I think that behind those “oh, it’s 30 years old” people miss one thing:
350nm chips are perfectly alright for many things. Simple controllers, chips inside various appliances, even some of the simpler military tech can absolutely rely on those chips.
Yep. Look at it this way, those $100,000+ machining centers that make nearly everything you use and own, are running on basically 486 chips. And they only transitioned from the 386’s because the dies wore out and the chip manufacturers said they weren’t going to remake them. It caused a noticeable amount of angst in manufacturing when the news got out.
Yeah, not to mention some low level engineers that built it only using a hairpin, a hammer, and a lithography machine … (ofc joking, but I bet there are like five nerds that basically made it all happen).
See page 6.Their fab in Lawrence, MA only goes down to 1000nm. Their other locations go down to 250 or 110nm. IIRC, some of that is the auto industry refusing to port things off of old chips, but the point is that you can do a lot of useful stuff with horribly outdated fabs.
Probably 20 per slab, and an annual yield of about two slabs combined. Of course it will only run for a month before breaking down, due to some vital part going missing.
I think that behind those “oh, it’s 30 years old” people miss one thing:
350nm chips are perfectly alright for many things. Simple controllers, chips inside various appliances, even some of the simpler military tech can absolutely rely on those chips.
It is way more than nothing.
Yep. Look at it this way, those $100,000+ machining centers that make nearly everything you use and own, are running on basically 486 chips. And they only transitioned from the 386’s because the dies wore out and the chip manufacturers said they weren’t going to remake them. It caused a noticeable amount of angst in manufacturing when the news got out.
Yeah, not to mention some low level engineers that built it only using a hairpin, a hammer, and a lithography machine … (ofc joking, but I bet there are like five nerds that basically made it all happen).
Yeah, those old fans are still useful. Here’s what Microchip Technology Inc runs:
https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/00004075.pdf
See page 6.Their fab in Lawrence, MA only goes down to 1000nm. Their other locations go down to 250 or 110nm. IIRC, some of that is the auto industry refusing to port things off of old chips, but the point is that you can do a lot of useful stuff with horribly outdated fabs.
That’s like late 486 early pentium 1 era. You don’t need a supercomputer for everything. The chip situation could be much shittier.
Are they telling the truth though?
we landed on the moon with those
With much worse ones*
Ya but would you like a yield of 100 cpus per slab, or 5.000 ?
So it’s a question of cost too I think, not an expert OFC.
Probably 20 per slab, and an annual yield of about two slabs combined. Of course it will only run for a month before breaking down, due to some vital part going missing.
Plus I would guess that few country could also rebuild the whole manufacturing process in a few years?