system software reliability. AVX10: Established as the next-generation vector and general-purpose instruction set extension, AVX10 boosts throughput while ensuring portability across client, workstation, and server CPUs. ChkTag: x86 Memory Tagging: To combat longstanding memory safety vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors, the EAG introduced ChkTag, a unified memory tagging specification. ChkTag adds hardware instructions to detect violations, helping secure applications1, operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware. With compiler and tooling support, developers gain fine-grained control without compromising performance. Notably, ChkTag-enabled software remains compatible with processors lacking hardware support, simplifying deployment and complementing existing security features like shadow stack and confidential computing. The full ChkTag specification is expected later this year – and for further feature details, please visit the ChkTag Blog. ACE (Advanced Matrix Extensions for Matrix Multiplication): Accepted and implemented across the stack, ACE standardizes matrix multiplication capabilities, enabling seamless developer experiences across devices ranging from laptops to data center servers.
    - wtallis 10mo ago
      Copying and pasting a press release does not make for a good comment. Especially because you don't seem to have understood what you pasted in, or the context of this discussion. What you're demonstrating is several more new features added to the pile. Intel's retracted X86S proposal was actually about removing legacy features, creating a cleaner subset for the modern era.
      - 10mo ago
- fulafel 10mo ago
  90s x86 from ISA pov is already free to use, no? The original patents must have expired and there's no copyright protection of ISAs. The thing keeping the symbiotic cross-licensed duopoly going is mutating the ISA all the time so they can mix in more recently patented stuff.
  - tracker1 10mo ago
    AFAIK, most of event x86_64 patents are largely expired, or will be within the next 6 years. That said, efforts for a more open platform are probably more likely to be centered around risc or another arm alternative than x86... While I could see a standardization of x86 compatible shortcuts for use with emulation platforms on arm/risc processors. Transmeta was an idea too far ahead of its time.
    - fulafel 10mo ago
      Remembering the Mac ARM transition pain wrt Docker and Node/Python/Lambda cross builds targeting servers, there's a lot to be said for binary compatibility.
      - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
        90% of those problems effect people like you and I, developers and power users, not "regular" users of machines who are mostly mobile device and occasional laptop/desktop application users. I suspect we'll see somebody -- a phone manufacturer or similar device -- make a major transition to RISC-V from ARM etc in the next 10 years that we won't even notice.
        fulafel 10mo ago
        I agree, some will, but it may not be a more open platform from developer POV.
      - tracker1 10mo ago
        You're doing builds for Docker on your desktop for direct deployment instead of through a CI/CD service? My biggest issue was the number of broken apps in Docker on Arm based Macs, and even then was mostly able to work around it without much trouble.
- IshKebab 10mo ago
  Far too late for that. Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years?
  - tracker1 10mo ago
    Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the company itself the past few years, it could very well self destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the next decade, who knows.
  - izacus 10mo ago
    20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the lifetime of home computing as we know it. So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT on desk.
  - fulafel 10mo ago
    Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base. Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny advantage) has closed.
    - IshKebab 10mo ago
      To be clear if x86 is ever as unpopular as SPARC or PowerPC I would consider that to be obliterated. I was thinking more like if it falls to 10% of desktop/laptop/server market share, which is still waaaaaay more then the nearly-dead architectures you listed.
      - fulafel 10mo ago
        Couldn't resist picking at semantics here: Things that have < 10% market share - macOS - all car manufacturers except Toyota Things that history considers obliterated: - The city of Pompeii - districts of Hiroshima within the bomb's blast radius
- tester756 10mo ago
