I had no idea AMD was around back then!
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Yes, AMD goes way back, founded in 1969. Early products were shift registers and 4-bit counters copying Fairchild. Here's their first original product, the Am2501. A 4-bit binary counter chip introduced in 1970, this one is dated 1985. I'm working on die photos of this chip.pic.twitter.com/3T7pa2ZwZS
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Ah, memories.
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No, memories are an entirely different type of chip. :-)
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Arbitrary-length words? Or just to 8 or 16?
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Totally arbitrary. The point of bit-slice chips is you can use as many as you want to get a word size as big as you want. (
@brouhaha mentioned DEC with a 36-bit word.) AMD also made carry look-ahead chips so carry propagation wouldn't harm performance for larger word sizes.
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Nice. What are the two small dies above and below the main chip?
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Those aren't dies, but connections to the silicon substrate. The Vcc pin is connected to these. I'd attach a photo but it's just a metal square with a wire attached.
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Was trying to rationalize why this design was abandon, seemingly scalable in terms of bits. Came up with the wiring to connect them together must be a bottleneck when trying to up the speed. Am I close?
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Yes. Also, it restricts the operations you can do, e.g. shifts. The bit slice was essentially a hack back when you couldn't fit the whole processor onto a chip.
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