Re: Remember "Bit-Slice" Chips ?

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.)