  >I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA AMD and Intel Celebrate First Anniversary of x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Driving the Future of x86 Computing Standardizing x86 features Key technical milestones, include: FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery): Finalized as a standard feature, FRED introduces a modernized interrupt model designed to reduce latency and improve system software reliability. AVX10: Established as the next-generation vector and general-purpose instruction set extension, AVX10 boosts throughput while ensuring portability across client, workstation, and server CPUs. ChkTag: x86 Memory Tagging: To combat longstanding memory safety vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors, the EAG introduced ChkTag, a unified memory tagging specification. ChkTag adds hardware instructions to detect violations, helping secure applications1, operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware. With compiler and tooling support, developers gain fine-grained control without compromising performance. Notably, ChkTag-enabled software remains compatible with processors lacking hardware support, simplifying deployment and complementing existing security features like shadow stack and confidential computing. The full ChkTag specification is expected later this year – and for further feature details, please visit the ChkTag Blog. ACE (Advanced Matrix Extensions for Matrix Multiplication): Accepted and implemented across the stack, ACE standardizes matrix multiplication capabilities, enabling seamless developer experiences across devices ranging from laptops to data center servers.
tracker1 10mo ago
I'm still a heavy advocate for requiring second/dual-sourcing in govt contracts... literally for anything that can be considered essential infrastructure or communications technology and medicine. A role of govt in a capitalist society is to ensure competition and domestic availability/production as much as possible. While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of today's issues stem from too much centralization of commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition. This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most people.
- gosub100 10mo ago
  Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it would affect anything important. You could do everything we do today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in software, programming languages, and libraries.
  - tracker1 10mo ago
    I'm talking about way more than just CPUs... And for your question, we'd pretty much miss out on modern-like mobile phones entirely. 90nm -> 18A/1.8nm is a LOT of reduction in size and energy... not to count the evolution in battery and display technology over the same period. Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an enemy that DOES have modern production that you (no longer) have... it's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death. China, though largely hamstrung, is already well ahead of your hypothetical 2005 tech breakpoint. Beyond all this, it's not even a matter of just slower, it's a matter of even practical... You couldn't viably create a lot of websites that actually exist on 2005 era technology. The performance memory overhead just weren't there yet. Not that a lot of things weren't possible... I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, and you could do a LOT if you had 4-8x what most people were buying in RAM.
    - 10mo ago
izacus 10mo ago
I wonder if in 2025 a company would even allowed to start before being curb stomped by Intel's IP lawyers. After all, they started making clones, something that China gets accused of a lot.
- tiffanyh 10mo ago
  If the company was based in the EU, local regulation might encourage reverse-engineering. See tangentially related topic from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362927
  - userbinator 10mo ago
    EU or RU.
- jezek2 10mo ago
  You can do it with HW accelerated emulation like Apple did with M1 CPUs. They implemented x86 compatible behavior in HW so the emulation has very good performance. Another approach was Transmeta where the target ISA was microcoded, therefore done in "software".
  - BlueToth 10mo ago
    They said that they implemented x86 ISA memory handling instructions, that substantially sped up the emulation. I don't remember exactly which now, but they explained this all in a WWDC video about the emulation.
    - als0 10mo ago
      Not instructions per se. Rosetta is a software based binary translator, and one of the most intensive parts about translating x86 to ARM is having to make sure all load/store instructions are strictly well ordered. To alleviate this pressure, Apple implemented the Total Store Ordering (TSO) feature in hardware, which makes sure that all ARM load and store instructions (transparently) follow the same memory ordering rules as x86.
startupsfail 10mo ago
Seems like an interesting story, Ashawna - she was about 25 at the time, and as per Wikipedia, already worked on the military projects - the Sprint Missile System, and was at Xerox. > The processor was reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar. The Haileys photographed a pre-production sample Intel 8080 on their last day in Xerox, and developed a schematic and logic diagrams from the ~400 images.
htrp 10mo ago
> Am9080 variants ran at up to 4.0 MHz Definitely read that wrong the first time I skimmed the article
bhasi 10mo ago
“Behind every successful fortune there is a crime.” - Mario Puzo, The Godfather
B1FF_PSUVM 10mo ago
