While we don’t actively collect GPU’s, we do pick them up when they come along, rather then scrap them, and from time to time have been donated a handful of them. Here are a few that have been sitting on my desk that were donated. GPU’s are pretty impressive in their own right (with many having over 1 billion transistors now)
Nvidia NV43 ENG SAMPLE
The NV43 is the code name for the Geforce 6600. It was released in August 2004 (abut the time this Engineering Sample was made) and could be clocked at up to 525MHz. It was fab’d by TSMC on a 110nm process and contains 143 million transistors (about the same as a Pentium-M Dothan core).
Out of the annuls of history comes this interesting computer on eBay. PIXAR made around 300 of their Image computers during the late 1980s, hoping they would be a commercial success, as well as useful for their own render work. While they proved to be very good at what they did, they were a bit ahead of their time, and certainly out of the price range of most institutions. The first models started at $130,000 and the PII, as seen on eBay, was sold for $30,000. PIXAR began trying to sell their computers two months after Steve Jobs bought the company (formerly LucasFilm graphics division).
Each system ran 1, 2, or 4 CHAPs (CHAnnel Proceesors, RGBA). Each CHAP consisted of a board with 4 AMD 29116 16-bit bipolar bit slice microprocessors, running at 10MHz supported by 4 Logic Devices LMU17 16 x16 parallel multipliers.
AMD AM29116 16 bit microprocessor
Essentially the PIXAR Image Computer was a 1980s GPU, it required a separate SGI or Sun workstation to run.
Leaving on a trip so I dumped all the pending CPUs/EPROMs etc to a gallery.
There are litterally thousands of new CPU’s, EPROM’s, FPU’s, and some oddities.
They are sorted by manufacturer (technically brand)
Hard to imagine its been 30 years since IBM released the 5150 Personal Computer for the grand sum of $1265 thus starting the flood of PCs. Build with generic hardware, and MS-DOS from Bill Gates and crew (itself only released a month prior), the 5150 did away with proprietary, the MS-DOS OS was not exclusive to IBM, and the hardware was essentially off the shelf, using Intel’s 4.77MHz 8088 (cut down version of the 8086) processor and a discrete 256k of RAM. Other companies, could, and did, in mass, replicate and add to the 5150 making the 8088, and with it the x86 instruction set the de facto standard even to today. (though ARM has been making a large impact as of late due to the rise of mobile computing)
Here is an early add for the 5150, not only have we come a long ways in computers, but advertising as well.
$213,000 Apple 1 being programmed vi $2000 Mac Book Pro
The owner, Mark Bogle, President of the clothing company BasicNet, did not want this Apple 1 to sit idle. instead, infront of an audience of hundred, the Apple 1 was checked with an oscilloscope and a program was fed to it by none other then a Mac Book Pro. Its an amazing feat really, considering its a 35 year old motherboard. One can only imagine the crowds reaction if one of the power filtering caps decided to fail upon boot up. Read more here (all in Italian but Google translate works fine)
Traditional microprocessor transistors are "planar" or flat as they pass through the switching gate
April marked the 50th anniversary of Robert Noyce’s patent on making silicon IC’s with a planar process, a concept that has changed little since then. That is, until this month, when Intel announced their new 22nm process, a process that will not be restricted to planar transistors. Intel, like Hollywood as of late, has gone 3D, Instead of a transistor being built in planes (layers) Intel has developed a way to produce transistors with source/drain spanning several planes on the die, essentially they are formed vertically, rather then horizontally.
This in an of itself is not remarkable, it has been thought of, and done before. What Intel did is make it happen on a commercially viable process. Intel claims to be able to initially manufacture these on a commercial scale at only a 3% cost increase over traditional planar processes, and of course expects that 3% added cost to drop to zero, or in fact result in a cost savings, as the process is refined.
The Tri-Gate system features 3D "fins". This allows the same surface area, in a smaller die area.
