Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

falstad.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 152 posts

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#51

Post by RC_ITR »

codedokode wrote: post #49
cmeacham98 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The literal clock speed of CPUs has been stalling, but CPU performance is and has been on a massive increasing trend effectively ever since AMD released the first Ryzen CPUs. Recent product announcements from Intel and AMD show no sign of slowing down. Sure it's not the 'double performance in 1-2 generations' of the olden days, but it's definitely not stalled either.

One of the reasons why CPUs are getting faster is because the more transistors you have, the faster is the chip and vice versa (this is not a proven statement but rather my intuition). We might not be able to use higher clock frequency, but we still can fit more transistors on the same area.

What’s even more, is we can make higher frequency chips, it just turned out higher density gates was the easier path to go down.

If the gates path reaches its end, we can still go back to clock. It won’t be easy or cheap to solve all the clock problems, but if it’s better than the alternative someone will do it (like how fracking only became viable as a means of drilling oil once the cheap, easy to get oil was somewhat depleted)

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#52

Post by aswanson »

ajp11 wrote: post #19

In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis. It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts. It's about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips. http://searle.x10host.com…

The 70s were everything.

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#53

Post by snek_case »

codedokode wrote: post #45
peter303 wrote: post #33

I implemented Conways Game of Life in TTL and oscilloscope for my 1975 MIT digital circuits lab. The clock was 6 nanoseconds or 166 MHz. The limiting chip was one kilobit RAM which was in tight supply and expensive. I think we used two for alternating generations. There are similarities to the pong circuit.

What logic family did you use? Standard 74-series TTL chips that existed in 1975 are unlikely to work at 166Mhz, their propagation delay was around 20 ns.

The 1 kbit RAM chip probably also would have difficulty running at 166MHz. That being said, having the master clock of the system running at 166MHz doesn't mean the entire thing does. You could use a high clock rate to generate a video signal but have the actual logic of the system behind a clock divider running at a much lower frequency.

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#54

Post by codedokode »

RC_ITR wrote: post #51
codedokode wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons why CPUs are getting faster is because the more transistors you have, the faster is the chip and vice versa (this is not a proven statement but rather my intuition). We might not be able to use higher clock frequency, but we still can fit more transistors on the same area.

What’s even more, is we can make higher frequency chips, it just turned out higher density gates was the easier path to go down. If the gates path reaches its end, we can still go back to clock. It won’t be easy or cheap to solve all the clock problems, but if it’s better than the alternative someone will do it (like how fracking only became viable as a means of drilling oil once the cheap, easy to get oil was somewh…

By the way, why did clock frequency stop around 3-4 GHz? I assume that as transistors become smaller, their propagation delay decreases, as their power consumption, and it allows to use higher clock frequencies. Is there something else that I am missing?

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#55

Post by snek_case »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #32
natly wrote: post #12

It'll be exciting if the clock cycles keep stalling like they've basically been doing in the last few years and we end up having to learn and do things at this level again to squeeze out what we want happen out of a long-term fixed compute budget.

The literal clock speed of CPUs has been stalling, but CPU performance is and has been on a massive increasing trend effectively ever since AMD released the first Ryzen CPUs. Recent product announcements from Intel and AMD show no sign of slowing down. Sure it's not the 'double performance in 1-2 generations' of the olden days, but it's definitely not stalled either.

The Ryzen 7 2700X chip I bought back in 2018 is still fairly close to the latest Ryzen 9 chips in terms of single-core performance on benchmarks (within 10% IIRC). The Ryzen 7 is an 8-core (16 thread) CPU, and now you can get 12 or 16 core Ryzen 9's, but most workloads don't take proper advantage of even an 8-core machine.

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#56

Post by loser777 »

codedokode wrote: post #45
peter303 wrote: post #33

I implemented Conways Game of Life in TTL and oscilloscope for my 1975 MIT digital circuits lab. The clock was 6 nanoseconds or 166 MHz. The limiting chip was one kilobit RAM which was in tight supply and expensive. I think we used two for alternating generations. There are similarities to the pong circuit.

What logic family did you use? Standard 74-series TTL chips that existed in 1975 are unlikely to work at 166Mhz, their propagation delay was around 20 ns.

Way out of my wheelhouse here but maybe something like emitter-coupled logic that was used in the Cray-1 of similar vintage? Power hungry but allowed the Cray-1 to hit 80 MHz in 1975.

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#57

Post by pishpash »

codedokode wrote: post #54
RC_ITR wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s even more, is we can make higher frequency chips, it just turned out higher density gates was the easier path to go down. If the gates path reaches its end, we can still go back to clock. It won’t be easy or cheap to solve all the clock problems, but if it’s better than the alternative someone will do it (like how fracking only became viable as a means of drilling oil once the cheap, easy to get oil was somewh…

By the way, why did clock frequency stop around 3-4 GHz? I assume that as transistors become smaller, their propagation delay decreases, as their power consumption, and it allows to use higher clock frequencies. Is there something else that I am missing?

Propagation delay doesn't decrease from one end of the chip to the other if you keep the same area in total.

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#58

Post by version_five »

ajp11 wrote: post #19

In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis. It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts. It's about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips. http://searle.x10host.com…

In my EE degree (in year 2000), we had to implement something with external I/O as a state machine using logic gates (it was in an FPGA though, we drew the schematic). Pong is a way cooler exercise than whatever I did with a 7 segment display and a keypad. But the idea of state machines is still a big part of introductory digital logic.

Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

#59

Post by masswerk »

Cadwhisker wrote: post #27

Excluding "Spacewar", Pong is the first "classic" arcade game that has reached the milestone of being 50 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_arcade_video_game_...

Notably, there was Computer Space, by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (1971, Nutting Associates/Syzygy Engineering), the first coin-op arcade video game, also made from TTL logic. This one actually pioneered the approach.

For a description see https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html

Syzygy Engineering (Bushnell and Dabney) soon became Atari, but still entertained links to Nutting Associates with Atari titles appearing under the Nutting Associates brand, as well. (E.g., Pong was Computer Space Ball in the somewhat fancier NA version.)

Post reply on HN