Richard Erlacher wrote:
> Another thing to keep in mind is that most CPU's of yesteryear are not
> integrated circuits, but, rather, board(s) full of the them. I remember looking
> at a 16-bit CPU from some Florida company that was being customed up by my then
> local circuit house and it occupied a 22x32" panel (very large for the time) of
> 5-layer circuit board, all in STTL. The outer layers were intended not so much
> for containing the RFI as for dissipating the heat, to wit, the entire long
> outer edges of the board was mounted to a 3-1/2" square heatsink that drew heat
> from the board and had fans attached specially provided to manage this board's
> dissipation requirement. It was quite a thing to behold!
>
> see additional remarks below, plz.
>
> Dick
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ben Franchuk" <bfranchuk_at_jetnet.ab.ca>
> To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 10:13 PM
> Subject: Re: CPU design at the gate level
>
> > >What's unfortunate, at least from where I sit, is that though some sources
> give
> > >you a schematic or an HDL of a CPU, yet they don't tell you WHY the choices
> made
> > >in its design were made. Normally such decisions are normally driven by
> > >requirements, be it for performance, or for specific addressing modes, chip
> > >size, or whatever. It seems we never see light shed on such matters.
> >
> > Sometimes you can find this information on the web. Now that many of the
> > older computers are of historical value people are writing things down.
> >
> > >One caution is certainly warranted, however. Fully synchronous design became
> > >the default method of designing circuits of anysubstance in the mid-late
> '80's.
> > >One result, of course, was that signal races were easily avoided, and, with
> the
> > >use of pipelining, it allowed for the acceleration of some processes at the
> cost
> > >of increased latency. The use of fully sunchronous design drove up CPU cost,
> > >however, and was not an automatically assumed strategy in the early '70's, so
> > >you've got to consider WHEN a design was specified before making any
> assumptions
> > >about why things were done in a given way.
> >
> > I thought that that was due more to the fact (core) memory was
> > asynchronous with a wide
> > range of cycle times as well as I/O transfers. Only with memory being in
> > the same box as
> > the cpu does a more synchronous system make sense.
> >
> > >Classic CPU's were mostly NOT fully synchronous, as fully synchronous design
> > >required the use of costlier faster logic families throughout a design when
> that
> > >wasn't necessarily warranted. Today's FPGA and CPLD devices, when used to
> host
> > >a classic CPU design, eliminate the justifications for asynchronous design
> > >strategies that were popular in the early '70's - late '80's. Their use
> > >essentially requires the design be synchronous, not only because signal
> > >distribution/routing resources are limited, but because propagation delays
> are
> > >so different from what they were in the original discrete version.
> >
> > What is so different a F/F is still a F/F, a gate is still a gate. It is
> > only that
> > routing delays are a unknown so you can't use logic that requires timing
> > delays or
> > or oneshots. It is only that the programs can't discover when logic can
> > or cannot change
> > like a designer can but must use worse case assumptions .It is only in
> > the case when you
> > have a single clock that timing calculations are the most accurate.
> >
> Not all CPU chips of yesteryear were even built with clocked logic. If you look
> at the ones with a single clock cycle for a single bus cycle, e.g. 6800, et. al,
> you'll find that the clock was a useable as a steering member and a timing
> reference, but not necessarily a clock to a set of registers. I'd say FlipFlops
> of the R/S and transparent latch sort were much more common than those used for
> counting. In fact, I recently revisited the 650x core recently and found that
> it could and probably should be built with no clocked flipflops at all, using
> the ALU to increment the PC and stack pointer as well as operating on the data
> registers. That's what reduced the poundage of silicon in the 650x series
> chips, which, aside from their very elegant instruction set, is what bought them
> their market share.
> >
> What's different is that the style of design that was used back when the
> classics were being worked out was so different from what's done today. Back
> then, fully synchronous design meant that all the devices used were of the same
> technology and that meant cost impacts whenever fully sunchronous rather than
> locally asynchronous, globally syncrhonized structure was used, since that meant
> that a nand gate had to have two dual-rank registered inputs and a registered
> ouput. Which immediately raised the cost of that 30-cent gate to $4.80. Back
> then arrays were a sea of gates, and things changed depending on which gate of
> the 4000-6000 identical nands in the array you were using. Today, a small array
> consists of a putative 100K gates, of which one's lucky to be able to get the
> equivalent of 10K gates in actual practice. Of course they count a 3-input gate
> as two gates and a 4-input gate as three, and a D-flop as over a dozen, rather
> than the 6 it should really use. Then there's that LUT, which , to the
> marketing department represents a lot of logic, even though you have to use the
> whole thing just to make a single 5-input AND. Consider how much of the
> marketing departments resources you consume with what would have been a 74S133.
> >
> > How ever I suspect most CPU design starts with a clean sheet of paper
> > lays out goals and basic
> > design parameters. A good block diagram often can tell you how complex
> > your system is.
> > While gates are important the quantify and packaging of the gates define
> > just how your system
> > can be laid out. Only after the instruction set is defined do you look
> > at the logic need
> > to produce the Computer System, and once you lay things out you have
> > good idea of
> > what instructions are needed. Of course everything gets revised again
> > and again.
> >
> Well, if you put pencil to paper before the instruction set is defined, and
> before the requirements are firmly defined, you're wasting time, and, sadly, I
> doubt that many CPU designs start on a clean sheet of paper these days. They
> certainly didn't back in the "old days." There's always the political baggage.
> >
> > http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Saving_Bell_Books for some
> > interesting reading.
> > Also "CMOS circuit design,layout and simulation" ISBN 0-7803-3416-7 is
> > very good reading for CPU design at the real gate level.
>
> > Ben Franchuk.
> > --
> > Standard Disclaimer : 97% speculation 2% bad grammar 1% facts.
> > "Pre-historic Cpu's" http://www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk
> > Now with schematics.
> >
> >
--
Standard Disclaimer : 97% speculation 2% bad grammar 1% facts.
"Pre-historic Cpu's" http://www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk
Now with schematics.
Received on Wed Oct 31 2001 - 09:37:23 GMT