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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • Modern CPUs are pipelined, meaning that the clock signal doesn’t have to propagate across the entire chip each tick. Instead the subsections act like a bucket brigade, with each one handing the results of the partially completed work to the next stage.

    There is a limit to how small these subsections can be practically made due to pipeline length and the formation of “bubbles” on instruction branching that take time to clear. Eventually the cost of these bubbles outweighs the gains made from more pipeline stages.

    So, if a 6502 or a Z80 were smaller than a single pipeline stage in a modern processor it could potentially have an even higher clockrate, albeit while doing massively less work per clock cycle. Though thermals might be a bottleneck before clock propagation is. Very small but extremely hot spots can be a problem in modern CPU design, with parts of e.g. the ALUs rising to unacceptable temperatures even as all the silicon around them is relatively cool. IIRC some Intel CPUs actually have instructions that are only able to be executed a limited number of times per second for this reason.

    So an extremely small, extremely fast/hot 6502 might not have a much faster clockrate than a modern chip.









  • Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.

    I don’t know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I’ve wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.

    I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.


  • Alchemists (correctly) observed that everything in the world was subject to disorder and decay as time progressed, but noted that gold seemed to be immune to this effect (since it is highly resistant to oxidation). Add into that the belief system that they were working with:

    • That everything in the world exists on a chain of being from the most corrupt at the bottom to the most noble on top (with god being most high).

    • That everything is really the same thing, and through physical processes changes its form, including up and down the chain.

    And they belived that if they could figure out how to transmute a lesser metal into a more noble one then they could probably move other things up the chain of being as well. Which is why the Philospher’s Stone was supposed to make people unaging and immortal, and cure all disease, in addition to transmuting lesser metals into gold. Alchemists like John of Rupescissa probably belived that creating the Stone would also bring the world closer to the divine in some way, and it was god’s wish for mortals to do this.



  • The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired.

    In the transition from plugboards to programmed sequence control the thing that took over the task of routing values between registers, through the ALU, and to/from IO ports was the control unit. Microcode being one way to implement functionality in the control unit.

    One other approach was to use what was basically a finite state machine, implemented physically in-circuit. The output of that FSM was fed into a series of logic gates along with the current instruction value, with the output of that combination being connected to the control lines of the various CPU elements. Thus the desired switching/routing behavior occured.

    Modern chips are really complicated hybrids of microcode and a ton of interacting finite state machines. Especially in x86 complex or less commonly used instructions will be implemented in microcode, whereas simple/common instructions will be implemented by being “hardwired”, somewhat similar to the FSM technique described above (although probably more complicated).