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Ken Shirriff

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

16 comments
Ken Shirriff

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

Ken Shirriff

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

Badibulgator

@kenshirriff This reminds me of this sequence in the Koyaanisqatsi movie where we’re shown aerial views of a city and then…

youtu.be/RSINqSvSVyM?t=350

Giles Goat

@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 ?" 😅

[DATA EXPUNGED]
Ken Shirriff

@artandtechnic It must have been an interesting workshop! I see that Marilou Schultz is giving another workshop in October, in Rochester.

Lucienne Kennedy

@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.

Roy Brander

@kenshirriff

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.
But I think that was the 1970s article "The Computer", and what I still have is the 1982 issue on "The Chip", and it contributes this semi-relevant picture.
"Semi", because that's NOT a rug, but a model; it's how they had to review chip designs before you could do CAD zoom-ins.

Passepartout

@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.

KCRouth 🍻

@kenshirriff
this is so cool. I posted it separately before seeing your posting here. I love reading your articles and following your projects.

seismo!allegra!utzoo

@kenshirriff sure looks like Death Cab for Cutie album cover from 2008.

Rue Mohr

@kenshirriff I remember my 486DX4-100 being much faster than a P1-75. :]
... and my ALU worked properly.

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