AMD Athlon K7 Easter egg has a revolver and map of Texas etched onto the chip | Hacker News Reader

AMD Athlon K7 Easter egg has a revolver and map of Texas etched onto the chip

pcgamer.com

Fun factoid: Chips need to have patterns, even where there is nothing to print! This is because you want the acid etchant to be consumed the same way everywhere. So you choose a random repeating pattern that has the same density as your other signals density; it will serves no purpose other than consuming nitric acid. But you have freedom in choosing the exact shape.

Source: a friend of mine working at a chip company 20 years ago. They considered disparaging the competition billions of time in tiny 250nm letters. It occurred right after a patent dispute where it was highly likely they had reverse-engineered part of their design. A disdainful message only their competitor would read, to the tune of "we know you're cheating, and fart in your general direction". It was mostly a joke though, they did not go through with it.

----

AMD's one is only in one corner of the chip, so I don't think it applies here.

----

EDIT: this was a long time ago. Seems like filling has evolved quite a lot [1]. Timing, signal integrity, and probably capacitance too are so constrained nowadays you can no longer write a personalized message to your competitors.

[1] https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/materials/fill...

Then why no anime girls etched in chips yet?

Seems we're slowly getting there, we've only gotten as far as to making the casing/fan covers "anime inspired" so far, ignoring individual custom mods of course.

- Radeon RX 7900 Sakura - https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/yeston-rx-7900-xtx-sak...

- MAXSUN Geforce RTX 4070 Ti iCraft Limited Edition - https://www.amazon.com/Geforce-iCraft-OC-Graphics-Computer/d...

Chips was a mistake

So someone is selling a GPU with an anime furry with huge boobs and thick thighs? What kind of consumers do they have in mind?

People who thinks sticking anime girls on their PC cases is not enough, I guess.

Kemonomimi ≠ furry

kemonomimi is essentially sticking animal parts onto a human, so it may as well be part-furry.

it's not fully furry, but I'd be inclined to agree with the term "anime furry" if "anime" is being used as shorthand for "anime girl", I suppose.

explain how its not

Everything old is new again https://i.imgur.com/6wKkitF.jpeg

Yeah, but those had more clothes on, and no animal body parts or gigantic human body parts.

If we're being more serious here some has their own mascott anime girl for asian markets

There's PCB of course https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6...

There is a similar requirement for PCB manufacturing known as 'Thieving' - If you don't have a certain amount of copper, plating will not be uniform.

See: https://resources.altium.com/p/what-thieving-pcbs-and-why-it...

The Soviets used to reverse engineer and clone DEC VAX computers. When the DEC engineers heard about this, they added a message in Russian to one of their CVAX CPUs: "VAX - when you care enough to steal the very best"

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

«Когда вы заботите довольно воровать настоящий лучшей»

Doesn’t parse grammatically, but close enough.

Soviets replicated all sort of stuff, 8bit controllers, all the way up to i386.

They even cloned IBM mainframes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM

The message was no doubt a parody of the Hallmark (greeting card company) advertising tagline of "When you care enough to send the very best".

Maybe you touched upon the real meaning here.. attention competitors DONT MESS WITH TEXAS (bang!)

This is especially fascinating to me because I have such a K7 chip right next to me! I never had one in their heyday but built a K7 rig last year to test AGP 8x cards. It's a pretty impressive chip and my fastest retro CPU. Paired with a fast AGP card, it handles HL2 and Doom 3 pretty well.

These were the last 32-bit chips from AMD before they introduced AMD64 to the world with the Athlon64. They would eventually gain dual-channel DDR memory with KT880 chipset, the last mainstream 32-bit AMD consumer chipset in 2004. [0]

[0] https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/mainboard/724-via-kt880-chips...

I also have mine right next to me, but instead of upgrading to KT880, I downgraded to KT133 board with an ISA slot for my Sound Blaster 16. I really wanted a KT133A with 133MHz FSB, but no luck. Those boards are so hard to find.

> The gun and speeding bullet? Well, that's anyone's guess.

Seems like a Superman reference to me.

Fastest gun in the west?

As an europoor my American geography is rusty but afaik Texas isn't really in the west, but more in the middle-south, no?

Texas at one point in history represented the frontier-border for 19th century US expansion.

"The West" refers to everything west of the Appalachian Mountains or the Mississippi River. It comes from the early eras of the USA when those portions of the country were unexplored and perceived to be "wild". This is related to why the "Midwest" starts at Ohio.

It's arbitrary. We generally refer to "West" as 'West of the Mississippi River'. Mid-West as Ohio-ish to around the Mississippi River (i.e. Midwest (Ohio, Indiana); Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois)).

A lot of us still refer to Texas; Iowa; Nebraska; Missouri; etc... as just 'mid-west'. California, Oregon as 'West Coast'; Washington as 'Upper/Northwest Coast'; Arizona/New Mexico as Southwest; and Wyoming/Nevada as West.

Goes back to the days of expansionism in the early to mid-1800's, Texas and the Mississippi River were the "East/West" dividing line. Texas, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma also have the standard 'west' cartoon and movie stereotype (cowboys; saloons; tumbleweed; desert; etc...). In the mid-west it's more field or forest. And freezing cold wind. Lots of freezing cold wind.

I was born and raised in Idaho and have lived in Seattle for over 10 years and I have never heard anyone say “Upper coast”. Washington is part of the “west coast” or “northwest”.

I didn't mean "Upper Coast", I implied Upper West Coast with my slash, which is a common referral to northern Oregon and Washington around here. Probably not clear in my reply.

