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The Chip Letter

thechipletter.substack.com

Computer history and architecture. Click to read The Chip Letter, by Babbage, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Computing historyCPU / microarchitectureHardware

’22’23’24’25’26
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204 from 28 Aug 2022 to 13 Oct 2026
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monthly (21 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 18

  1. Pat Gelsinger : Why This is the Best Time to Build Hardware
  2. Arm & SoftBank: Part 1- Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
  3. The Air Computer
  4. The Innovative HP Computer Behind a Hedge Fund Pioneer
  5. Where will RISC-V be in 20 Years? Poll Results
  6. RISC-V : What Really Matters
  7. Apple and AI : Siri the Early Years
  8. The Secret Life of Computers
  9. Floating Point: The Origin Story
  10. Arm, the UK and Apple
  11. Intel Inside the Micro Revolution: 8008 Origins
  12. The Infinity Man
  13. Arm Makes Chips!
  14. Compatibility and Fragmentation in the AI Era
  15. Nvidia's Groq Plot Thickens
  16. The Origins and Limitations of AMD's Historic Revival
  17. Intel's Larabee Legacy
  18. Qualcomm's Ventana RISC-V Acquisition

2025 29

  1. Jensen Groks Groq
  2. TPU Mania
  3. Qualcomm's Hexagon AI Accelerators
  4. Nexperia's Long History, Tangled Present and Uncertain Future
  5. Obsolescence
  6. Arm's Chief Architect on the History of the Arm Architecture
  7. The PC was never a true 'IBMer'
  8. How Big was IBM?
  9. Intel in Oz
  10. Source Control
  11. Turing Award Histories
  12. Mips
  13. Huang's Law
  14. The End of Simplification: Intel Abandons X86S
  15. Apple In China
  16. Personal Computer Origins: The Datapoint 2200
  17. Markdown and Substack - A Bear Workflow
  18. The birth, rise and eclipse of the personal computer
  19. David Patterson on Software Engineering Daily
  20. COBOLers
  21. Nvidia's PTX
  22. The Soul of an Old Machine
  23. Happy 18th Birthday CUDA!
  24. Modern Baby
  25. Robert Noyce And The Road To El Dorado
  26. Learning Assembly for Fun, Performance and Profit
  27. Back to the Future with Gordon Moore
  28. Qualcomm’s RISC Pays Off; Arm’s Dogs Don’t Bark
  29. The Engine

2024 45

  1. The Nvidia Way
  2. Innovation, Customers and Scale: A Positive Vision for Intel's (Foundry) Future
  3. Qualcomm RISCs, Arm Pulls: The Legal Battle for the Future of Client Computing
  4. Wafer Scale - Trilogy Systems: Part 2
  5. Dylan and Jon on the Dwarkesh Podcast
  6. Wafer Scale - Trilogy Systems: Part 1
  7. Intel's Transformation 2.0
  8. Tock, Tock, Tock, Zen
  9. How Intel Missed the iPhone: XScale Era
  10. Pico Pi RISC-V
  11. Intel’s Immiseration
  12. Computer Architecture: Foundational Reading
  13. Intel Everywhere - The 8051 in Detail
  14. Intel Everywhere
  15. Updating 'About the Chip Letter'
  16. New to The Chip Letter? Start Here!
  17. What killed the 68000?
  18. SPUR - RISC IV: The LISP Multiprocessor Workstation
  19. Demystifying NPUs: Questions & Answers
  20. The Alchemy of Scale Transformation
  21. Motorola's 68000 Series: Its Rise in Ten Computers
  22. SOAR-ing with Smalltalk: Berkeley RISC-III
  23. Compiler Explorer
  24. A History of C Compilers - Part 1: Performance, Portability and Freedom
  25. The Invention of the Integrated Circuit : Jean Hoerni's Patent Notebook
  26. More on x86
  27. The Paradox of x86
  28. AI Accelerators: The Cambrian Explosion
  29. Nvidia's Superman
  30. Google's First Tensor Processing Unit : Architecture
  31. Demystifying GPU Compute Software
  32. Motorola's 6809: The Best 8-Bit?
  33. Morris Chang, TSMC and Japan
  34. Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Origins
  35. John C. Dvorak on Intel's First Neural Network Chip
  36. Eight More '8-Bit Era' Microprocessors
  37. 100 Years of 'IBM'
  38. Introducing Chiplets
  39. Satya Nadella uses an IBM AS/400 in 1993
  40. Demystifying GPU Compute Architectures
  41. Intel's Inside
  42. New to The Chip Letter? Start Here!
  43. Moore on Moore
  44. Leaving Arizona
  45. Tiny Computers from Texas