What this allows is 2-3 times the number of transistors in the same space as a planar process (assuming the same process size). Intel plans to use this process for the 22nm node. Intel’s first processor, the 4004, was constructed on a 10 micron process with 2300 transistors. Thats 500,000 times larger features and over a million times less transistors, yet it consumed almost a 1 watt of power. With Intel’s new 3-D 22nm process it should give Intel the break they need into the mobile phone market, a market they have been desiring to reenter ever since selling off their mobile ARM (PXA//StrongARM) division to Marvell several years ago.
When Intel released the 8755 in 1976 and 8755A in 1977 it provided an easy way to interface the 8080 and the 8085 to other components. It was a 16k (2kx8) EPROM with a pair of latched 8 bit I/O ports. This greatly reduced system chip counts and complexity of board design. The basic 8755A ran at 3Mhz (the later 8755A-2 ran at 5MHz) which allowed interfacing with the 8085AH with zero wait states. The 8755A continued to be used well into the 1980s with many processors (Intel and others)
Intel D87C75PF - 1988 Engineering Sample
By 1988 the 8755A was out of date, its 16k of EPROM space was insufficient for most designs and its power consumption was much higher then contemporary parts. Intel sought to remedy this with the release of the 87C75. The 87C75 is essnetially a 27C256 EPROM, and 82C55A port expander, and latches combined on a single chip. It was made on Intel CHMOSII-E process which reduced power consumption (from 1.5Watts to 500mW). It ran at a max of 5MHz and the EPROM was bumped up from 16k to 256k. It was designed to interface direction to the 8051, MCS-96 and i188 processors.
Why then do we find so few examples of the 87C75PF? The late 80’s and early 90’s also ushered in dozens of microcontrollers and embedded processors that had all of the 87C75’s features on chip; larger EPROM on die, more I/O ports, and the widespread use of Flash on microcontrollers effectively made the 87C75PF obsolete.
On April 25th, 1961 Robert Noyce, then working at Farichild Semiconductor, received Patent 2,981,877 SEMICONDUCTOR DEVICE-AND-LEAD STRUCTURE. This was the patent for how to make integrated circuits, containing multiple silicon based transistors, on a single die. Six months prior Jack Kilby received a similar patent, but for geranium based devices. Silicon became, for a variety of reasons, the preferred material and 50 years later we now use some of the same principles to build IC’s with over a billion transistors on them. The diagram in the patent showed a device with 8 components on a single doe, 1 transistor, 2 diodes, 2 capacitors, and 3 resistors.
In 1968 Noyce, and Gordon Moore (of Moore’s Law fame) left Fairchild and founded Intel. Fairchild Semiconductor was the ‘incubator’ of many such semiconductor companies, Intersil, Teledyne, Xicor and AMD were all founded by former Fairchild employees
RCA 1802E Die - 20x magnification - Visual6502.org
The talent at Visual6502.org continues. After imaging and building a complete simulator for the MOS 6502 they did the same for the Motorola 6800 (from which the 6502 was based).
We have sent Visual6502.org several chips and they have now imaged the RCA 1802 that we sent. What is very interesting is how little marking are on the die, the only that I could see was the number ‘10824.’ This particular chip was dated early 1981 though the 1802 COSMAC was designed in 1976 and was one of the first CMOS microprocessors. The 1802 had around 5000 transistors (Visual6502 will let us know exactly how many once they are done, and of course what each and every one of them does). For higher res shots and more info see here
Commodore USA has started taking pre-orders of its newly revamped Commodore 64 Home Entertainment system. Of course this version comes with Blu-Ray and a dual core Intel (gasp!) processor running a version of Ubuntu Linux, it will include a Commodore OS 1.0 emulator, which should run all your favorite C64 6502 based games.
Commodore USA C64 - 1.8 Dual core Atom - 2GB RAM
The Original C64 had 64k of RAM, the Intel Atom D525 has 112k of just L1 cache. At least the die size is similar :).
Commodore USA is also making modern version of the VIC computers for your enjoyment, albeit in slightly modified cases.
In my daily hunt for new processors, and other chips for the museum, as well as information about new chips, I constantly come across interesting chips, in strange locations. Here you will get a chance to learn WHERE many of the chips in the museum come from and what they are.
