I’m mostly impressed the camera guy casually knew what week number it is

I'm sure everyone would like to join me in wishing the Acorn A3010 SoC a very happy birthday 🎂

Very good video. As a retired HDD firmware engineer, I can tell you that storage devices had systems on a chip (multicore). In fact everything on an hdd has gotten smaller, use less power, and faster over the decades.

"I am not a chip designer" - never thought I'd hear that disclaimer, hooray for engineers :) IAACD (I am a chip designer) and this was a really good outside view of why SoC so good job all. Only addition I'd make is that it used to take a couple of engineers about 2 months from inception to prototype to design a new computer (what I did before SoC), a few thousand quid for a handful of prototypes and you could test and fix it in "real life" with a soldering iron until it was working and start selling the final product a few months later. With SoC it takes more than 2 months just to very precisely specify what it does and probably more like a team of 12 engineers 2 years and a few hundred thousand quid to getting a chip that has a chance of working and there's no bodging it with a soldering iron when it doesn't so add another pile of cash and 6 months+ if you got it wrong, which is why most technological changes are now evolutions not revolutions.

Thank you Computerphile and Steve for a lovely video, once again ! Probably my favorite channel on UKposts.

What we had before a microcontroller? A suitcase full of TTL circuits.

It's crazy that in one clock cycle light can only travel 10cm. These are some incredible machines

I already know what a SoC is, but I watch the video anyway because I know I'll still learn a thing or two from Dr. Steve.

Thanks! Very interesting discussion of the differences and pros and cons. The 3GHz track length thing was fascinating! Hadn't appreciated at that speed we were getting into such considerations.

0:52 Disassembly was really easy back in those days.

Actually I think you can go back a bit further, because in the early/mid 1980s there already were quite a few MCUs that combined CPU with timer(s), A/D converter, UART, etc.

As far as signaling, all of this is true, even without taking capacitance and em interference into account, which are far bigger problems for high frequency signals, and are much easier to manage / plan for in an SOC.

This video was absolutely amazing. Please, do more like these. Similar topic, maybe about other HW…

I think you should have mentioned the most important leap in modern SoC design: incorporating the RAM.

I love that CTM644 in the background, on top of the MP-3 TV tuner. Really nice!

Dr. Steve Bagley, what a lovely guy. Looks like he's living the dream with all the retro devices in his office!

Nowadays if you want to customize the entire thing down to the cpu, you can always plonk down an fpga, use a soft ARM or RISC-V core and build the rest of your custom circuity into the firmware without ever needing to design and produce a custom physical chip.

"Somewhere here in my archive" - which is everything in a 200 degree radius behind his back.

There is also a tremendous speed and power advantage to routing high fan out peripherals on chip vs. off chip. Anytime you have to pass a signal through a pad driver and externally, the driver power goes up and the speed of the line goes down. One of the great drivers of SOCs were the making of cells out of standard design blocks such as CPUs. To do this, silicon designers would separate the cells (CPUs, peripherals, etc) from their pad ring drivers. Thus a single cell design could be dropped into a SOC using multiple cells internally, or drop into a pad ring to make a stand-alone design.

the motorola 68HC11XX chips were a lot of fun to play with, and they were used in a lot of different consumer devices.

I'm sure I heard somewhere that the latest Raspberry Pi is originally a SoC for a set top box.

I recall reading about an open source project years ago for a SoC that implemented an IBM PC, though with VGA rather than CGA or MDA and no FPU option.

The 1984 Commodore/MOS "TED" chip was a sort of early SoC, prior to any ARM chip. Please, some credit for Commodore, MOS/CSG, etc. What insane obsession with Apple/ARM.

Wow. Teraz zrozumiałem cały concept. Świetny film😇

Nice. Very comprehensive video. Lots of good info in the comments too

I Thought this explanation of SOC's very good indeed and most interesting as well. Many Thanks,

ARM250 based Archimedes ( A3010, A3020, A4000 ) can be very easily overclocked up to 24 Mhz thanks to faster DRAMS. It's all detailed on the Stardot forum.

I also would like to add, that soc is not only about computational power and exact circuits on chip design(features and so on) but also end user devices manufacturing processes. The size of exact circuits on chip is way smaller that final chip “package”, because the package used not as a shell only but also as heat conductor and array of contact points. There also cons and pros going from this fact.

hey @Computerphile ,I really hope that you will be discussing next time about Quadtree and its use in image comparaison or sorting spatial data (the main purpose of the invention of quadtree in 1974) ! Thanks in advance ;

The primary design constraint in GHz+ PCB design isn't propagation delay but the fact that those are microwave frequencies. Traces act like transmission lines, not wires, and fast edges generate very high frequency harmonics. You can wave away impedance matching at the MHz clocks speeds of 1980s/90s machines, but not now.

One more advantage of a SoC, is the power efficiency. Transfering data uses more power than the actual calculations made in some discrete systems. Having the data close, reduces that energy requirement. Also latency is reduced. This also translates to cost savings for cooling solutions. And weight savings for mobile devices.

I love that you used Acorns to explain SoC

Any videos where you go over your collection of gear there? If not, make one!

