asciilifeform: it's a good try, but i dunno that this is usable for re.
asciilifeform: ( also seems to have dirt, which is problem, cuz 1 speck of shit can cover several 100 transistor at this density -- not even speaking of moar recent micronages )
asciilifeform: in earlier days there were also folx stuffing strings into block hdrs, but dunno if this is still in fashion, and at any rate no longer doable if you aint chinese, to 1st approx
asciilifeform has personally used this mechanism for remote control of... autonomous machinery
asciilifeform: costs whatever the miner fee is, plus epsilon for payload ( most of the current chinese won't mine a 0-summing tx iirc )
asciilifeform: but sure can stuff in whatever bytes, iirc addr decoder barfing dun invalidate a tx , classically
asciilifeform: ( somewhere on my hdd, there's a photo of shrobe walking across a stage holding up a 3620 , the kind in http://www.loper-os.org/?p=51 , in his hands, 'looksy, first 'portable' bolix' )
asciilifeform: iirc he went into medicine after bolix folded
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: indeed, tho quite ironically bolix itself was quite analogous to a su research town
asciilifeform: amberglint: let's have it, for completeness, if you can dig up.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: recall that these folx had automation that actually worked.
asciilifeform: However, the common way of measuring chip complexity is to count the number of transistor sites; this measures the size of the internal ROMs better. Using that count, this is one of the largest chip ever done, containing nearly 400,000 transistor sites. The chip was designed very quickly (it took about 9 months from the freezing of the architecture to the first prototype chip, using a team of only 4 designers).'
asciilifeform: 'Figure 24 show some statistics about Ivory. The size of the chip was about a centimeter-and-a-half on a side in the earliest version which was done using 2-micron CMOS technology. The first commercial version will be done in a 1.6 micron process and will be about a centimeter on a side, as is the TI chip. This makes it a very large, (but not impossibly large), chip to fabricate. There are about 255,000 actual transistors on the die.
asciilifeform: ble to what you'd see in a 80386 or a 68020 class machine.'
asciilifeform: 'It is of tiie same complexity as an Intel 80386 or a Motorola 68030. Figure 21 is a photomicrograph of the chip (chip people always seem to need to show their chip pictures). The Ivory chip is more or less divided into three horizontal slices; the top is the datapath and stack cache, the middle is the control system, and the bottom is the memory interface. In the middle of the control system is a very large microstore, again compara