AMD was already in the CPU market with bit-slice LSI chips, the Am2900 set of chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900 Those worked in 4-bit slices, and you could use them as LEGO blocks to build your own design (e.g. 8, 12 ou 16 bits) with much fewer parts than using standard TTL gates (or ECL NANDs, if you were Seymour Cray). The 1980 Mick & Brick book Bit-slice Microprocessor Design later gathered together some "application notes" - the cookbooks/crib sheets that semiconductor companies wrote and provided to get buyers/engineers started after the spec sheets.
- adrian_b 10mo ago
  Intel has launched in 1974 both the NMOS Intel 8080 and a bipolar bit-slice processor family (Intel 3000). AMD has introduced in 1975 both its NMOS 8080 clone and the bipolar bit-slice 2900 family. I do not know which of these 2 AMD products was launched earlier, but in any case there was only a few months difference between them at most, so it cannot be said that AMD "was already in the CPU market". The launch of both products has been prepared at a time when AMD was not yet in the CPU market and Intel had been earlier than AMD both in the NMOS CPU market and in the market for sets of bipolar bit-slice components. While Intel 8080 was copied by AMD, the AMD 2900 family was much better than the Intel 3000 family, so it has been used in a lot of PDP-11 clones or competitors. For example, the registers+ALU component of Intel 3000 implemented only a 2-bit slice and few ALU operations, while the registers+ALU component of AMD 2900 implemented a 4-bit slice and also many more ALU operations.
WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago
> AMD entered the CPU market with reverse-engineered Intel 8080 clone 50 years ago Moral: Awesome productivity happens when IP doesn't get in the way.
- WaitWaitWha 10mo ago
  If I recall correctly, they were also licensed to produce some clones. I remember when in the early 90s the am386-40MHz came out. Everyone was freaking out how we are now breaking the sound barrier. There was a company Twinhead(?) that came out with these 386-40Mhz motherboards with buses so overclocked most video cards would fry. Only the mono Hercules cards could survive. We thought our servers were the shizzle.
  - fweimer 10mo ago
    Weren't legal protections for semiconductor masks rather lax in the 70s, at least in the United States? You might need certain patent licenses for the manufacturing process, but the chip itself was largely unprotected.
    - rasz 10mo ago
      yep, thus intel going microcode and patent route.
    - mrandish 10mo ago
      > "In the summer of 1973, during their last day working at Xerox, Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey, and Jay Kumar took detailed photos of an Intel 8080 pre-production sample" I was interested in this and followed the links to the original interview at: https://web.archive.org/web/20131111155525/http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hailey.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20131111155525/http://silicongen... which was interesting: > "Xerox being more of a theoretical company than a practical one let us spend a whole year taking apart all of the different microprocessors on the market at that time and reverse engineering them back to schematic. And the final thing that I did as a project was to, we had gotten a pre-production sample of the Intel 8080 and this was just as Kim and I were leaving the company. On the last day I took the part in and shot ten rolls of color film on the Leica that was attached to the lights microscope and then they gave us the exit interview and we went on our way. And so that summer we got a big piece of cardboard from the, a refrigerator came in and made this mosaic of the 8080. It was about 300 or 400 pictures altogether and we pieced it together, traced out all the logic and the transistors and everything and then decided to go to, go up North to Silicon Valley and see if there was anybody up there that wanted to know about that kind of technology. And I went to AMI and they said oh, we're interested, you come on as a consultant, but nobody seemed to be able to take the project seriously. And then I went over to a little company called Advanced Micro Devices and they wanted to, they thought they'd like to get into it because they had just developed an N-channel process and this was '73. And I asked them if they wanted to get into the microprocessor business because I had schematics and logic diagrams to the Intel 8080 and they said yes." From today's perspective, just shopping a design lifted directly from Intel CPU die shots around to valley semi companies sounds quite remarkable but it was a very different time then.
ck2 10mo ago
ah I remember those amazing days instant 20% speed boost replacing the IBM 8088 with the v20 chip bought a sleeve of them cheap and went around to all the PCs and popped them out only problem was software that relied on clocks ran too fast
FridayoLeary 10mo ago
>In 1975, AMD could make these processors for 50 cents and sell them for $700. Apparently by ripping off their military customers. >says Wikipedia. Why is that a primary source?
mixxit 10mo ago
Gordon should have stuck to the symphonic

