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Ken Shirriff

There aren't many die photos of the 432 chipset, but I made this summary from various sources. The 43201 and 43202 form the "General Data Processor". The 40203 was an attached I/O co-processor. The Bus Interface and Memory Control were for fault-tolerant multiprocessor systems.
20 Apr 2023 at 15:46 | Open on oldbytes.space
5 comments
Robert Hollingshead :donor: replied to Ken

@kenshirriff wow. I didn't know iNTEL made this and it fits neatly into my fantasy world where one could increase processing power by adding hardware to the existing hardware. You could upgrade without having to throw out the old stuff immediately. I know the nuance would kill such a thing but a person can dream.

I'm wondering if this was inspired by LISP?

Thanks for sharing

20 Apr 2023 at 16:02 | Open on infosec.exchange
Ken Shirriff replied to Robert Hollingshead :donor:

@0xF21D I don't think there was any Lisp influence on the iAPX 432. It was inspired by object-oriented languages, specifically Ada.

20 Apr 2023 at 16:13 | Open on oldbytes.space
Kristofer Younger replied to Ken

@kenshirriff @0xF21D my 432 had the Ada compiler. it took hours to compile “hello.adb”. had access to it at Purdue. it was 1983 i think. my summer job was learning Green Ada, at Honeywell SRC.

20 Apr 2023 at 23:10 | Open on me.dm
Ken Shirriff replied to Ken

Taking the Instruction Decoding Unit die photos was a bit tricky because the die is encased in a paperweight. Thanks to moylecroft for loaning me the paperweight.
Chips-on-board photo by @brouhaha (CC BY-SA 2.0) commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil
Die photos of 43204/43205 from Intel/CHM.
20 Apr 2023 at 16:11 | Open on oldbytes.space
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