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I read an interview with the original inventor of the 555. He was actually embarrassed at its crudeness, and would have done it very differently at the later date. I guess there was an attempt at an updated version, but it didn't sell.
http://www.designinganalogchips.com/_count/designinganalogch...
In one of the later chapters he introduces an updated NE555 design.
https://twitter.com/njcw/status/1467522736000053256
Its the primary (20kV) for a tesla coil. The 555 toggles a power MOSFET which drives the primary of a car ignition coil making a nice crackly 20 kV spark.
The 555 was my first introduction to electronics. I still have the 555 book my dad gave me back in the 80s!
he also made a working 1 bit processor the same way:
What a great project Idea! I have often looked at the internal schematic of the 555 and wondered if it could be made with discrete components - now I know that it is possible :-)
If you want something in kit form, I’m a big fan of this: https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/652 It’s a beautiful representation of a 555 timer in discrete component form - and functional too. The 555 timer itself is a pretty simple IC since it’s just a few dozen transistors and resistors at its core.
I read an interview with the original inventor of the 555. He was actually embarrassed at its crudeness, and would have done it very differently at the later date. I guess there was an attempt at an updated version, but it didn't sell.
Like the 741 op amp its one of those inferior yet friendly teaching tools used heavily in academia.
Feel free to double check my math, but a modern M1 CPU with its ~16 billion transistors would be about 380 million times bigger (imagine a square ~1.7 miles on a side)
It would take an electric signal about 40ns to travel from the center to one corner and back, and a signal certainly needs to do more than that in a clock cycle, so the physical limit on its operational frequency would be well below 25 kHz. If you want comparable computing power to a regular M1, you'd need to build a tower of them at least 100,000 high. On the plus side, you could build a city on the stack and no one…
Feel free to double check my math, but a modern M1 CPU with its ~16 billion transistors would be about 380 million times bigger (imagine a square ~1.7 miles on a side)
It would take an electric signal about 40ns to travel from the center to one corner and back, and a signal certainly needs to do more than that in a clock cycle, so the physical limit on its operational frequency would be well below 25 kHz. If you want comparable computing power to a regular M1, you'd need to build a tower of them at least 100,000 high. On the plus side, you could build a city on the stack and no one…
This probably says more about how bloaty modern software development is, than the capabilities of your hypothetical macro-M1. You wouldn't need a cluster. Just one should do. The entire traffic light system of San Francisco ran on a few PDP-8 controllers, once. About as fast as the macro M1 at 25 kHz. (Even at 25 kHz, with parallel execution, it'd still be completing hundreds of thousands of 64-bit-data instructions per second, running circles around something like the original IBM PC or even the early Macintosh.)
With hardware so cheap and software stacks so deep these days, we often grossly overestimate the number of cycles really necessary to complete a task.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found the interview: [1] > The thing is that this is not a good design (the 555). I had a few years of experience, I’d say about five years, but I had no teacher, and I had to learn it by myself. > You know it was really the beginning of design, so looking at it now, I would say “I wouldn’t do it like that again”. But nobody has actually changed it - it is still the same. They have shrunk it, they shrunk the dimensio…
Of course he could make it better. Everybody can. The issue is if it makes sense. The only engineering science where improving something is (stil) cheap is SW. Although SW seems to be cursed and almost every improvement they make is a complete redesign. 555 is a cheap signal generator. It is very good at what he does. When you need a better one you can have a uC ( which you need to program and test) or a synthetiser…
I enjoyed reading the interview. Besides this snippet, he talked about how modern design differs from back when he made the 555. It's always super impressive to me when someone keeps up with their craft through such huge technological changes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would take an electric signal about 40ns to travel from the center to one corner and back, and a signal certainly needs to do more than that in a clock cycle, so the physical limit on its operational frequency would be well below 25 kHz. If you want comparable computing power to a regular M1, you'd need to build a tower of them at least 100,000 high. On the plus side, you could build a city on the stack and no one…
40ns = 25MHz.