2021-02-28

Cool

Great day for hardware porn

Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller

It's interesting to consider the hierarchy of connections between the coarse 0.1" grid of the chip's pins and the tiny 1µm features on the chip. At the top level, the pin spacing is 0.1" in a 14×14 grid. The solder balls have a spacing of 0.01", so the ceramic substrate reduces the spacing by a factor of 10. The solder balls are connected to the wiring on top of the die, spaced at 0.001", increasing the density by another factor of 10. The top wiring is connected to the underlying wiring on the chip, with a spacing of 0.0001", another factor of 10. Finally, the feature size on the die is about 1µm, another factor of 2.
The Interesting Multiplexing Scheme of the Grass Valley Series 300 Crosspoint Switch Panel | Photons, Electrons, and Dirt
UK meteor: 'huge flash' as fireball lights up skies

Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

open source groups should not be unconditionally supporting the ecosystem for a large corporation’s hardware and/or platforms.

Companies should be paying for this directly: if pyca/cryptography actually broke on HPPA or IA-64, then HP or Intel or whoever should be forking over money to get it fixed or using their own horde of engineers to fix it themselves. No free work for platforms that only corporations are using
A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word “Class.”

67% of US families watch the Super Bowl – what percent of New York Times editors and reporters do? 20% of Americans go to religious services weekly – how many of those work for the New York Times? How come 96% of political donations from journalists go to Democrats? Your job is to take a page from the Democratic playbook and insist there is no reason any of this could be true except systemic classism, that any other explanation is offensive, and it’s the upper-class media’s moral duty to do something about this immediately.