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Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 06 2020, @11:46PM   
from the free-as-in-beer dept.

looorg writes:

Google is offering to produce free chips for you. They have to be open source, they are using 20 year old technology and you'll get 100 of them. Could someone reverse engineer a SID-chip and have Goggle start to crank those suckers out?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/open_chip_hardware/
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk

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Original Submission

• 130 nm process node 130 nm process node (Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:03AM (3 children)

  by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:03AM (#1017481) Journal

  Seems like that's not too bad. Opteron Sledgehammer, PPC G5, Xeon Northwood, and SPARC 64 V are all in that range. A RISC V chip in that process node would be interesting indeed. The MOS 6581 SID Chip is 7 µm by comparison, they used technology that was current in 1974 to get higher yields and hence cheaper chips; state of the art in 1981 when it was being developed was in the 1.5 µm range. A whole C64 SOC complete with a VIC II, SID, 6502 core, 64k RAM, and all the other support circuitry would be more than feasible with a 130 nm process.

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• Re:130 nm process node Re:130 nm process node (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:19AM (2 children)

  by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:19AM (#1017488) Journal

  Now factor in the maximum die size: 10mm².

  I'm not sure about the Xeon but most of the Northwood [intel.com] products seem to have been based on a 131 mm² die.

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  • Re:130 nm process node Re:130 nm process node (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:44AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:44AM (#1017511)

    Emulating old systems seems to be the realm of Rpi 4 videos on youtube.

    SNES machine that dual boots into a 2GS?

    GS/OS would absolutely fly at 1000 times its original clock speed.

    Parent

    • Re:130 nm process node (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:06AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:06AM (#1017514) Journal

      RPi 4 just moved to a 28nm node, from 40nm. I'm guessing die size is somewhere between 80 and 100 mm².

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