techlife

  I am typing this on a computer that has a total of 56 processing units inside of it. 8 performance cores. 4 efficiency cores. 16 GPU cores and finally 16 Neural cores. It has 28 billion transistors. It runs at up to 4.5GHz. It has 24 GB of system memory. It has 512GB of solid-state storage. All this compute power in its entirety fits into an enclosure that is 5”(w) x 5”(l) x 2”(h) inches in size. Progress. So let’s go back in time. A time when we had single processor machines that ran between 1 and 4 Mhz. 64 KB of RAM if we were lucky. No onboard long-term storage – for that a tape drive was needed. Or if you were lucky a floppy disk drive.  The Commodore 64 was special though. It had special sauce. That came in the form of custom chips known as VIC and SID. Although I guess they sound like two old characters down the local pub VIC (Video Interface Chip) and SID (Sound Interface Device) were extremely important in defining the Commodore 64 experience. The heart of machi...