The Chip Letter

Nov 16, 2024 | thechipletter.substack.com | Dylan Patel

“You have to bet the company. Especially right now, it’s like being in the gladiator business: you go in, you prepare, you go to the Colosseum …”Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm CEO, Jan 2022 via Financial TimesWho controls an Instruction Set Architecture? The answer may be less obvious than it first seems. In the 1970s and 1980s, Intel developed and seemingly controlled the architecture we now know as x86. Except Intel didn’t fully control x86.

May 5, 2024 | thechipletter.substack.com | Stephen Johnson |Brian W. Kernighan

The economic advantages of portability are very great. In many segments of the computer industry, the dominant cost is development and maintenance of software. Dennis Ritchie and Stephen Johnson 1978… many insist that C is the programming language and that it will last forever. Byte Magazine 1983The August 1983 issue of Byte Magazine devoted its cover, and a large part of its editorial content, to the C programming language.

Apr 28, 2024 | thechipletter.substack.com | Jillian Hess

It’s often said that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Here we can look over the shoulders of two giants and see them working together. Science writers are sometimes fond of ‘Eureka’ moments. The original legend is that Archimedes exclaimed ‘Eureka', Greek for ‘I have found it’ when he realized that the volume of water displaced from his bath must equal the volume of his own body. Archimedes reportedly used his discovery to test whether a golden crown had been debased with cheaper silver.