SVG Mask Artwork of the Intel 4004
4004.com
4004.com
It would also be interesting to compare the efforts made then with what it would take today to make as 4004-equivalent. It would certainly be much easier. Anyone in the field armed with the right tools care to hazard a guess?
They could not be created earlier for the same reason why Hollywood could not have been created in the 17th century: there was no motion pictures technology or modern internet distribution channels. But none of that tech has to do with Hollywood.
The engineering complexity of Airbnb is in the ARM SOC and in the GPS constellation, but not in their app.
There are plenty of startups that work on challenging engineering problems (though I'd have to google for the Unicorns who do that).
Even comparing the engineering complexity of what Google does, and what Airbnb, Uber, etc do is impossible. Many large unicorns are doing nothing new, or special. They are only clicking existing technology together. Which means they are very easy to outcompete, too.
Well, it isn't always true that unicorns are easy to outcompete. I could argue that Amazon (not AWS) isn't anything special either. The point of a unicorn isn't to develop complex tech. At scale, these companies are hard to beat.
Nope, I'm talking about engineering complexity.
"I could create Facebook in a weekend!" became such a recurring post on HN that posts about how you really couldn't became cliche, too. Seriously, yes, these "unicorns" really are doing really hard work. In another 30 years maybe you'll be able to turn a crank and produce a unicorn-scale codebase, but we definitely are not there today. Even in the last 5 years a lot of tools have come out to make it noticeably easier.
(Note how I said "hard" work. Whether or not it's valuable is an entirely different discussion. Hate the unicorns all you want, it doesn't make them any easier to engineer. I suspect you may be falling for the "I don't like X so X must have every negative quality" cognitive trap.)
Yes, both are quite easy, as long as you ignore all the parts that make it hard. Like scaling. Lots of things are easy if they don't have to scale.
Scaling is solvable, but it is not solved. If you have to throw money/people at the problem, well, that means it is a problem, right?
Certainly not today's Facebook or Twitter, no. But the initial versions were very simple things. Anyone can make a Facebook or Twitter. Not anyone can grow it to a userbase of hundreds of millions of users. That was what was special, not something technical. Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.
Yep.
> Scaling wasn't an issue; once you have investment and users, you just throw money at the problem.
Yeah not really. The CAP theorem is going to bite you if you just buy more servers. Twitter suffered huge growing pains as it tried to scale after becoming mainstream--remember the "fail whale?" Facebook completely re-engineered PHP to address performance and scale issues.
Facebook has what, almost a billion and a half users? 500PB of data?
They are likely the largest systems of their kind in a few areas. It has to be more than somewhat difficult.
44 years ago though, only a few talented engineers worldwide could implement it. :)
I claim that this notion extends to code, as well, and rightly into many other engineering and scientific projects (I suspect the pure math community might agree, i.e. by my reading of how they view their own discipline).
As an informal definition of art, I offer creativity within some bounds, i.e. the rules of the medium. Often, the tighter the bounds, the higher we elevate the end result (e.g. the most praised sonnet, or work of classical music). Here the bounds are pretty constrained: bug free, implements the ISA, manufacturable, and competitive and profitable.
As with many here, I am frustrated with my work when it is reduced to "turning the crank," but I suspect many writers (e.g. your Reuter's journalist) feel the same; and of course, we could introduce other examples from other disciplines. If working on a ground breaking project, then I can focus on that and derive some satisfaction from my contribution to that end.
Finally, my point: I submit these masks as evidence of the artificial dichotomy between the liberal arts and engineering disciplines. There should be more acknowledgement of the art produced on both sides of this divide, and more crossing the aisle (so-to-speak) from the thought leaders in this debate. Of course we need to train our next generation to work with these machines, and of course we should not kick the traditional liberal arts out of the curriculum. Sheesh. But I really would like some push back that claims our ground, i.e. technical achievement of this kind as art.
If I had to guess, you don't like the Poignant Guide to Ruby: http://poignant.guide
Why is there such enthusiasm for this? If it were only about solving puzzles with clinical detachment, I doubt the guide would have gained its following. Perhaps this book is a work of art meant to convey a fascination with a purely technical subject -- but why is this so successful, when the traditional routes toward the same, namely a degree in CS taught by like minded faculty, fail in some scenarios. In my view, the reductive stance that there is no art in these disciplines, is holding us back (i.e. diminishing our culture, and hindering recruitment).
Your point about purpose is well taken, and I get that. I disagree about how easy it is to score the results, and there is some inherent inconsistency when you can simultaneously refer to elegant engineering and objectively measurable best possible solution, i.e. in the latter, elegance is not a criteria, i.e. unless you make it one, it which case the contradiction is self evident. But again, this isn't going to persuade you, however, if you want to refine your position, perhaps you omit the reference to elegance :)
Thank you, btw, for your comment.
Alternatively you could go full monty and build something like this http://www.megaprocessor.com/
If you want to DIY the entire chip, as in manually lay out the transistors, I suppose it can be done if you have quite a bit of experience in electrical engineering, but it'd be rather cumbersome given the 'modern' (as far as HDL tooling is modern) tooling that is already available.
FPGA path is nice, but masks are useless - and instead a HDL is needed, with the whole 'nother toolchain.
And credits to Masatoshi Shima most of all (initially from Busicom but came to work at Intel and was mostly responsible for the 8080 as well, then the Z80).
New: Scalable Vector Mask Artwork for Museum-sized Exhibits
My guess is that you have to license it from them.
Is there a diagram with all the logic gates of this CPU available somewhere?
Not sure if it's possible to tell that from this mask, I guess it is for an expert?
That might be one.
transistor level schematics are kind of unreadable at this scale. It's a better idea to represent them as blocks or at least at the gate level and notate the specifics like timing and such.