2023 75

  1. 2023 : A Year In Chips
  2. 8-Bit : Learning from the Sources
  3. Motorola's Pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and Architecture
  4. Why Are There No Minicomputers Any More?
  5. The Virtues Of The 8-Bit Era : Eight Iconic Processor Designs
  6. ILLIAC IV Supercomputer : DARPA, SIMD, Fairchild and Stanley Kubrick's '2001'
  7. RISC-V : Will SiFive be a Winner?
  8. Intel vs NEC : The Case of the V20's Microcode
  9. Emulation Everywhere
  10. Apple's Mac Transitions : 68k to PowerPC to Intel to Apple Silicon
  11. No one ever got fired for buying ... Nvidia
  12. Ten Books On The History of Semiconductors
  13. GPU Compute : Costs, Trends, Huang's Law and FLOPS in the Brain
  14. Deep Thought, Deep Learning and the World's Total Computing Resources
  15. Sustaining Nvidia's Long Game
  16. Computer Architecture: Four Great Learning Resources
  17. McCulloch, Pitts, Neural Networks and the Origins of Modern Computing
  18. Happy 65th Birthday, Integrated Circuit
  19. Seven Projects Innovating Around RISC-V
  20. Inmos and the Transputer - Part 2 : Politics and Processors
  21. One Year On. Thank You!
  22. Inmos and the Transputer : Instruction Set and Architecture
  23. Inmos and the Transputer - Part 1 : Parallel Ventures
  24. RISC-V : Poll Results And A New Emulator
  25. RISC-V - Part 2: Ambitious Aims
  26. Will RISC-V become the standard for Instruction Set Architectures?
  27. Chip Letter Links No. 22 : Intel Gallatin, Nvidia, Minimal CPU, Gary Kildall, Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Twitter, Quake and more
  28. Learn more about RISC-V
  29. RISC-V - Part 1: Origins and Architecture
  30. Nvidia and the Longevity of Technology Moats
  31. Herman Goldstine and the IAS Machine: Unveiling the Modern Computer
  32. Intel APX
  33. Chip Letter Links No. 21 : Xerox PARC Special
  34. Arm at Amazon
  35. The Everything Blueprint - Arm Everywhere
  36. Chip Letter Links No. 20 : Intel i960, John Goodenough, RISC-V in Terraria, Loongson, AT&T Microworld and more
  37. Ericsson to Whatsapp : The Story of Erlang - Supplemental
  38. Ericsson to WhatsApp : The Story of Erlang
  39. Chip Letter Links No.19 : AMD Zen 4, Nvidia, x86 Instructions, 8-Bit Video, General Turtle, 1-Bit Computing, ZX Spectrum
  40. Nvidia's Embarrassingly Parallel Success
  41. AT&T’s CRISP Hobbits - Supplemental
  42. AT&T’s CRISP Hobbits
  43. Be Grateful, Be Geeky, Be Generous : Jean-Louis Gassée's Memoirs
  44. Chip Letter Links No. 18: NexGen, Nvidia, Die Topology, FastGPT in Fortran and more
  45. The First 'Apple Silicon': The Aquarius Processor Project
  46. The First 'Apple Silicon' : The Aquarius Processor Project - Supplemental
  47. The Long History of REP MOVS
  48. Britain's headlong slide from silicon supremacy to silicon irrelevance
  49. The RISC Wars Part 2 : The Age of Alliances
  50. Chip Letter Links No. 17: Raptor Lake, Fake Chips, China's Chipmakers, Linux in the Browser, Stepper Prices, Cray and more
  51. The RISC Wars Part 1 : The Cambrian Explosion
  52. The RISC Wars Part 1 : The Cambrian Explosion - Supplemental
  53. RISC on a Chip: David Patterson and Berkeley RISC-I
  54. Chip Letter Links No. 16 : Gordon Moore's Notebooks, Nvidia on Acquired, Assembly Language, Jeff Hinton, RISC-V on Jupyter
  55. Apple's "Perpetual, Royalty-Free License" and Other Arm Myths
  56. The Unnecessary Obscurity of Assembly Language
  57. iAPX432 : Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC failure
  58. Chip Letter Links No. 15 : Gordon Moore, Itanium, Inventing Ethernet, MIPS, RISC-V and more
  59. The Arm Story Part 3 : Creating A Global Standard
  60. The Arm Story Part 3 : Creating a Global Standard - Supplemental
  61. Bring Back Bunny
  62. Trillion Dollar Stopgap: The Intel 8086
  63. Chip Letter Links No 14: Raspberry Pi Pico
  64. The Arm Story Part 2 : Archimedes to Advanced RISC Machines
  65. The Arm Story Part 2 : Archimedes to Advanced RISC Machines - Supplemental
  66. Once Again Through Eratosthenes Sieve : 40 Years of Progress
  67. The Arm Story Part 1 : From Acorns
  68. The Arm Story Part 1 : From Acorns - Supplemental
  69. Chip Letter Links No. 13: Andy Grove and the 80386
  70. The Founding of ASML Part 2: Oil to Electric
  71. The Founding of ASML Part 2: Oil to Electric - Supplemental
  72. Chip Letter Links No.12: Nintendo Strategy, ASML Culture, Dekatron, Blinkenlights, RISC-V Summit
  73. Serious Fun
  74. Captain Zilog Crushed! Supplemental
  75. Captain Zilog Crushed! : The Story of the Z8000

