[HN Gopher] MicroVAX 78032
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MicroVAX 78032
Author : amacbride
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-09-24 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| loph wrote:
| After the eastern bloc copied this chip, DEC engineers had a
| special message for the Russians:
|
| https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
| ananonymoususer wrote:
| I cannot find any reference to this online, but your post
| reminded me of a similar message to the Russians from the same
| era. The roof of the Northrop plant in Hawthorne, CA (now
| SpaceX) had "Yeb Vas" written in some fashion so as to be
| visible only from the ISR satellites of the day.
|
| https://mymemory.translated.net/en/Russian/English/yeb-vas
| johnklos wrote:
| It's also mentioned by one of the designers here:
|
| http://simh.trailing-edge.com/semi/cvax.html
| retrac wrote:
| This might have been the crucial point, where DEC missed the
| microcomputer boat. In early 1985, the only full 32-bit single-
| chip processor that was generally available was the Motorola
| 68020. The Intel 386 would come out later that year. DEC was
| focused on the high end though. Much of the R&D was going into
| high-end designs with rack-sized arrays of ECL logic for the
| processors in their VAX mainframes and vector supercomputers,
| which they never sold very many of. The later CMOS NVAX design,
| when process shrunk, ended up being faster than the $1 billion
| ECL VAX 9000 line not long after it was introduced.
| rsecora wrote:
| "I just don't understand it, I don't see how this is possible,
| how this one chip can replace these racks of electronics, I
| just don't get it"
|
| "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in
| his home"
|
| "Unix is snake oil"
|
| --Ken Olsen (DEC Founder, president, and chairman)
| em500 wrote:
| It seems like the repeating cycle of the industry is the low
| end "toy" computers eating the high end "real work" computers,
| first in volume, eventually also in performance, from mainfraim
| (IBM) -> mini (DEC) -> workstation (SUN) -> PC (Intel) -> phone
| (Apple/ARM). With the incumbents never learning from history.
| wrs wrote:
| They learn, they just can't usually do anything different.
| See Clayton Christensen's _The Innovator 's Dilemma_. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
| rsecora wrote:
| SGI -> Nvidia
| convolvatron wrote:
| yeah, thats true. the 9000 was a really lovely workhorse
| though.
| johnklos wrote:
| While collecting VAXen is usually reserved for those with
| gratuitous amounts of free space and lots of cheap power, I'm
| happy to have the 78032's successor, the CVAX SOC, running in my
| datacenter (it's slow - be patient):
|
| http://vlc.zia.io/
|
| It includes the 78034, the floating point unit, and up to 8K of
| L1 cache in a single CPU package. The "up to 8K" was because
| they'd keep CPUs if 5K or more of L1 worked.
|
| It's my little piece of this interesting history.
| klelatti wrote:
| Very cool! What's the software stack?
| johnklos wrote:
| Thanks! It runs NetBSD 9 and is being used to test a number
| of toolchain patches, and soon it'll be used to test NetBSD
| 10. The web server is NetBSD's bozohttpd.
| klelatti wrote:
| Interesting that it had roughly the same number of transistors as
| the 286 but appeared three years later but on a larger node size
| (so bigger die).
| chasil wrote:
| The VAX was a 32-bit CPU with an mmu, the 286 was not. UNIX
| variants on the 286 had severe limitations (64k max program
| size). VMS was built for a much bigger machine than a 286.
|
| The fab was also in-house.
|
| "It is DEC's first single-chip microprocessor implementation of
| the VAX ISA and DEC's first self-fabricated microprocessor...
|
| "The MicroVAX 78032 contains 125,000 transistors on an 8.7 by
| 8.6 mm (74.82 mm2) die that was fabricated in DEC's ZMOS
| process, a 3.0 um NMOS logic process with two layers of
| aluminum interconnect."
| Koshkin wrote:
| The 286 was a curious little beast. It did have a sort of an
| MMU, and, according to Wikipedia, _The CPU was designed for
| multi-user systems with multitasking applications_ ...
| klelatti wrote:
| Yes my first reaction was that the VAX would have been a much
| better architecture but Intel's manufacturing lead meant that
| it could churn out 286s (and of course 386s in 1985) at much
| lower cost.
|
| Interesting to compare them both with the ARM1 which was 32
| bit (no MMU) but only used 25k transistors on a 3 um process
| - and which was more powerful than VAX 11/780. So both
| powerful and cheap to make.
| [deleted]
| chasil wrote:
| I really don't understand why Acorn wasn't purchased
| outright as soon as the samples were back from the fab.
|
| I think DEC was the first third-party implementation with
| StrongARM.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
| klelatti wrote:
| Yes I think you're right on StrongARM which was the most
| powerful ARM CPU for a long time. Eventually made its way
| to Intel I think.
|
| I think everyone eventually had their own RISC - IBM, HP,
| AMD, Intel (i960) plus MIPs and SPARC of course and a few
| others.
|
| Arm eventually got traction because of the business model
| and because they intentionally didn't go head to head
| with the Intel x86 juggernaut. It wasn't obvious for a
| long time that their model would work though.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| IIRC, StrongARM was the basis for XScale, which Intel
| foolishly spun off. They could have had a good chunk of
| the smartphone market, or at least a viable path into it.
| klelatti wrote:
| Indeed, sold c2006 I think just before the iPhone
| launched!
| wmf wrote:
| But they couldn't have because if they kept XScale they
| wouldn't have invested in it.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| > StrongARM which was the most powerful ARM CPU for a
| long time. Eventually made its way to Intel I think.
|
| DEC sued Intel for patent violations and won. Digital was
| dying, and part of the settlement was that Intel purchase
| the billion dollar chip fab in Hudson, Massachusetts that
| was just built to produce the chips, and later demolished
| it in 2015.
| klelatti wrote:
| Interesting thanks.
| mek6800d2 wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of Paul DeMone's signature line
| on USENET's comp.arch back in the day!
|
| _The 801 experiment SPARCed an ARMs race of EPIC
| proportions to put more PRECISION and POWER into
| architectures with MIPSed results but ALPHA 's well that
| ends well._
| klelatti wrote:
| Very good! Just need to get RISC-V in there now too.
| ananonymoususer wrote:
| I did some development on uVAX in 1989. Wrote a DECWindows app
| that did monitor & control of a distributed realtime system.
| DECWindows was slow, so it would get updated every 250ms, while
| the realtime stuff communicated to a proxy (via 10Mbps DECNet
| with a custom driver) every 20ms. All of the code was in 'C', but
| everything aside from the DECWindows stuff was running from ROM
| on embedded VAXELN.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXELN
| emmelaich wrote:
| Sydney University (Basser CS) had a few 11/780s. It may have run
| AUSAM, a modified 6th edition.[0]
|
| It was a rush to go from sharing one with 40 other students to my
| first job where I had a microvax all to myself!
|
| [0] https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=AUSAM
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(page generated 2022-09-24 23:00 UTC)