197 points by ksec 10mo ago

ksec 10mo ago

If Intel decide to focus on Foundry, I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA open source or at least available for licensing. I dont want it to end up like MIPS or POWER ISA where everything is too little too late.

holowoodman 10mo ago
A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone. And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
- fooker 10mo ago
  Software or microcode emulation works pretty well. So it would be faster and more efficient when sticking to the new subset and Nx slower then using the emulation path.
  - kimixa 10mo ago
    You could argue that microcode emulation is what they do now.
    - fooker 10mo ago
      True, the only part that can not be solved by microcode emulation is faster decoding. Most architectures other than x86 have fixed sized machine instructions now, making decoding fast and predictable.
- ksec 10mo ago
  There are software compiled today without using MMX support. I was thinking the idea of something that is open or for licensing is an 86 ISA that is forward compatible. And for customers that requires strict backward compatibility they could still source it from AMD and Intel. i.e Software compiled for 86 should work on x86. The value for backward compatibility is kept with both Intel and AMD. If the market wants something in between they now have an option. I know this isn't a sexy idea because HN or most tech people like something shiny and new. But I have always like the idea of extracting value from the "old and tried" solutions.
  - Scoundreller 10mo ago
    Sadly over the past year, Spotify builds require AVX extensions. Had an issue updating my 2008 Dell semi-upgraded bench PC that has a Q9300 in it (no AVX on it) But thankfully I could install an old bin and lock it out from updating. Intel’s software development emulator might run the newest bin but variable how slow it might be. In other circumstances, the AVX extensions aren’t required but the app is compiled to fail if they’re not required: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pix02j/hotfix_for_cyberpunk_2077_removes_avx_cpu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/pix02j/hotfix_for...
- inkyoto 10mo ago
  > A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone. This isn't an issue in any way. Vendors have been routinely taking out rarely used instructions from the hardware and simulating them in the software for decades as part of the ongoing ISA revision. Unimplemented instruction opcodes cause a CPU trap to occur where the missing instruction (s) is then emulated in the kernel's emulation layer. In fact, this is what was frequently done for «budget» 80[34]86 systems that lacked the FPU – it was emulated. It was slow as a dog but worked.
lloydatkinson 10mo ago
They recently killed off their recent attempt; x86s.
- tester756 10mo ago
  Wut? >AMD and Intel Celebrate First Anniversary of x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Driving the Future of x86 Computing Oct 13, 2025 Standardizing x86 features Key technical milestones, include: FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery): Finalized as a standard feature, FRED introduces a modernized interrupt model designed to reduce latency and improve system software reliability. AVX10: Established as the next-generation vector and general-purpose instruction set extension, AVX10 boosts throughput while ensuring portability across client, workstation, and server CPUs. ChkTag: x86 Memory Tagging: To combat longstanding memory safety vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors, the EAG introduced ChkTag, a unified memory tagging specification. ChkTag adds hardware instructions to detect violations, helping secure applications1, operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware. With compiler and tooling support, developers gain fine-grained control without compromising performance. Notably, ChkTag-enabled software remains compatible with processors lacking hardware support, simplifying deployment and complementing existing security features like shadow stack and confidential computing. The full ChkTag specification is expected later this year – and for further feature details, please visit the ChkTag Blog. ACE (Advanced Matrix Extensions for Matrix Multiplication): Accepted and implemented across the stack, ACE standardizes matrix multiplication capabilities, enabling seamless developer experiences across devices ranging from laptops to data center servers.
  - wtallis 10mo ago
    Copying and pasting a press release does not make for a good comment. Especially because you don't seem to have understood what you pasted in, or the context of this discussion. What you're demonstrating is several more new features added to the pile. Intel's retracted X86S proposal was actually about removing legacy features, creating a cleaner subset for the modern era.
    - 10mo ago
fulafel 10mo ago