2022 37

  1. Chip Letter Links No.11: NEC V20, Psion, Richard Feynman, Xmas Trees
  2. The Founding of ASML - Part 1: The Philips Era
  3. Chip Letter Links No.10: Transistor 75th Anniversary, CPU Duke, Wafer Scale, Quarter Scale Retro-computing
  4. How Long Will x86 Endure?
  5. Chip Letter Links No. 9 : RISC-V, Tank Simulation, Unix History, IBM Research, Fred Brooks and more.
  6. RISC-V : The Last ISA?
  7. Chip Letter Links No. 8: The Photomask, CHIPS for America, Megaprocessor, Compiler Explorer, Z80 Secrets And More
  8. Motorola, Intel, IBM Make A Mainframe in a PC - The PC XT/370
  9. 65 Reasons To Celebrate The 6502
  10. Adam Tooze On Writing And Productivity
  11. Chip Letter Links No. 7: RISC Pioneers, Sophie Wilson, ASML Book, Finger Chips, Home Made Chips and More
  12. David Patterson Speech on RISC at Draper Prize
  13. The Mainframe In Your Pocket
  14. 60-Bit Computing
  15. Chip Letter Links No.6 : Gigatron, Altair, Thinking Machines, Awesome Emulators and More
  16. Cash, Canadians and CPUs : Intel's 'Lost' Early Microprocessor
  17. Chip Letter Links No. 5: 4004, PiDP 10, Andy Grove, Decapping, UTM on the Mac and more
  18. The Legacy Of The Intel 4004
  19. Chip War : Economics Battles Geopolitics
  20. Chip Letter Links No. 4: Chip War, ASML, DEC, Virtual Lorenz and more
  21. The First RISC: John Cocke and the IBM 801
  22. Writing IBM S/360 Assembly By Hand
  23. Chip Letter Links No. 3: Virtual Data Center, AI Designs, Floppy Disks, MONIAC, Jobs, Chip Art
  24. Thanks, What's Coming Soon and a Poll
  25. Substack, Friction And The Paradox of Choice
  26. Inside Intel's 8087
  27. Chip Letter Links No. 2: Arpanet, The First Byte, Nodes, ENIAC.
  28. Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors And Computing in 1833
  29. The First Intel 'Fab'
  30. Chip Letter Links No. 1
  31. AMD's Early Math Innovation
  32. Bytecode and the Busicom
  33. The Strangeness Of The Intel 4004
  34. About The Chip Letter
  35. The Arc of History Bends Towards Performance Per Watt
  36. Little Power In A Small, Cheap Package
  37. Robert Noyce And The Road To El Dorado