Whatever happend to 65T32(Terbium)?

[Alienthe]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

White Flame wrote:

Alienthe wrote:

In aircraft design you have one such example: SR-71. And it flies every bit as fast as you can imagine when you see it on the ground.

The thing leaks JP-7 all over the place until its skin gets hot enough at speed to expand and seal. I wouldn't quite call that elegant.

The environmentalist whackos would have a field day suing Lockheed and everyone around them over some jet fuel drips.

I think the standard excuse that JP-7 was derived from K9-P, very environmental...

Quote:

Never mind that during the height of the cold war, especially when Brezhnev was running things in the old Soviet Union, the existence of technology like the Blackbird was definitely a game-changer. However, it's probably good that the Blackbird was retired when it was.

Why? It worked and worked well. I have a preference for using what does the job without going way over the top technologically. To take an example from that era: Skylab fell down. Two space shuttles were lost and other missions were scrapped due to malfunctions in systems with complexities that went too far too fast. At the same time Soviet Mir stayed in orbit way after its original expectancy.

Quote:

Whether a Blackbird ever flies again, or not, it will always be a monument to the visionary thinking of Kelly Johnson and his crew, just as the 6502 will always be a monument to the brainpower that was embodied in Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch.

Yes. Incidentally I hear a few SR-71 flights were done under the first Iraq war.

While we are on an enjoyable tangent, I'd like to add that culture goes beyond the designers, it also becomes part of the users. Like the marvellous designs of Woz.

As for SR-71 pilts, or sled drivers, they were the King of Speed:http://www.jumbojoke.com/the_king_of_speed.html
(The preface states it is not sure if the story is true. However it is from the book by Brian Shul.)

[ElEctric_EyE]

White Flame wrote:

Alienthe wrote:

In aircraft design you have one such example: SR-71. And it flies every bit as fast as you can imagine when you see it on the ground.

The thing leaks JP-7 all over the place until its skin gets hot enough at speed to expand and seal. I wouldn't quite call that elegant. ...

I would when you consider that it was built over 30 yrs ago!
I've heard this also, about it leaking fuel through 1inch gaps until some of the titanium parts in the engine expand enough to seal better...
I had to post as I came across a link with the SR-71 pictured at the front, while I was catching up on some news today.

BTW, I thought the SR-71 was retired a few years ago, with NASA obtaining one for study.

EDIT: I see I am wrong. It's over 40+yrs old and NASA got 3 before it was retired over 10 years ago. If you click the read more under the SR-71 pic, the full history is here.

[whartung]

I had the privilege to see one of these at an air show, not just a static display, but they had it take off as well. Pilot in a space suit, afterburners, the whole kit. Pretty exciting.

[BigEd]

That (excellent) King of Speed story is found on Schul's own site here:
SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower
http://www.econrates.com/reality/schul.html

Same pilot, different anecdote, "how slow can it go?"
http://tailspinstales.blogspot.com/2010 ... kbird.html

[ElEctric_EyE]

Excellent reads BigEd! Thanks for posting those!

[Tor]

I once tracked an SR-71 by satellite.. at one of its stops at a semi-secret airport it must have landed a bit too hard and its military-frequency emergency location transmitter was switched on (that's quite a common occurrence with those in-tail-mounted ELTs). That thing was flying _fast_. It landed at another airport, then continued back home to the US. (Of course the only reason I knew it had to be an SR-71 was because of its extreme speed plus the particular airports it visited. No Concorde in those areas.)

-Tor

[Velociraptor]

It seems 65T32 was to be a 32 bit, 16 bit bus CPU... At least according to some little info I managed to find while Googleing. Seems not competitive enough with ARM v7, although I did see some 32/16 bit ARM v7 chips(from Marvell, if my memory hasn't failed me).
I wonder if WDC has ever finished work on it and if it's available as IP.

[GARTHWILSON]

So maybe the '832 is not dead?
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7b2 ... 24c71c1c99 (and programmable microcontrollers coming too, something WDC has always lacked)
http://65xx.com/65xxcelr8r-overview/boa ... 5xxcelr8r/

[BigDumbDinosaur]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

So maybe the '832 is not dead?
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7b2 ... 24c71c1c99 (and programmable microcontrollers coming too, something WDC has always lacked)
http://65xx.com/65xxcelr8r-overview/boa ... 5xxcelr8r/

The 65xx.com site almost seems to be something supported by WDC, yet some of the narrative suggests that it's an independent site. The acronym EIT is used on at least one page on WDC's official site.

[GARTHWILSON]

Yeah, I don't know what to make of it.  I signed up on their forum last night and had to wait for approval before even being able to read anything-- then I find out there's nothing to read.  There's not even a welcome post.  Nothing.  I tried to edit my profile, and the link just takes you back to the home page.  There's a partners link, and it just takes you to the definition of partners on a dictionary website.  Many of the pages have absolutely no content.  In spite of the splash picture that tries to make it all look exciting, the whole site is pretty dead, like going into a theme park and everything is shut down and there's no one there.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Yeah, I don't know what to make of it. I signed up on their forum last night and had to wait for approval before even being able to read anything-- then I find out there's nothing to read. There's not even a welcome post. Nothing. I tried to edit my profile, and the link just takes you back to the home page. There's a partners link, and it just takes you to the definition of partners on a dictionary website. Many of the pages have absolutely no content. In spite of the splash picture that tries to make it all look exciting, the whole site is pretty dead, like going into a theme park and everything is shut down and there's no one there.

I did see where some stuff can be purchased, like the SDK (there's a USB-keyed version in addition to the MAC address version). All-in-all, though, it's a strange site, with verbiage that suggests that the author was taking hits on his bong in between typing sessions.

[BigEd]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Yeah, I don't know what to make of it.

As far as the '832 is concerned, it seems to be a solid indication that WDC want to use that number to mean system development: there is no sign of a 32-bit core and I'd say the reuse of the name means there never will be.

Also interesting: whereas the '02 core on Lattice FPGA is described as running up to 42MHz, the '816 core (for which there is no open source clone, as far as I know) is described as running only up to 16MHz.
http://www.latticesemi.com/products/int ... xxmicr.cfm

I wonder if that means that the '816 core is an old code base which hasn't been revved up, compared to the '02.

Cheers
Ed

[TMorita]

IMHO a 32-bit version of the 6502 would not be competitive against other 32-bit processors.
The code density would be worse, and the clock frequency would probably be lower for a given process.
Plus, there is the enormous cost of porting a toolchain and OS, and huge support issues.

I don't think WDC has the resources to introduce a new 32-bit processor.

Toshi

[BigDumbDinosaur]

TMorita wrote:

I don't think WDC has the resources to introduce a new 32-bit processor.

I agree and also don't think that there's a market for it at this point in time. Something else to consider is that Bill Mensch is not a young guy anymore—he'll be 68 in December. I suspect his attention is more focused on maintaining WDC's income stream than on engineering a new version of the 6502. If he really thought that a 65C832 would be a viable product it would already be in existence—the preliminary data sheet for it was written long ago.

If anything new were to come out from WDC, I'd say a floating point processor should be a priority. The one real weakness of all the 65xx MPU's is limited arithmetic support, so an FPP would be a real performance enhancer. Something else that would be nice would be a 65Cxx bus-compatible DMA controller. All wishful thinking, of course.

[ElEctric_EyE]

DMA would take precedence over FPU.