90s x86 from ISA pov is already free to use, no? The original patents must have expired and there's no copyright protection of ISAs. The thing keeping the symbiotic cross-licensed duopoly going is mutating the ISA all the time so they can mix in more recently patented stuff.
- tracker1 10mo ago
  AFAIK, most of event x86_64 patents are largely expired, or will be within the next 6 years. That said, efforts for a more open platform are probably more likely to be centered around risc or another arm alternative than x86... While I could see a standardization of x86 compatible shortcuts for use with emulation platforms on arm/risc processors. Transmeta was an idea too far ahead of its time.
  - fulafel 10mo ago
    Remembering the Mac ARM transition pain wrt Docker and Node/Python/Lambda cross builds targeting servers, there's a lot to be said for binary compatibility.
    - cmrdporcupine 10mo ago
      90% of those problems effect people like you and I, developers and power users, not "regular" users of machines who are mostly mobile device and occasional laptop/desktop application users. I suspect we'll see somebody -- a phone manufacturer or similar device -- make a major transition to RISC-V from ARM etc in the next 10 years that we won't even notice.
      - fulafel 10mo ago
        I agree, some will, but it may not be a more open platform from developer POV.
    - tracker1 10mo ago
      You're doing builds for Docker on your desktop for direct deployment instead of through a CI/CD service? My biggest issue was the number of broken apps in Docker on Arm based Macs, and even then was mostly able to work around it without much trouble.
IshKebab 10mo ago
Far too late for that. Does anyone seriously think ARM isn't going to obliterate x86 in the next 10-20 years?
- tracker1 10mo ago
  Well, given some of the political/legal gamesmanship over the company itself the past few years, it could very well self destruct in favor of RISC-V or something else entirely in the next decade, who knows.
- izacus 10mo ago
  20 years is half of x86's lifetime and less than half of the lifetime of home computing as we know it. So this is kind of a useless question, because in such a timespan anything can happen. 20 years ago computers had somewhere around 512MB of RAM and a single core and had a CRT on desk.
- fulafel 10mo ago
  Look how long SPARC, z/Architecture, PowerPC etc have kept going even after they lost their strong positions on the market (a development which is nowhere in sight for x86), and they had a tiny fraction of the inertia of x86 softare base. Obliterating x86 in that time would take quite a lot more than what the ARM trajectory is now. It's had 40 years to try by now and the technical advantage window (power efficieny advantage) has closed.
  - IshKebab 10mo ago
    To be clear if x86 is ever as unpopular as SPARC or PowerPC I would consider that to be obliterated. I was thinking more like if it falls to 10% of desktop/laptop/server market share, which is still waaaaaay more then the nearly-dead architectures you listed.
    - fulafel 10mo ago
      Couldn't resist picking at semantics here: Things that have < 10% market share - macOS - all car manufacturers except Toyota Things that history considers obliterated: - The city of Pompeii - districts of Hiroshima within the bomb's blast radius
tester756 10mo ago
>I just wish AMD and Intel could work together and make a subset clean up of x86 ISA AMD and Intel Celebrate First Anniversary of x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group Driving the Future of x86 Computing Standardizing x86 features Key technical milestones, include: FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery): Finalized as a standard feature, FRED introduces a modernized interrupt model designed to reduce latency and improve system software reliability. AVX10: Established as the next-generation vector and general-purpose instruction set extension, AVX10 boosts throughput while ensuring portability across client, workstation, and server CPUs. ChkTag: x86 Memory Tagging: To combat longstanding memory safety vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and use-after-free errors, the EAG introduced ChkTag, a unified memory tagging specification. ChkTag adds hardware instructions to detect violations, helping secure applications1, operating systems, hypervisors, and firmware. With compiler and tooling support, developers gain fine-grained control without compromising performance. Notably, ChkTag-enabled software remains compatible with processors lacking hardware support, simplifying deployment and complementing existing security features like shadow stack and confidential computing. The full ChkTag specification is expected later this year – and for further feature details, please visit the ChkTag Blog. ACE (Advanced Matrix Extensions for Matrix Multiplication): Accepted and implemented across the stack, ACE standardizes matrix multiplication capabilities, enabling seamless developer experiences across devices ranging from laptops to data center servers.

