Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

They have been masters of second sourcing things for a long time! One can ony imagine the complexity of the Intel cross licensing deals.

Company founded by Marc Verdiell in his garage, and later acquired by Intel which was going on a optoelectronics buying spree. The division was later sold off in 2023 of course during more difficult times: www.theregister.com/2023/10/31/intel_silicon_photonics_jabil/

On Crunchbase: www.crunchbase.com/organization/lightlogic

It's hard to understand exactly what the company did by Googling it nowadays. Sad and usual fate. Presumably something related to transceiver for fiber-optic communication. Only the patents remain: patents.google.com/?assignee=lightlogic&oq=lightlogic to tell its story to the brave.

Marc Verdiell is a human electrical engineer best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel.

Marc made $58.4m from the sale of LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in 2001:

Register transfer level is the abstraction level at which computer chips are mostly designed.

The only two truly relevant RTL languages as of 2020 are: Verilog and VHDL. Everything else compiles to those, because that's all that EDA vendors support.

Much like a C compiler abstracts away the CPU assembly to:

Compilers for RTL languages such as Verilog and VHDL abstract away the details of the specific semiconductor technology used for those exact same reasons.

The compilers essentially compile the RTL languages into a standard cell library.

Examples of companies that work at this level include:

Hyperthreding is the Intel brand-name, TODO generic name.

Borrow from the Internet Archive for free: archive.org/details/supermenstory00murr

Initial chapters put good clarity on the formation of the military-industrial complex. Being backed by the military, especially just after World War II, was in itself enough credibility to start and foster a company.

It is funny to see how the first computers were very artisanal, made on a one-off basis.

Amazing how Control Data Corporation raised capital IPO style as a startup without a product. The dude was selling shares at dinner parties in his home.

Very interesting mention on page 70 of how Israel bought CDC's UNIVAC 1103 which Cray contributed greatly to design, and everyone knew that it was to make thermonuclear weapons, since that was what the big American labs like this mention should be added to: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel but that's Extended Protected... the horrors of Wikipedia.

Another interesting insight is how "unintegrated" computers were back then. They were literally building computers out of individual vacuum tubes, then individual semiconducting transistors, a gate at a time. Then things got more and more integrated as time went. That is why the now outdated word "microprocessor" existed. When processors start to fit into a single integrated circuit, they were truly micro compared to the monstrosities that existed previously.

Also, because integration was so weak initially, it was important to more manually consider the length of wire signals had to travel, and try to put components closer together to reduce the critical path to be able to increase clock speeds. These constraints are also of course present in modern computer design, but they were just so much more visible in those days.

The book does unfortunately not give much detail in Crays personal life as mentioned on this book review: www.goodreads.com/review/show/1277733185?book_show_action=true. His childhood section is brief, and his wedding is described in one paragraph, and divorce in one sentence. Part of this is because he was very private about his family most likely note how Wikipedia had missed his first wedding, and likely misattribute children to the second wedding; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Seymour_Cray section "Weddings and Children".

Crays work philosophy is is highlighted many times in the book, and it is something worthy to have in mind:

Cray's final downfall was when he opted to try to use a promising but hard to work with material gallium arsenide instead of silicon as his way to try and speed up computers, see also: gallium arsenide vs silicon. Also, he went against the extremely current of the late 80's early 90's pointing rather towards using massively parallel systems based on silicon off-the-shelf Intel processors, a current that had DARPA support, and which by far the path that won very dramatically as of 2020, see: Intel supercomputer market share.

Intel is known to have created customized chips for very large clients.

This is mentioned e.g. at: www.theregister.com/2021/03/23/google_to_build_server_socs/Those chips are then used only in large scale server deployments of those very large clients. Google is one of them most likely, given their penchant for Google custom hardware.

TODO better sources.