Path: ...!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!news.mixmin.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Robert Riches Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Remember "Bit-Slice" Chips ? Date: 8 Dec 2024 05:01:35 GMT Organization: none-at-all Lines: 52 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: spamtrap42@jacob21819.net X-Trace: individual.net IkB5e2mTYEVLl+trYf9DLg1wUNm+V1H6t1anUuxAd7ZEiSAGyL Cancel-Lock: sha1:FFJq2+f7swj4AxhOMK1ZF6r0u7g= sha256:4rdt4aOD4O0tchA1kKRnq0NNEJdzcY/RxHQpDJZLnI8= User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (Linux) Bytes: 2729 On 2024-12-07, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote: > Latter 70s they were The Thing. > > Needed a 64/128 processor in an 8-bit world, then > bit-slice processors were yer fix. > > They were the basics of a CPU - but wired so you > could physically attach them to MORE processors. > All the necessary flags/registers/etc could be > expanded wider and wider. > > You could buy 2-bit, 4-bit, slice processors and > physically build something much stronger. > > I even remember hearing of them mentioned in some > cheap TV series - some geek with his own R2D2 > clone that was WAY too capable for the era. > > TODAY ... well ... you can make a 64/128 on like > a 1cm die - really party on a 2cm die. > > Bit-slice now - you'd loose far too much in > the interface wiring. Really no longer a > solution - unless maybe you need a 1024/2048 > processor :-) > > Kinda the same goes for 'Transputers' - parallel > solution using ultra-speed (for the day) serial > links between many processors to coordinate > things between all the chips (they could have > a shared memory area too). > > Older tech limitations spawned FIXES ... there > were many. Some were very *clever* - might even > have future apps. Tektronix made a series of "desktop" computers back in the day. The 4051 was the first in the series and used a Motorola 6800 processor. As far as I'm aware, the 4052 and 4054 made up the rest of the series. Those had the same processor, a 6800 superset made from bit-slide chips (2900-2901-..., IIRC). IIRC, they ran about 20MHz except when accessing an external ROM pack. There were added opcodes for basic floating point operations. Even with BASIC using double-precision floating point numbers for everything numeric, they were faster at many things than microprocessors of the day. I was told it took a 486 at somewhere around 66MHz to equal or beat it. -- Robert Riches spamtrap42@jacob21819.net (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)