tracker1 10mo ago

I'm still a heavy advocate for requiring second/dual-sourcing in govt contracts... literally for anything that can be considered essential infrastructure or communications technology and medicine. A role of govt in a capitalist society is to ensure competition and domestic availability/production as much as possible. While my PoV is US centered, I feel that other nations should largely optimize for the same as much as possible. Many of today's issues stem from too much centralization of commercial/corporatist power as opposed to fostering competition. This shouldn't be in the absence of a baseline of reasonable regulation, just optimizing towards what is best for the most people.

gosub100 10mo ago
Suppose we got nuked or some calamity caused the interruption of all the fancy x-nanoneter processes. What would we actually miss out on? I don't know what the latest process nodes we have stateside are, but let's say we could produce 2005 era cpus here. What would we actually miss out on? I don't think it would affect anything important. You could do everything we do today, just slower. I think the real advancement is in software, programming languages, and libraries.
- tracker1 10mo ago
  I'm talking about way more than just CPUs... And for your question, we'd pretty much miss out on modern-like mobile phones entirely. 90nm -> 18A/1.8nm is a LOT of reduction in size and energy... not to count the evolution in battery and display technology over the same period. Now apply that to weapons systems in conflict against an enemy that DOES have modern production that you (no longer) have... it's a recipe for disaster/enslavement/death. China, though largely hamstrung, is already well ahead of your hypothetical 2005 tech breakpoint. Beyond all this, it's not even a matter of just slower, it's a matter of even practical... You couldn't viably create a lot of websites that actually exist on 2005 era technology. The performance memory overhead just weren't there yet. Not that a lot of things weren't possible... I remember Windows 2000 pretty fondly, and you could do a LOT if you had 4-8x what most people were buying in RAM.
  - 10mo ago

izacus 10mo ago

I wonder if in 2025 a company would even allowed to start before being curb stomped by Intel's IP lawyers. After all, they started making clones, something that China gets accused of a lot.

tiffanyh 10mo ago
If the company was based in the EU, local regulation might encourage reverse-engineering. See tangentially related topic from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362927
- userbinator 10mo ago
  EU or RU.
jezek2 10mo ago
You can do it with HW accelerated emulation like Apple did with M1 CPUs. They implemented x86 compatible behavior in HW so the emulation has very good performance. Another approach was Transmeta where the target ISA was microcoded, therefore done in "software".
- BlueToth 10mo ago
  They said that they implemented x86 ISA memory handling instructions, that substantially sped up the emulation. I don't remember exactly which now, but they explained this all in a WWDC video about the emulation.
  - als0 10mo ago
    Not instructions per se. Rosetta is a software based binary translator, and one of the most intensive parts about translating x86 to ARM is having to make sure all load/store instructions are strictly well ordered. To alleviate this pressure, Apple implemented the Total Store Ordering (TSO) feature in hardware, which makes sure that all ARM load and store instructions (transparently) follow the same memory ordering rules as x86.

startupsfail 10mo ago

Seems like an interesting story, Ashawna - she was about 25 at the time, and as per Wikipedia, already worked on the military projects - the Sprint Missile System, and was at Xerox. > The processor was reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar. The Haileys photographed a pre-production sample Intel 8080 on their last day in Xerox, and developed a schematic and logic diagrams from the ~400 images.

htrp 10mo ago

> Am9080 variants ran at up to 4.0 MHz Definitely read that wrong the first time I skimmed the article

bhasi 10mo ago

“Behind every successful fortune there is a crime.” - Mario Puzo, The Godfather

B1FF_PSUVM 10mo ago

AMD was already in the CPU market with bit-slice LSI chips, the Am2900 set of chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900 Those worked in 4-bit slices, and you could use them as LEGO blocks to build your own design (e.g. 8, 12 ou 16 bits) with much fewer parts than using standard TTL gates (or ECL NANDs, if you were Seymour Cray). The 1980 Mick & Brick book Bit-slice Microprocessor Design later gathered together some "application notes" - the cookbooks/crib sheets that semiconductor companies wrote and provided to get buyers/engineers started after the spec sheets.

