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Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor

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

#111

Post by mjgerm »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #107
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems are power consumption, speed, cost, size, development time, and the difficulty of updates and bug fixes. A modern embedded processor handily solves all of those. Boards full of TTL are a fascinating engineering exercise, but there aren't many applications where they're a better solution. It's also tempting to cheat and solve some of the sub-problems with monostables and analog timers. As soon as you do t…

> power consumption That's the only one I don't quite understand. All your other points are definitely great objections. Are you saying that a clocked system consistently uses less power than a stateful but quiescently 'static' circuit? I can imagine there's a reason, but it goes counter to my experience that the faster you clock a microprocessor the more power it consumes; therefore at zero clock rate a purely data-…

Roughly, the power of a digital system is sum of the static power and the dynamic power (P=1/2 CV^2*F).

1. Discrete logic chips tend to be built in substantially larger process nodes (microns vs nanometers) that are less efficient. This means higher leakage current and more static power.

2. Discrete logic has to drive traces on a PCB, which have substantially higher capacitance (C) and therefore use more power getting across a board.

3. Discrete logic operates at higher voltages. Contrast 5V TTL vs. 1V core voltage inside a processor. Power is proportional to the voltage squared.

4. A microprocessor running even at low speed can replace a massive number of discrete logic chips, so for simple solutions F is low. If you're doing something very simple and interrupt-driven, F can be in the tens-hundreds of kHz.

Consequently, there's a whole lot more of both static and dynamic power with discrete logic than with a uC.

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

#112

Post by hulitu »

baisq wrote: post #106
snek_case wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most workloads don't even take proper advantage of more than 1 core. Single core performance is still the most important metric and there hasn't been anything exciting regarding that in the last... 15 years?

This is true. However your workload runs in a multitasking OS which, at least for Win 10, needs at least a core only for itself.

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

#113

Post by orlp »

pegasus wrote: post #103
nonrandomstring wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-s…

Yes! It seems to me this would be the only sane way to build voting machines, especially.

There is no sane way to build voting machines. Voting isn't a technology problem, it's a social/trust problem.

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

#114

Post by Someone »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #107
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems are power consumption, speed, cost, size, development time, and the difficulty of updates and bug fixes. A modern embedded processor handily solves all of those. Boards full of TTL are a fascinating engineering exercise, but there aren't many applications where they're a better solution. It's also tempting to cheat and solve some of the sub-problems with monostables and analog timers. As soon as you do t…

> power consumption That's the only one I don't quite understand. All your other points are definitely great objections. Are you saying that a clocked system consistently uses less power than a stateful but quiescently 'static' circuit? I can imagine there's a reason, but it goes counter to my experience that the faster you clock a microprocessor the more power it consumes; therefore at zero clock rate a purely data-…

I don’t understand speed, either. Once you have the desired circuit, you don’t have to build it out of discrete components, you also can send it to a fab (I think that already happened with 7400-style ICs, too. The 74248 BCD to seven segment decoder doesn’t contain lots of individual NAND gates)

That will introduce practical problems, though. If you want your design on the best tech possible, that costs serious money that you may not be able to afford, especially if you don’t want an enormous number of circuits. Your 10,000 transistor design may fit a million or more times on a top-of-the-line die.

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

#115

Post by dalbasal »

orlp wrote: post #113
pegasus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It seems to me this would be the only sane way to build voting machines, especially.

There is no sane way to build voting machines. Voting isn't a technology problem, it's a social/trust problem.

Dropping stones in a bucket is "technology," effectively.

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

#116

Post by lb1lf »

orlp wrote: post #113
pegasus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It seems to me this would be the only sane way to build voting machines, especially.

There is no sane way to build voting machines. Voting isn't a technology problem, it's a social/trust problem.

-That depends on how you use them; this is a people problem, not a tech problem, as you (IMHO) correctly observe.

If you use the voting machines to keep a running tally of votes cast so results are available immediately after polls close, you have already gotten a large benefit from them.

However, to ensure the (most warranted!) concern of the electorate that the votes are not being tampered with, the machine should also print a receipt to the voter after his/her vote is cast, in a human-readable format, which is then deposited in an urn much like today.

So - you get instant results, and if the result is challenged, you can audit the actual ballots rather than just doing a code audit and hoping the numbers haven't been tampered with in some undetectable way.

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

#117

Post by andi999 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #102
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 implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-s…

There is a very old Steve Jobs video where he says something like:i dont understand what is special about software, what you cannot do in hardware. Let me see if I can find that.

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

#118

Post by okeuro49 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #102
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 implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-s…

> not need 'firmware' updates

Well, you might still need flaws to be fixed in the device, but now flaws in the device can never be corrected.

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

#119

Post by Gracana »

okeuro49 wrote: post #118
nonrandomstring wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-s…

> not need 'firmware' updates Well, you might still need flaws to be fixed in the device, but now flaws in the device can never be corrected.

In the past, technicians would get engineering change orders and follow the instructions to rewire boards to fix problems. You could also replace state machine and microprogram ROMs, which I guess sounds a lot like a firmware update.

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

#120

Post by the_only_law »

andi999 wrote: post #117
nonrandomstring wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-s…

There is a very old Steve Jobs video where he says something like:i dont understand what is special about software, what you cannot do in hardware. Let me see if I can find that.

Software becomes interesting when I have to make the hardware do things Jobs doesn’t want me to.
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