Taniwha

thanks, glad you had fun

Bits of it exist, not much about the CPUs yet - I get the impression they have something different from a normal RISC-V vector unit, and only on one of the two cores

https://documentation.espressif.com/esp32-s31_technical_refe...

OTOH it has a full MMU and will run linux

OTOOH it comes in a new WROOM package that's much harder to hand solder (not castelated so they can have lots more pins

There were lots of candidates in the first round, neither of today's candidates got 50%+1 so they had a runoff, all the voters from those other candidates were forced to pick one of the two

Vik, the guy who made this, is one of the original reprap people

I learned to program Fortran at 13, 55 years ago, it was old then

A friend did that too, a lot of his job was going out in the snow and changing tapes, I guess better internet connectivity changed a lot

It's worth noting that LNT is also a requirement of the space (a BLM wilderness area) and their permit. I've been involved in organising rocket launches at the same site (well slightly north) and we are required to do the same thing - the BLM inspects our site (and Burning Man's) afterwards, it's a condition of our ongoing permit.

When I first started going out there (before Burning Man) there was a century's worth of junk out there, we spent a lot of time helping the BLM clean it up - well most of it, there are millenia old archeology sites there and 200 year old covered wagon debris which are protected, but the tires, car wrecks, all sorts of junk had to go - we appreciate people putting in the work to keep it clean

Yes that early pdp-11s had core memory, its contents survived power cycling. We'd hand toggle in the bootstrap into high ROM and start it, it would load whatever we were running from paper tape - unless you did something stupid that trashed that high memory you'd get to reuse the bootstrap over and over

Having said that the bootstrap was something like 8 16-bit instructions, a pain but not impossible

HBM dies are designed to be physically mounted on top of other dies in the same package, they can have up to 2048 data pins (compared to 8-64 on consumer dies which are in their own packaging) - to do what you propose you'd need an interposer chip of some type which would push the price back up

You just know that the AI bubble is going to break and they're going to be stuck with tons of HBM4s.

The big problem is that this will not depress the consumer DRAM market and mean we can all afford DRAM again

So essentially the same thing the AI companies are doing

Blackrock used to be pretty wild-west (I was going before Burning Man started), pretty scary stuff at times (a friend once did something silly and hurt himself badly, Clinton was doing something in Reno, the SS heard about it, thought it was nearby and MiB showed up looking hot and bothered in their suits), over time the BLM realised that they needed to police the area a bit more and things got toned down (doesn't help that BM situates itself across multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, these days there's a surfeit of police)

From my observation Scientology starts by teaching you to be selfish, more self assertish, in the process you end up pushing your friends and family away, but guess what, you have some new friends in the 'church'

Just in case anyone here finds themselves falling into their world I'll save you $0.5M: all your problems are caused by you being infested with murdered space aliens

I think that has more to do with the amount you could get onto a die at that time, architecturally they had to move the MMU onboard first which left the cache(s) offboard

Maybe, but Norway should still wait until the inevitable AI crash

They're from roughly the same era (and the same as 68020s/396s/88ks/mips) - 29ks came out of AMD and sadly didn't fly as high as we hoped at the time - their unique stack management may have been part of that

The other thing he doesn't mention is time, I live in AoNZ and we do get free shipping from Digikey if we order over a minimum (~$60US) - but the big deal is time - you have to order everything you need ahead of time and get it all to arrive - miss one thing and you're stuck with a PCB and a box of bits and are sitting on your hands for a couple of weeks - you have to be incredibly organised - it's why I have a cabinet of SMD reels most of which I'll never use (reels of common components are ~$2 while visiting Shenzhen a couple of hundred $$ saves you a bunch of pain)

Living in the US and having free overnight delivery is 1st world luxury

ESP32-P31s are cheap - samples are cheap ($5-6 for WROOM modules) production prices are going to be lower - and twice the number of pins ESP32s are known for (but say goodbye to castelated modules hand soldering is going to be harder)

I wonder if it gets the moon the right way up in the southern hemisphere

Not even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Yeah but when I started the words weren't in common usage - we understood "freeware", but not really for hardware yet

In the mid to late 90s I was selling a rocketry flight computer kit:

http://www.taniwha.com/~paul/fc/index.html

We didn't have words to describe "Opensource" yet, I wrote (from the above page):

  This page is designed to be a home for the Taniwha Flight Computer which 
  I'm building and kitting for a number of other interested people. This is 
  NOT a for-profit enterprise - the idea is to get a critical mass of people 
  up and using the same hardware so that they can write cool and interesting 
  code (or make cool and interesting hardware) and share it with everyone else 
  who's using the design.

  A quick note about copyrights etc - all the stuff here is marked with my 
  copyright - this is something I do with everything I design to retain control 
  of my designs should I decide to sell them for profit in the future. However 
  everything in these pages, the design itself and the software that runs on it 
  (at least the stuff I provide) is hereby provided it for anyone's use - but I 
  retain ownership and copyright (even feel free to build them commercially if 
  you want).

You can see the gem of what later became GPL/etc there, using copyrights to retain control while releasing it to the world. Later I added:

  "Open Source" is now all the rage - we've been running this project that way
  for the past 4 years - so as always "feel free to steal anything on these web
  pages".

This is probably the place to say if you want to come play in this space you really ought to go to KawaiiCon - AoNZ's kinder/nicer DEFCON - in Wellington over the Halloween weekend, tickets available now, be in before they sell out

Yeah, we had a very strict initial lockdown, and closed the border, once the number of cases went to 0 we opened up again, we then had regional lockdowns after cases broke the border quarantine.

You might is they included DFT (design for test, stuff to make sure when you make a chip all of it actually works) - a scan chain thru all the internal flops will provide you with info about the internal flops and how they are connected - reverse engineering this into a model of reality would certainly be extremely hard, but maybe not impossible

In fact if you have the sky130 libraries installed (it's where I'm working) you can get a spice netlist out of it in about 10 seconds - really they should have flattened it

I take it back, it's a sky130 .gds the gates are explicitly in there

I'm a chip designer, back in the early 90s I visited a small silicon house who were doing some work for us, their boardroom table had been taken over by a giant sized photomicrograph of IBM's VGA chip and they had a bunch of summer hire grad students tracing wiring and matching standard cells (easier back then because we only worked in 2 layers of metal).

They weren't trying to steal IBM's design, they already had one of their own, what they wanted to know was "is there any as yet unannounced functionality in the IBM VGA chip?" they didn't want to be caught out when some unknown registers popped up. Of course it turned out there was as yet unannounced functionality - but not by IBM's design, more because of the orthogonality of the design - MODE-X was discovered and became the basis for DOOM's speed, anyone who didn't support it lost out

yes, but at the transistor level .... it has no idea at that level how those transistors are arranged into gates directly

It's even easier in this case because they've included the original verilog source ....