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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

#121

Post by the_only_law »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #97
codedokode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The top-of-the-line next generation of chips will be solidly clocked at 5GHz and above. https://hothardware.com/news/amd-computex-taipei-2022-keynot...

I believe mainframes have had CPUs operating around this for a while as well.

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

#122

Post by ReactiveJelly »

Gracana wrote: post #119
okeuro49 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's expensive to hire someone technical enough to:

- Perform such an update

- Sign off that they performed the update _correctly_

If you need an air-gapped system, it's still much easier to set it up so it can update from a USB flash drive and log "I did the update correctly" back to the drive.

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

#123

Post by bluGill »

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.

true, but most people doing hardware are doing formal designs and prove their work correct. While the proofs are not perfect, there are a lot less bugs. The cost of fixing bugs in hardware is a lot more than software, so it is seen as worth it.

Of course the cost of doing the above is one reason we don't do everything in hardware. If you have the money you could implement everything people do with computers in hardware, no software - I don't even want to think about the cost.

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #122
Gracana wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's expensive to hire someone technical enough to: - Perform such an update - Sign off that they performed the update _correctly_ If you need an air-gapped system, it's still much easier to set it up so it can update from a USB flash drive and log "I did the update correctly" back to the drive.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by Tuna-Fish »

Someone wrote: post #114
nonrandomstring wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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

You are still going to use a very old and obsolete process, compared to the microcontroller.

As a rule of thumb, every generation of lithography that has made transistors smaller and more efficient, has also roughly doubled the NRE costs. As you move down the feature size slope, you get all kinds of useful properties, but the tradeoff is that you have to manufacture more of any given design for it to be able to make any economic sense. To the point where you can get an amazing chip that has an arm core, storage and memory in a single package that costs pennies (well, not right now it doesn't, but it did in the past and will again) and uses almost no power, so long as you can use the exact same device that is also shipped in the millions for other things too.

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

#126

Post by heurisko »

bluGill wrote: post #123
okeuro49 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

true, but most people doing hardware are doing formal designs and prove their work correct. While the proofs are not perfect, there are a lot less bugs. The cost of fixing bugs in hardware is a lot more than software, so it is seen as worth it. Of course the cost of doing the above is one reason we don't do everything in hardware. If you have the money you could implement everything people do with computers in hardwa…

I have experience working with IoT hardware, there were a fair few bugs, in an apparently constrained domain.

One including a datatype mismatch, that was also a bug in the specification.

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

#127

Post by BVCommander »

dalbasal wrote: post #115
orlp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paper slips signed by an independent observer and marked with indelible ink can be audited more easily by electoral participants than counting featureless stones in a bucket.

They have the added security feature of oily fingerprints containing unique DNA imprinted on them. It's customary in functioning democracies to not sequence fingerprints on a ballot paper, but theoretically it could be done.

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

#129

Post by Tostino »

mjgerm wrote: post #111
nonrandomstring wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 C V^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 getti…

Appreciate that description. Helps crystalize exactly how revolutionary microprocessors were compared to other contemporary approaches.

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

#130

Post by sumtechguy »

chriscjcj wrote: post #78

When I was a kid, I remember being at my local arcade and seeing them open up Monaco GP to service it. My mind was completely blown by the hundreds and hundreds of wires and I couldn't fathom how anyone could make sense of it. I believe this is another game that doesn't have code or a CPU, but uses discrete logic circuitry instead. ...Which, I think, is why it's not emulated in MAME.

MAME has a netsolver built in. The issue is the number of devs who know how it works and can put a driver into MAME is kind of small.
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