Ah, understood. Where is "here"? I have literally never heard "Upper West Coast" in my life.

Eastern PA, Upper West Coast is what I've typically learned it's called. Interchangeable with Northwest Coast. To be fair, it's also normal to say redup; youse; jawns; werter; hoagie. Regional dialects are nuts.

I live in Houston. Let me try to frame this for you.

Texas as an idea is considered part of the American west, but as with most things it's more complicated than that.

Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso, at the western edge.

Eastern Texas starts out looking like the rest of the southeast -- lush, green, piney. The coastal part, or at least the part closer to Louisiana, is very like Louisiana with plenty of wetlands and live oaks and whatnot.

But that thins out quickly, and within a couple hundred miles Texas starts to look more like "movie Texas" and becomes more stereotypically West.

(A fun flip side to all this is that a simple majority of Texans -- which is to say, just slightly more than 50% -- live in the metro area of Houston or the combined metro area of Dallas-Ft Worth. The bulk of the rest live in and around Austin or San Antonio. Almost NO ONE lives in Texas between San Antonio and the western side of the state, comparatively speaking.)

> Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso

In fact, Austin, the state capital, is farther away from El Paso than it is to any of the states (or country) that Texas borders. Or put another way: El Paso, which is in the middle of a desert, is closer to the Pacific Ocean (via the Gulf of California) than its own state capital.

While we're on the subject of the vastness of Texas, Big Bend National Park is a true wonder and definitely worth a visit.

> Texas is absurdly large

I love your state and hope to be there for the 2024 Total Eclipse in April. (RV parking for a night, anyone, lol?)

But yeah, driving the great state of Texas takes some time, doesn't it? o_O

I was surprised when I started to scroll maps and trip plan .. and I'm saying this as a Canadian -- most of our 10 provinces and all of our 3 territories are bigger in area than Texas but a whole lot less populated. Looking forward to Texas splendour...

I don't think it happens much with North Americans, but it's pretty common for folks from farther away (Europe, Asia) to think they could "day trip" between Texas cities, or out to Big Bend or whatever. It's just not reasonable. The distances are too far.

I have done a day trip to Austin before, for a business meeting booked on short notice, but that's 170ish miles one way. It sucked. And no, rail isn't really a usable thing.

In 30 years in Texas, I have FLOWN from Houston to Dallas more often than I've driven there.

>Texas is absurdly large

You weren't kidding. I just checked a map and Texas is as wide as France and Germany combined. No wonder Americans can afford to all have single family homes with so much space.

> No wonder Americans can afford to all have single family homes with so much space

I live in one of the many states both smaller and less densely populated than Texas. As someone who immigrated to the US from a tightly-packed Asian country, the argument against immigration on the basis of "there's no room" never made any sense...

Texas is definitely NOT densely populated. Apparently, despite the large cities (Dallas-FtWorth and Houston mostly), we still only rank 30th in the US.

Texas ranks 2nd in terms of population (29M; only CA has more) and also area (261,000 square miles; Alaska is more than 2x as large), so our overall density is nothing of note. Texans are VERY unevenly distributed -- a simple majority of us live in the metro areas of either Dallas-Ft Worth or Houston. It's like 70% if you include San Antonio and Austin.

And there's a LOT of big empty space west of all those cities.

So the US has a system of higher-speed expressways we call Interstates. They all have numbers.

The southernmost east-west Interstate is called 10 ("I-10"), and runs from Jacksonville, FL (which is on the Atlantic Ocean) to Los Angeles, CA (which is, obviously, on the Pacific).

These highways have frequent, standardized signs on them from time to time to tell you how far away upcoming cities, towns, or even roads are in miles. Just inside the eastern border of Texas, on the westbound side, there's a highway sign that I'm pretty sure just exists as a flex or brag.

It says something like -- and my numbers may be slightly off, but they're roughly correct at least:

Beaumont 18

El Paso 857

The gist is "one place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is 20 minutes away; another place in this state, on this road, straight ahead, is MOST OF A THOUSAND MILES AWAY."

I believe it's true that crossing Texas on I-10 constitutes about 1/3 of the distance across the US -- like, it's about 1/3 from Jacksonville to the border, about 1/3 across Texas, and about 1/3 from El Paso in the west to LA. There's a highway sign on Interstate 10 just inside the TX/LA border, and I'm pretty sure it just exists as a flex.

> Texas is absurdly large

The second largest state in the union.

> Texas is absurdly large -- there's 800+ miles between the Louisiana border and El Paso, at the western edge.

California is 1000+ miles north-south, albeit only 560 miles east-west.

And Alaska is several Texas' in size.

> Alaska is several Texas' in size

To the chagrin of Texans, were Alaska to be split in half, Texas would be the third-largest state ;-)

The existence of OTHER very large states doesn't make Texas NOT large.

A Texan once boasted to an Israeli about the size of his fields: "If I get in my car at dawn and drive all day, I still won't have reached the end of my fields!"

The Israeli sighs and replies, "Yeah, I know. I once had a car like that."

(For comparison, Israel is a whole country, and in some places is less than 6 miles wide total!)

I heard that joke told about two ranchers in Texas. I like it a lot.

The other answers are good, but calling Texas part of "the West" can be justified even now on the basis of population density. The median north-south population line has not reached the Mississippi even as of 2020 - it's in southwestern Indiana.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_...

Wow! Never seen the Great Migration depicted like that before. Fascinating.

The reference is to Superman, who was often described in Golden Age comics as "faster than a speeding bullet".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com