Re: Remember "Bit-Slice" Chips ?

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 07/12/2024 07:33, 186282@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.
 

As an engineer it always amazes me on how such little things the success of a technology depends.
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Aircraft could have been invented hundreds of years earlier if a lightweight power source had turned up, but steam wasn't good enough, and it took oil petrol or gas to make the power sources light enough.
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Today's electric cars fail because the batteries simple are barely good enough to replace IC.
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Windmills and solar panels are useless for the same reason. - there is no storage able to meet the intermittency problem.

Jesus christ... don't get me started! In the mainstream press people _still_ write and say that 100% solar or 100% wind is the only viable way. I cannot bear to read it! And when I ask how much a battery storage system would cost that could store all the power for a country, for x days, there is never an answer.
Maybe, just maybe, it might be possible to have 100% solar in africa somewhere, but it would still need storage capacity for the night.

Yet the advance of photolithography and quantum theory made the integrated circuit a possibility, the Cold War mandated the need for small light electronics for missiles, and here we are.
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