Chips with everything - good electric toothbrush

Tim Hunkin's "never trust a computer you can't lift up" is a buzzword created by Intel engineers to support their early microprocessor.
It must be a strange idea when the serious IBM machine is full of the whole room and the baby microprocessor is so primitive.
The first Intel 4004, launched in 1969, was commissioned by a Japanese calculator company called Busicom, which believes that for all models, having a programmable chip is cheaper than having a dedicated chip for each model.
At that time, Intel was making money from memory chips, and its marketing experts thought it would make no sense to sell programmable chips to others & colon;
"You see, computer companies sell 20 000 minicomputer units a year.
We are the latecomers to the industry.
We can get 10 cents if we are lucky.
There are 2000 chips each year, which is not worth so much trouble at all.
Michael Malone's "microprocessor" records the rapid rise of processor chips from these promising beginnings.
Malone believes that the credit for the first microprocessor should be attributed to a man who was previously unacknowledged by the name of Fred Rico Ferkin.
After Intel left in 1974, it wrote down Ferkin from its history, but attributed all the credit to Ted Hove, who launched the development.
But what really builds 4004 and 8080 is the team led by feinkin.
Earlier, at feizhao semiconductor, one of the inventors of MOS (
Metal Oxide Semiconductor
Integrated circuit technology.
He is the only person Intel can combine the understanding of chip architecture with the detailed practical knowledge needed to convert these ideas into working devices.
Creating the first microprocessor is a great achievement, but it doesn't involve much new technology.
The key is the 1959 invention of the integrated circuit, which combines transistors, resistors and capacitors on a single "chip" of silicon.
As pioneer Jack Kilby says, integrated circuits can make products more complex, reliable and cheaper at the same time, and are truly unique in the field of invention.
By the end of 1970, several companies were producing microprocessor chips.
Intel's technology is often less advanced than its competitors, but sales are positive.
The company even organized an "action crushing" in 1979 to try to eliminate some objections.
But the biggest trick is to sell a microprocessor to IBM the same year.
IBM is very secretive about the "personal computer" in its plan.
"When we go in and provide technical support, they put our people on the side of the black curtain, their people on the other side of the prototype product, said an Intel engineer involved in the project.
"We will ask some questions;
They will tell us what is going on and we have to work on this in the dark.
If we were lucky, they would let us stretch out our hands from the curtains, fumble around and try to figure out what the problem was.
The success of IBM's personal computers has created Intel's wealth and led it to dominate the market.
It's not that its products are perfect.
I'm happy to find that 286 of virtual memory is its inherent weakness-maybe my ignorance and impatience is not the only reason I can never get the extended or extended memory software to work.
This book updates the history, checks the highly exposed defects in the Pentium exposed last year, and details the manufacturing process today.
The statistics of chips like Pentium are extraordinary.
Its Silicon must be "six-nine purity" of 99 ".
Pure 9999.
If a track on the chip is extended to the width of the office corridor, the entire chip will be 100 miles wide.
At the end of the manufacturing process, there are still some changes in the performance of a single chip-for example, all 486 s are the same, but according to the speed at which they operate, from 25 to 100 MHz, sort when done.
Clive Sinclair did the same thing in the 1970 s, buying reject military transistors to find transistors that still work enough for his amplifier.
The biggest advantage of the complementary MOS technology used today is that it is scalable.
From the generation chip to the next generation chip, the size of the circuit and gate has been reduced, and it still works fine when running at a smaller voltage.
This allows more circuits to enter the same space while using less and less power.
Despite Intel's strong marketing efforts, Malone believes that its dominance in the market is now challenged, especially because its Pentium chip is not
Computer streamlined instruction set)microprocessor.
The streamlined instruction system only uses simple instructions that can be executed within one clock cycle, which greatly speeds up the operation of the chip.
More complex instructions are executed by a sequence of simple instructions.
Sun Sparkstation, Silicon Graphics computers, and Apple Power Macs all use a streamlined computer microprocessor.
Although there are many interesting facts and good stories in the microprocessor, this book sometimes becomes an endless volume of chip numbers.
Part of the interest in reading the history of things like jet engines, bridges, or almost any other technology is to confuse how they work and why they have improved things.
The history of the microprocessor cannot provide this satisfaction.
Malone tried his best to explain the difference between them, but the chip was the final "black box ".
They look exactly the same and there is no easy way to investigate what's inside.
At the end of 1970, I bought an evaluation kit for a simple 6502 processor from the US.
I spent a lot of time exploring the instructions in its memory and trying to get it to do something.
In the end, I was very upset and threw it out with disgust, but I didn't before I had a good feeling of how it should work.
Most of today's microprocessors are too complicated for this.
Even basic ideas like streamlined code are not obvious & colon;
If longer instructions are now completed in a sequence of short instructions, they still require many machine cycles, then why is this faster?
The worst part of the book is its writing style.
The hype is particularly irritating.
No one doubts that the microprocessor is one of the most important inventions of the 20 th century, but Malone asserts that every electric light switch, electric shaver, hair dryer, refrigerator, electric toothbrush has a microprocessor, coffee maker and soda
The toaster is ridiculous.
I recently cut an example of these items into half for the new secret life of the home gallery at the Science Museum in London.
None of them contain a microprocessor.
There is only one basic 555 timer chip inside the "microchip" toaster, and there is almost no microprocessor.
Even machines that use microprocessor, such as video recorders, televisions and washing machines, have not changed much.
They are cheaper and more functional, but they are all there before adding the microprocessor.
There is no need for hype and no lack of evidence of the real impact of the microprocessor.
A recent estimate shows that PCs consume 5% of all industrial and commercial electricity.
The two factories I have visited over the past year are busy installing cheap microprocessor.
The foundation of automation.
Managers at both factories feel they are fighting to stay competitive with China, and they can reduce labor costs by automating.
Malone's hype gets worse & Cologne: Never understatement;
"The microprocessor gives us the power of life . . . . . . It is the greatest tool of freedom ever.
"Fax machines and computer modems may make it easier for people to communicate, but I doubt they are really responsible for overthrowing the totalitarian regime as he claims.
In the end, the hype became so bad that it became interesting & colon;
"The industrial revolution was triggered by a 50-fold increase in productivity.
In contrast, the microprocessor has increased its performance by 1,000 times in just 25 years.
In other words, the microprocessor developers complete the equivalent of an industrial revolution every two and a half years.
This book is worth reading if you can like or ignore this crap.