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AMD FX 8370
Dropped from shooting table. orz
Lens: ZHONG YI OPTICS FREEWALKER 20mm F2.0 SUPER MACRO 4-4.5:1
3d Collaboration with philipsheffield.4ormat.com for my forthcoming Solo Show at Unlimited Editions
I've wanted this CPU cooler for a while but had no need for it, well, after my other died it was all the excuse I needed!
This is the inside of my ShuttleX PC. The square metal plate is a heat sink covering the AMD CPU, and the attached tubes are filled with liquid to dissipate the heat. The liquid is kept in circulation by convection currents created by the difference in temperature at each end.
This is Jesse adding the thermal compound to the top of his CPU. This part is not an exact science and always scares me the most; especially since it's dealing with the most expensive part of the build!
295/365
Back at the turn of the millenium, when I still built my own computers rather than buying them off the shelf, this was my processor. It was my first processor faster than 1gig and I was a big fan of AMD for making that kind of power affordable. Today it's so much junk. I shelved the machine when the motherboard went bad and finally got around to recycling it last weekend but I couldn't let this CPU go - it sits on my desk - a reminder of our recent and evolving past.
Ah, memories. January 1985! This is a photo of a design I did for a 6809 based CPU board for an arcade machine. It was put into production as drawn here.
The design incorporates battery backed up ram, volatile ram, rom, watchdog "kick" timer to restart the system if it lost its mind, powerfail and static sensor (people were always trying to confuse these machines) real time clock, stereo sound generation, stereo amplifiers, serial port, and parallel I/O for controls and graphics board connections. It also has an SS-30 compatible memory-mapped card bus.
The graphics board was a 16 color, semi-vector design; you wrote 8-bit X and Y positions to it, and an 8-bit code that specified the color in one nybble, and optionally increment / decrement for the X and Y position after writing. This architecture allows you to implement Bresenham's algorithms for line and circle drawing with the hardware doing much of the work; it also allows very easy pseudo-sprites, you just code up a stream of bytes, write an XY position, then code each byte with the appropriate XY modification to put the next data for the sprite in whatever place you wanted. If you went so far as to include an outer edge on the sprite code that was the backdrop color, and then made certain that you moved them only one pixel at a time, they'd even erase behind themselves, removing any need for keeping track of sprite state. Writing a complete sprite was a matter of simply sending X, Y and then one byte per pixel to the interface without further specific positioning data; the XY increment/decrement on each pixel ensured that the drawing continued in the right place. The bottom line was you could write the pixels in a sprite or draw a line or circle as fast as you could write sequential bytes.
The interface, then, consisted of two bytes driven by a 6522 VIA: one byte for X, Y, and pixel data, and one byte for control to set what the other byte meant at the moment, plus some arbitrary commands such as erase display.
Eventually, I wrote a Windows based emulator for everything you see here, plus the graphics board. Still works great. Runs 6809 Flex for the operating system, has assemblers, c compilers, forth, pascal, you name it. Most important to me, and the reason why I wrote it in the first place, is that it also runs all those old arcade games I designed. :)
Back in the day, I drew everything by hand on lightly gridded paper, generally in one pass, because it was just too annoying to be sloppy and have to do it over. Me, a drafting table, a mechanical pencil, an eraser shield, an eraser and some basic green plastic templates -- which I still have. I'm a packrat, I admit it.
Did you ever imagine you could do debugging assembler really *by* hand? Using this 3x2 meter CPU demonstration model, you actually can ;-)
However it's supposed to be used for teaching purposes. It simulates an 8-bit CPU, you stick plugs labeled with asm commands in the RAM, switch bits with big switches and see the calculation steps and register contents on large lamp displays (of course not yet LEDs ;-) ).
Just funny what you stumple upon in our basement ;-)