Gregory's ServerThe weaving of a Pentium is so accurate that I could label the functional blocks of the processor. Amusingly, the gallery hung the weaving backward. The wrong side is facing outward, so the chip is mirrored. I had to flip the image to make this diagram. 2/6
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 Marilou Schultz, the artist, learned weaving as a child and is part of four generations of weavers. She used wool from the Navajo-Churro sheep along with traditional plant dyes. She worked from an Intel photo of the die (shown below) and used the "raised outline" weaving technique to make the borders of chip regions more visible. The lack of symmetry made the project challenging. 4/6 Marilou Schultz also created a weaving "Untitled (Unknown Chip)", 2008. Antoine Bercovici identified it for me as the AMD K6 III processor. These weavings are part of an exhibition "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction". The exhibition is no longer at the National Gallery of Art but will be at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) in November and the Museum of Modern Art (New York) next April. 5/6 For more information on the Pentium weaving, see my latest post: https://www.righto.com/2024/08/pentium-navajo-fairchild-shiprock.html 6/6 @kenshirriff This reminds me of this sequence in the Koyaanisqatsi movie where we’re shown aerial views of a city and then…  @kenshirriff .. this is going to confuse A LOT alien archaeologist species that will come in some millennia to a desert earth and will find "ancient remains" of "human tech" .. and so those legends/rumours/theories will be born ... "Maybe the humans had a knowledge we don't have to create chips using organic materials ?" 😅
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@artandtechnic It must have been an interesting workshop! I see that Marilou Schultz is giving another workshop in October, in Rochester. @kenshirriff @artandtechnic it was an incredibly interesting workshop and I felt really lucky to have the opportunity to attend. Marylou taught it with her sister and we learned how to assemble the upright loom, setup the weft and the basics of weaving.  @lopta @artandtechnic Sorry, the weaving workshop is in Rochester NY. I went looking for an old Nat.Geog. article that showed Navaho women actually making circuit boards for Fairchild Semiconductor, because they could remember the complex patterns.  @kenshirriff I came across this blog post by chance, rapidly emailed it to a bunch of people, and then saw you had a mastodon account so I want to thank you for causing me to email my mother and friends about an interesting thing. @kenshirriff  @kenshirriff I remember my 486DX4-100 being much faster than a P1-75. :]  @tth The TLB is the Translation Lookaside Buffer. It is used for memory management, caching mappings from virtual memory to physical memory. @kenshirriff Has anyone asked the gallery about why it was hung that way, or if they actually know it is backwards? @ancients I asked the artist who wove the rug to see if the backward pattern was intentional. From her perspective, a Navajo rug doesn't have a front or back, and she didn't realize that it made a difference from a hardware perspective. She didn't think it made sense to contact the museum since it was near the end of the exhibition. But maybe I should contact the next museum.  @kenshirriff @ancients please don't spoiler, rather log where it was "right and where it was wrong-sided". Each year at the Christmas market sets up this kind of abomination (inspired by artisanal pyramids driven by the rising gas from candles) and I'm always curious if they attach the electricity right or not, resulting in correct or incorrect rotation.  @kenshirriff @ancients filing a technical bug report on a textile display is next-level  @kenshirriff they don’t have to fix it, but you should totally let them know it’s backwards |
The weaving is not just a Pentium but specifically the P54C revision of the original Pentium. The first Pentium chips were too hot and slow. Intel fixed this by a) moving from 800 nm to 600 nm, b) dropping the voltage from 5V to 3.3V, and c) adding a clock driver that could stop the clock to idle parts of the chip. Intel also added 200,000 transistors to support multiprocessing; circuitry that is visible in the rug. My photo shows the P5 on the left and the smaller P54C on the right. 3/6