The hardware myth

Habe heute auf der blendobox einen interessanten Artikel von Tom Fürstner über die Verwandlung von HW in SW gelesen: Soften your hardware, baby! Ich muss da ein weiteres Mal hinzufügen, daß es seit 1979 keine Hardware im strengen Sinn mehr gibt.

Seit Masatoshi Shima den Zilog Z8000 fertig hatte und Lynn Conway und Carver Mead ihr Lehrbuch über VLSI-Design samt SW vorgestellt hatten, werden CPUs und andere HW Logic mittels der Allgemeinheit eher unbekannter Sprachen wie z.B. VHDL gecodet und - ein bissi vereinfacht - einer Suite von Silicon-Compilern umgesetzt. Und dann kristallisiert die SW halt wieder im solid state.

Dazu die Anekdote aus Chapter 14 von George Gilder's Microcosm: During 1979, Mead went to Zilog in Cupertino to visit with microprocessor pioneer Frederico Faggin. Walking down one of the halls, the two men encountered Shima. "Hey, Carver," he said, "I want a copy of your book." "Oh," said Mead bashfully, "it's really just for teaching students. It doesn't have anything to tell someone like you. It's not up to your standards." But Shima insisted. "I've just finished the Z8000," he said, "it's the last of the big mothers. No way we can ever design a chip like that again. Send me your book!"

Das war's mit der engineered HW. Zuviele Transistoren, zu viel Logik, zu viel alles. Nobody has been able to design or realise any significant HW anymore since 1980. Time to humble ourselves.

ai.eecs.umich.edu

Dieser Text war einmal auf dem tcm.org Science Museum: "California Institute of Technology professor Carver Mead and Xerox Corp. computer scientist Lynn Conway wrote a manual of chip design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems." Demystifying the planning of very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems, the text expanded the ranks of engineers capable of creating such chips. The authors had observed that computer architects seldom participated in the specification of the standard integrated circuits with which they worked. The authors intended "Introduction to VLSI Systems" to fill a gap in the literature and introduce all electrical engineering and computer science students to integrated system architecture."