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

asciilifeform: simply means there's 2 metal layer ( conductors ) .

asciilifeform: iirc phf ( and apparently nobody else ) has the actual pinout, but iirc it is on a tape or the like and he hasn't posted yet

asciilifeform: perma-mirrored at http://www.loper-os.org/pub/amberglint_bolix_1.jpg http://www.loper-os.org/pub/amberglint_bolix_2.jpg , ty ☟︎

asciilifeform: and yes photo matches the one given by baker, to the limit of naked eye.

asciilifeform: oh hey the die size

asciilifeform: ( prior to these, masks were drawn 'by hand', on room-sized film, with actual pieces of electrician's tape )

asciilifeform: item was 1 of the 1st ( if not ~the~ first ) machine-layout'd ic's, so it won't be as simple to re as the early 80s cpus

asciilifeform: 390`000 transistor.

asciilifeform: may be possible to infer exact metrage from it

asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bolix-1987-baker.pdf ( warning: pdfturd/scan ) has the only known die shot

asciilifeform: the die ? i dun think even today there is die whole 4mm tall

asciilifeform: moar typically 5.

asciilifeform: iirc this means up to 9 layers.

asciilifeform: my notes say that it is either '2um cmos' by vlsi co., or '1um cmos' (hp co) if later edition (not known which one we have)

asciilifeform: ( suggests that it's 2cm^2 )

asciilifeform: nor known what exactly size of die, beyond the obv max visible in the photo

asciilifeform: loox like top is au-plated iron thermal lid, bottom -- ceramic.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i dun think he's the comic d00d

asciilifeform: SeanRiddle: i tried to look at the high res samples on your www, but found only http://btcbase.org/log/2018-11-28#1875711 ☝︎

asciilifeform: SeanRiddle: also what res photo can you take ?

asciilifeform: trinque: i can't speak for deedbot, but the ircbot code i put pehbot on doesn't autoreconnect at all

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's the alleged ic rev d00d

asciilifeform: was transparently http://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/ ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: 'where they cut off yer lips! if they dun like yer smile! it's barbaric, but hey it's home!'

asciilifeform: ( and ran out of folklore to pillage )

asciilifeform: after that they went to '3d'

asciilifeform: iirc that was last one i saw ( and the only 1 in orig lang )

asciilifeform: hey i even managed to see disneys. a coupla, with the trad ru dubbing translator with clothspin on his nose going mmmm

asciilifeform: the notion that sumbody might turn away from 'modernity' consciously, rather than because alzheimer patient, apparently is a bridge too far for some folx ☟︎

asciilifeform: it's at least the 5th time i got that q, nearly lost count

asciilifeform: it was quite similar, imho, to the gabriel laddel fella. clearly there was 'somebody home' in the crankcase, but under a thick haze of substances and detritus from indiscriminate suction of ??? from heathendom. 'salvation of the drowning is work for the selfsame drowning', what can i say.

asciilifeform: i gave ~hour to attempt to cure. in retrospect it was folly, made 0 dent.

asciilifeform: folx ~do~ on occasion get out of e.g. the bottle. but ~this~ appears to be incurable, medicine is powerless.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i still can't make heads or tails of wtf was in that d00d's head. shows symptoms of some kinda maths education. but omfg the 'cd-r brain'.

asciilifeform: ( and , in fact ~to the credit of~ koch, at least the latter didn't fuck about with 'proofs' )

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: well, asciilifeform is not usually the 'Пастернака не читал, но осуждаю'(tm)(r) type. so yes tried to read. ☟︎

asciilifeform: tried, for instance, to actually read zx2c4's hairball, ran outa barfbags

asciilifeform: another day in the lulzroom.

asciilifeform: diana_coman: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2051&cpage=1#comment-19756 and thx !

asciilifeform: ( there are 'lifers' in ru, typically 5+ corpses on ea., but they typically have life expectancy of ~7y . 1 survived to parole age last yr, it was enuff of an oddity that it was taken up in the fishwraps as newz )

asciilifeform: in current-day ru, as i understand you need repeated (1 corpse generally not suffice) wetwork to merit >decade

asciilifeform: jailers pull'em down with hooks, so they get rebuilt regularly.

asciilifeform: ( technically 'horse' is the spitball, 'road' is the rope, but again in eng world whoknows, maybe whole tradition died/never born )

asciilifeform: ( in ru variant, moar laborious cuz their setup tends to look moar like https://www.tyurem.net/album/images/narva_55_jpg.jpg -- iron grate sorta like on modern 'central ac' duct, gotta be pried apart a little with sumthing )