The Chip Letter

All the way back in August 2023, in the midst of a series of posts on the RISC-V architecture, I ran a reader poll on the future of the architecture, with the following introduction: As we’re in the middle of a short RISC-V series, I thought it might be fun to test how Chip Letter readers feel about RISC-V. There’s lots of ambition behind the RISC-V project. In “Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V”Krste Asanović and David A. Patterson wrote: “..

Readers may have seen the recent blog post from Dmitri Grinberg RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better which sets out, at some length, his criticisms of the RISC-V architecture. Here’s a sample: Now, about those compressed instructions. Let us look at them in detail. They are hilariously poorly designed. Say you want to store a byte to a register plus offset. What range of offsets can a 16-bit instruction encode? Zero through three. Not thirty three, not three hundred and three.

One of the reasons for studying technology history is to look for recurring patterns: characteristics of either the technology itself or of firms that are built around it that are repeated time and time again. These can be particularly useful as predictors of future behaviour at a firm when that firm has strong DNA that is passed down from one generation of management to the next. It’s generally agreed that Apple is one firm with a track record of acting to preserve and strengthen its DNA.

A defining moment in the Keynote that launched the original iPhone was when Steve Jobs revealed that it would combine an iPod, a phone and an ‘internet communications device’. I don’t think even Steve Jobs, though, envisaged the range of tasks (and devices) that the iPhone would absorb. Our ‘pocket supercomputers’ have taken on roles big and small; email machines, movie players, instant messengers, games consoles, GPS devices, step counters and so on and so on.

Floating point arithmetic is a crucial part of modern computing. A large proportion of the silicon currently being installed consists of ‘floating point units’ and floating point standards continue to emerge to meet the needs of modern machine learning. But where did floating point arithmetic come from and where was it first implemented? Perhaps surprisingly it can trace its beginnings to the origins of the development of the computing universe as we know it today ….

The latest episode of Supply Chained, the new podcast from Tim Culpan and Jon Y has just dropped and it’s all about Arm. Before we go any further please drop what you’re doing and subscribe to Supply Chained and to Tim and Jon’s newsletters; you can thank me later. The podcast episode is titled ‘Arm might be swallowing its own poison pill’ and most of the discussion is about Arm’s decision to launch its own CPU.

In The Virtues Of The 8-bit Era : Eight Iconic Processor Designs we looked at eight of the most important microprocessor designs of the 1970s and early 1980s. This time we’ll look at more 8-bit designs from that era, that didn’t quite make it into that list. The rules are broadly as before. The designs have to be for microprocessors and not microcontrollers. They don’t have to have made it into production though.

Intel has bounced back from its, at one point, seemingly existential crisis. When I wrote this post back in August 2024 the situation seemed bleak. Today Intel’s share price has risen to almost $100.

I'm a weird British outlier, on this little island here, and I've made my own path. I've followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in. Demis Hassabis The cover of The Infinity Machine, Sebastian Mallaby’s new biography of DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, features a blurred portrait of Hassabis. The effect was probably meant to evoke a Star Trek transporter-like dissolving of the human form as human intelligence transforms into a less tangible artificial variety.

Arm AGI CPU - Photo Credit Arm Please note that the following is not investment advice. This post may be too long for your email client so please read in your browser by clicking on the title. ‘We’ll make chips over my dead body.’ Robin Saxby, ARM Founding CEO It’s one of the things that Arm is most famous for: it’s a chip company that doesn’t make chips.