LaurieWired Profile picture
May 12 6 tweets 4 min read Read on X
What if humanity forgot how to make CPUs?

Imagine Zero Tape-out Day (Z-Day), the moment where no further silicon designs ever get manufactured. Advanced core designs fare out very badly.

Assuming we keep our existing supply, here’s how it would play out: Image
Image
Z-Day + 1 Year:

Cloud providers freeze capacity. Compute Prices skyrocket.

Black’s Equation is brutal; the smaller the node, the faster electromigration kills the chip.

Savy consumers immediately undervolt and excessively cool their CPUs, buying precious extra years. Image
Image
Z-Day + 3yrs:

Black Market booms, Xeons worth more than gold. Governments prioritize power, comms, finance. Military supply remains stable; leaning on stockpiled spares.

Datacenters desperately strip hardware from donor boards, the first "shrink" of cloud compute. Image
Image
Z-Day + 7Yrs:

Portable computing regresses, phone SoCs fail faster from solder fatigue. Internet switches hit EOL, nothing horrible yet, but risk increases.

Used “dumb” car market skyrockets, lead-free solder in ECUs experience their first failures from thermal cycling. Image
Image
Z-Day + 15Yrs

The “Internet” no longer exists as a single fabric. The privileged fall back to private peering or Sat links.

Sneakernet via SSDs popular, careful usage keeps them alive longer than network switches. For those lucky enough not to have their desktop computers confiscated, Boot-to-RAM distros and PXE images are the norm to minimize day-to-day writes.

HDDs are *well* past the bathtub curve, most are completely dead. Careful salvaging of spindle motors and actuator arms, with precision repairs keeps the most critical high capacity arrays online.Image
Image
Z-Day + 30Yrs

Long-term storage has shifted completely to optical media. Only vintage compute survives at the consumer level.

The large node sizes of old hardware make them extremely resistant to electromigration, Motorola 68000s have modeled gate wear beyond 10k years! Gameboys, Macintosh SEs, Commodore 64s resist the no new silicon future the best.

Fancier, (but still wide node) hardware like iMac G3s become prized workstations of the elite. The state of computing as a whole looks much more like the 1970s-80s.Image
Image

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More from @lauriewired

Jun 20
A lone Boston coder rewrote BIOS in 1984.

IBM wanted to sue. The programmer's clever loophole became the model for legally defensible reverse engineering.

You’ve probably been booting his descendants ever since. This is how Phoenix Technologies got away with it: Image
Image
The case Apple v. Franklin held that BIOS could be protected by copyright.

IBM already crushed other competitors citing the case law.

Phoenix created a bizarre ruse. What if an engineer had never *seen* IBM’s specification…and thus came up with the idea organically? Image
Image
Known as a Chinese wall, this was the setup:

One team read the proprietary IBM Tech Reference Manual; writing extremely detailed (but not plagiarized) specifications.

A lone engineer, never exposed to IBM source, then wrote compatible APIs to meet the technical spec. Image
Read 5 tweets
Jun 12
Grep is actually an acronym; originally started as a ed command:

:g/<re>/p

G - global search. <re> - Regular Expression, P - print.

It was invented to run Natural Language Processing on The Federalist Papers; the precursor to the US Constitution. Yes, really. Image
Image
Lee McMahon, computer scientist at Bell Labs, was working to clarify the authorship of The Federalist Papers.

85 essays, all published under a pseudonym, it’s been a historical puzzle for a century+

The trick? De-anonymization by isolating word-frequency statistics. Image
Problem. McMahon’s working on a PDP-11; only 64KB of memory.

The full corpus exceeded 200KB. Regexes were the clear way to calculate the sets, but ed loaded the whole file at once.

McMahon called in a favor from a friend, none other than Ken Thompson himself. Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 3
A squadron of F22’s was once taken out by an imaginary line.

On a mission to Japan, an unforeseen software bug occurred crossing the international date line. Longitude swaps from W179.99 to E180 degrees.

Navigation, comms, and even fuel management went down! Image
Image
This wasn’t a simple "turn it on and off again” fix; something was seriously wrong. Reboots weren't helping.

According to Maj. Gen. Sheppard:

“…all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems...they could have been in real trouble." Image
Thankfully, the squad of 12 F22’s were accompanied by a KC-10 tanker, who they followed visually back to Hawaii safely.

Details are sparse, but these issues aren't uncommon in aviation!

It's extremely difficult to notice subtle bugs over millions of lines of code. Image
Read 4 tweets
May 27
Want to recognize a song from just a few seconds of distorted audio?

Use Constellation Maps.

The math is brilliantly simple.

With just a handful of bytes; discarding 99% of the waveform, you can recognize a unique fingerprint across hundreds of millions of tracks. Image
Image
First, chop up the audio into few-second windows.

Take an FFT of the waveform, then extract the local peaks. Each maximum becomes a “star” on an xy plot of time vs frequency.

Pair nearby stars into clusters and hash the result. Boom, a noise-resistant fingerprint. Image
Constellation maps were the basis for Shazam.

Shazam today is a polished iOS/Android app, but the tech actually started back in 2003!

The early marketing was kind of hilarious; dial a phone number and get your Nokia to "listen". The ID'd track was sent back via SMS. Image
Read 4 tweets
May 23
I miss the insanity of 80s processor design.

Intel’s iAPX 432 was a “micromainframe”.

It had no general purpose registers, supported object orientation *directly*, and performed garbage collection on-chip.

It was also 23x slower than an 8086. Here's why it failed. Image
Image
Intel targeted Ada so aggressively that C support was an afterthought.

Problem was, particularly at the time, the Ada compiler was extremely untuned and immature.

Scalar instructions were basically never used; *everything* was huge object-oriented calls. Image
Image
The “micromainframe” moniker wasn’t just marketing. One I/O chip could stitch together 63 CPUs on a single bus.

Essentially memory safe in-hardware; dangling pointers were impossible at the ISA level.

Partners like BiiN suggested using the CPU for nuclear-reactor control. Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
May 22
NTIRE is the coolest conference you’ve never heard of.

Deleting motion blur? Sure.
Night Vision? No problem.

Every year, labs compete on categories like hyperspectral restoration, satellite image enhancement, even raindrop removal (think car sensors)! Some highlights -> Image
Low-light enhancement is always popular.

Retinexformer, shown here got 2nd place in the 2024 contest.

A *TINY* transformer-based model, it runs in about 0.5 seconds for a 6K image on a single 3090. Only 1.6M parameters (<2MB weights at INT8)! Image
Maybe motion blur removal is more your thing.

UAVs are often used to examine wind turbine blades for early failure warning. Movement of drone + rotational velocity pose a challenge.

Here’s the 2021 winner DeblurGANv2, taking ~0.19s of processing per image. Image
Read 5 tweets

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