adrian_b 10mo ago
Intel has launched in 1974 both the NMOS Intel 8080 and a bipolar bit-slice processor family (Intel 3000). AMD has introduced in 1975 both its NMOS 8080 clone and the bipolar bit-slice 2900 family. I do not know which of these 2 AMD products was launched earlier, but in any case there was only a few months difference between them at most, so it cannot be said that AMD "was already in the CPU market". The launch of both products has been prepared at a time when AMD was not yet in the CPU market and Intel had been earlier than AMD both in the NMOS CPU market and in the market for sets of bipolar bit-slice components. While Intel 8080 was copied by AMD, the AMD 2900 family was much better than the Intel 3000 family, so it has been used in a lot of PDP-11 clones or competitors. For example, the registers+ALU component of Intel 3000 implemented only a 2-bit slice and few ALU operations, while the registers+ALU component of AMD 2900 implemented a 4-bit slice and also many more ALU operations.

WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago

> AMD entered the CPU market with reverse-engineered Intel 8080 clone 50 years ago Moral: Awesome productivity happens when IP doesn't get in the way.

WaitWaitWha 10mo ago
If I recall correctly, they were also licensed to produce some clones. I remember when in the early 90s the am386-40MHz came out. Everyone was freaking out how we are now breaking the sound barrier. There was a company Twinhead(?) that came out with these 386-40Mhz motherboards with buses so overclocked most video cards would fry. Only the mono Hercules cards could survive. We thought our servers were the shizzle.
- fweimer 10mo ago
  Weren't legal protections for semiconductor masks rather lax in the 70s, at least in the United States? You might need certain patent licenses for the manufacturing process, but the chip itself was largely unprotected.
  - rasz 10mo ago
    yep, thus intel going microcode and patent route.
  - mrandish 10mo ago
    > "In the summer of 1973, during their last day working at Xerox, Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey, and Jay Kumar took detailed photos of an Intel 8080 pre-production sample" I was interested in this and followed the links to the original interview at: https://web.archive.org/web/20131111155525/http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/hailey.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20131111155525/http://silicongen... which was interesting: > "Xerox being more of a theoretical company than a practical one let us spend a whole year taking apart all of the different microprocessors on the market at that time and reverse engineering them back to schematic. And the final thing that I did as a project was to, we had gotten a pre-production sample of the Intel 8080 and this was just as Kim and I were leaving the company. On the last day I took the part in and shot ten rolls of color film on the Leica that was attached to the lights microscope and then they gave us the exit interview and we went on our way. And so that summer we got a big piece of cardboard from the, a refrigerator came in and made this mosaic of the 8080. It was about 300 or 400 pictures altogether and we pieced it together, traced out all the logic and the transistors and everything and then decided to go to, go up North to Silicon Valley and see if there was anybody up there that wanted to know about that kind of technology. And I went to AMI and they said oh, we're interested, you come on as a consultant, but nobody seemed to be able to take the project seriously. And then I went over to a little company called Advanced Micro Devices and they wanted to, they thought they'd like to get into it because they had just developed an N-channel process and this was '73. And I asked them if they wanted to get into the microprocessor business because I had schematics and logic diagrams to the Intel 8080 and they said yes." From today's perspective, just shopping a design lifted directly from Intel CPU die shots around to valley semi companies sounds quite remarkable but it was a very different time then.

ck2 10mo ago

ah I remember those amazing days instant 20% speed boost replacing the IBM 8088 with the v20 chip bought a sleeve of them cheap and went around to all the PCs and popped them out only problem was software that relied on clocks ran too fast

FridayoLeary 10mo ago

>In 1975, AMD could make these processors for 50 cents and sell them for $700. Apparently by ripping off their military customers. >says Wikipedia. Why is that a primary source?

mixxit 10mo ago

Gordon should have stuck to the symphonic