asciilifeform: when mp_en_viaje wrote that he trained these to do useful work, i believe. but it is a world-class feat, like kuklachev's famous housecat circus. i dunno that it's been replicated.

asciilifeform: ( and even these, ~1 per ~100 or so cocks )

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: i can't speak for erry fortress of us.academitardia, but in mine, the ~only chix in the engineering hall were 'dark meat' in hijab

asciilifeform: PeterL: at one time (long before i found out about mp's uni ad flyers) i put up some ads there; guess what result ? ( buncha grad students begging to have their homework done , and offering such laffably small bakshish that it was not worth for asciilifeform to even turn key in car )

asciilifeform pictures ye olde 1990s gag ad for 'linux airlines' . the 1 where 'come at 1200 hrs with cardboard panel ready to strap to arm and flap'

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: the flip side is that one can end up like asciilifeform , i.e. with dozen tonnes of ??? , from xray cabinet to that weird wrench one uses to swap water heater coils

asciilifeform: tho this might make prop.delay calculation slightly trickier. possibly what you'd want instead is to connect only the 4 'compass' faces of 'subcube' to adjacent units.

asciilifeform: depending on how many metal layers you have , could dispense entirely with 'subcubes' and give whole thing 'flattened cube' topology.

asciilifeform: idea being, that a typical subcircuit would fit inside 1 such cube .

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-10#1907891 << thinking about this further, prolly Right Thing would be a hybrid where there's a repeating block of e.g. 32x32x32 cells connected in 'cube' (this, or even larger, would still fit on physically 2d die) arranged in n x m matrix ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform: if 1 day they start broadcasting sumthing interesting, e.g. beheadings , i suppose i can run perl script on that sdr box and get 'tv' .

asciilifeform prolly to nobody's great surprise, dun have a tv , or at least not the usual kind with tuner

asciilifeform: for all i know, they serve up penguin flippers nao

asciilifeform: PeterL: believe or not , i dun think i've seen a mcd ad since i stopped riding the trains erryday

asciilifeform: simple enuff tech, that it actually begins to seem 'boring', which makes it auto-interesting to asciilifeform ..

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: as a matter of fact i did. how do you suppose i knew what beam cone to use, lol

asciilifeform: unlike the idjit heterogeneous fpga sold today, this item'd be a snap to simulate.

asciilifeform: i expect we'll want to simulate it, before anyone thinks of baking.

asciilifeform: the '80s-style 2d tile already gives you, e.g., simple means to bake arbitrarily-wide alu. for instance.

asciilifeform: but i was thinking moar along the lines of the simplest device that'd be of practical use, rather than 'futurisms'.

asciilifeform: xilinx incidentally has already confessed to resorting to 'cubism'/layered dies, to meet their claimed cell counts.

asciilifeform: the 'nanometer' densities have piss-poor yield, and this is how it is papered over.

asciilifeform: ( i suspect mp_en_viaje knew this already, but even intel et al, 'cheat', when you buy a pentium-whatever with 'n cores', it really has 24 or whatnot, and only n working units , the others lasered out ) ☟︎

asciilifeform: in order to be of use

asciilifeform: but indeed, homogeneous matrix of cells buys you 'hdd-like' item, where it is not necessary for whole thing to work

asciilifeform: this'd have the obv. down side, that your prop. delays are not deterministic. but would be cheap.

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: on anyffing at all, you get the 'only n % gotta work'

asciilifeform: ( current/historical. thing'd work just as well in 1970s 4um as in today's 8nm etc )

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: i dun presently know of an economical non-si substrate. was thinking strictly in the bounds of current commercial processes.

asciilifeform: generally you wouldn't want 'sparse die' tho, nobody cancelled speed of light etc

asciilifeform: it aint even like you can't buy a 30cm piece of si crystal. errybody does already, they simply cut it into 1cm^2 squares. simply costs.

asciilifeform: dunno if you could use an unmodified disk writer, given as the largest practical die is still smaller than the spindle hole. but same write head defo.

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: y'mean the faux-asics that were relabeled xilinxen lol

asciilifeform: simplest physical realization of this, would be to position eprom cells along a spiral. then can program via ordinary uv laser in konsoomer 'dvd-r'.

asciilifeform: the config logic is ~80% of the sq.metrage, in an item like this.

asciilifeform: rather than via the usual cascaded shift registers. get 4-5x the density, 'for phree'

asciilifeform: 1 interesting, imho, variation, would be to program the config regs ~optically~, a la 'cd-r'.

asciilifeform: i suspect if sovok had lived another 2-3 yrs, there's be ddr-baked examples of this in my parts box.

asciilifeform: theoretically, this kinda thing is chemistry-insensitive, could bake it on any process available, denser 1 will simply give you moar cells.

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: routing is the typical eater of sq.metrage in fpga

asciilifeform: they also had a variant with tree-like local structure, for same

asciilifeform: i would've added row/column lines , to cut down propagation delay when you bake internal bus, but it's moar or less exactly The Right Thing as-is

asciilifeform: it's entirely identical to what asciilifeform proposed in '15

asciilifeform: they even sold a card where you could plug in N of these, in tile pattern, and get whatever size fabric you like.

asciilifeform: d in series. ) simple enuff to simulate deterministically (and calculate propagation delays on paper..)

asciilifeform: not wholly unrelatedly, asciilifeform's semi-automated archaeology birthed a logworthy output recently. seems like in '80s there was an outfit, 'algotronix', that xilinx bought an' killed , to bury the product in patent liquishit. had entirely homogeneous fpga , made from identical ~200-transistor cells ( with simple north-south-east-west tile interconnects, and 1 flipflop inside, configged via 16bit shift register per cell, connecte