Awesome video:)

Great topic

Superb!

integration progresses in many directions, but it gets a bit complicated in MCM, should we call them System On Package? or the lack of GPU makes them not count? but then APU are clearly SoC as these are monolithic and technically all of them are able to run without chipset at all but I don't think there are any aftermarket chipletless motherboards for Intel there are mobile SoC that have the PCH (chipset) die on the "CPU PCB" but not all of them do that

So would you consider the ULA on the ZX81 to be a primitive version of an SoC?

Nice, even for beginners. Thanks!

00:52 That lid was ready to go 🤣

Great channel I have downloaded all its videos with an external UKposts download program. Just Wikipedia for the article: Comparison of UKposts downloaders.

10:16 - I thin you forgot to put the disclaimer up Sean! 😀

Given how many more transistors that, say, the Z80A of a Spectrum has than the Spectrum ULA, it's a shame that SoCs didn't come about in around 1976. Put a DRAM-compatible interface on a ROM/PROM and a relatively cheap computer could have been built with a 40-pin SoC.

We are reaching performance levels where latency is limited by distance. As signals want to travel at the speed of light - they get held back by the fields which will be generated in a system. The trend will continue

It always amazes me that the UK had so many native computer types that were their own thing and weren't exported.

Nice video, keep it up , thank you :)

The modern x86 processors are kinda SoC too - built in cache, built in memory controller, built in IO PCI-Express bus controller etc. Compare to even 20?25 years ago, there was a 'north bridge' interface for memory controller and 'south bridge' for IO. If RAM serves, even kind of until the Intel Core 'i' era. On certain even older earlier ones (386, 486?) even cache was external. If nowadays a gpu is built in, all you need is RAM and storage and it feeds video output directly from the chip.

This must have been the kind of thing that totally makes sense in hindsight. Of course you're not going to run a bunch of traces that are unnecessary if you just cram those modules together.

I guess you can ignore curves or bypasses of traces when calculating transmission speed due to the transmission line theory. Only the distance between origin and destination is important when calculation time needed for the signal to arrive. Is that correct?

Oh man, 1987! Awesome. Not on topic, but... I wish that I still had my old commodore 64 with it's floppy disks and cassette tape storage to show my teenaged son.

The ARM250, which you found in the A3010 ran at a clock speed of 12MHz vs the ARM2's 8MHz, but while the latter only managed 4MIPS, the former ran at 7MIPS, and that extra 1MIPS of speed was, in part, down to the fact everything (aside from the memory) was so tightly integrated on the ARM250 SoC!

A! that was a Pixel 6, eh? nice. So half of the PC-systems today are SoCs? with integrated graphics and integrated mem-controller and integrated north-bridge?

Oh, that “if you remember” moment)))))) nice

I'm a simple man. I see Steve Bagley, I hit like.

So ... essentially... SoC is just a fancier more cable Microcontroller? Like to hear some thoughts on this.

Me, an ECE student, who somehow managed to pass this semester: _"hmmm, interesting..."_ Jokes apart, it's videos like this that keep me going. Thanks!

How did I know he'd use an Acorn as the first example lol

for a looong time we had chipsets (and still do for desktop motherboards).

Nice video

No mention of key terms from back in the day: northbridge and southbridge?

Why are they talking about Shadow of Chenobyl?

So... How does this work vs Veritasium's light-second light bulb circuit which lights almost instantly because of the energy field... If the light turns out almost immediately despite very long wires, why is PCB track length an issue that needs to be consider in relation to "time taken for electrical signal to reach the other end" based on what Veritasium was saying it seems like track length wouldn't be important and only the position of the chip relative to the CPU would matter (it wouldn't matter is the tracks were different lengths or went all around the houses to reach their destination. I understand there might be issues with attenuation and potentially signals resonating within that wires, but here if seems you are focusing on the speed of light and length of tracks to determine arrival of information (which makes sense to me), but it seems to go against this whole concept that Veritasium has got people talking about.

Intel or AMD is SoC? They have many controller bulild in "CPU".

I have an "archive" like Steve's (Dr. Bagley) too: a big pile of old computer crap that I can't bring myself to throw out!

One of the disadvantages of a SoC is, that there is more die size required than for the individual components. So in big designs, the yields become less economically viable.

Acorn could have been HUGE. I know that Arm is super successful but I wish Acorn were still around. I loved their computers, so ahead of their time.

You can make a wireless micro-bridge between GPU/CPU/Microchips shielded from outside interference and it can act as a BUS for interoperability and comms; eg. cryptography/timebased as the chips would "know" the distance to each other and can then encrypt the data.

I like the fact that the coke container just hang around in the back

And now we are moving "back" to bridges with chiplets...

how a computer scientist get doxxed by a highschool dropout, its hilarious

He's got a whole case of diet Coke in the back. Curious.

... 0:34 It really bugs me, that I can't make an abbreviation with SoC that turns it to SoCK ...

South bridge, North bridge. I feel like these are terms you aren't using, but should be with these systems.

3:44 It almost looks like the serial controller has USB logo on it :)

Who is the man asking questions?

I'm still here

I believe that the future Low Cost Computers for businesses and home use will all be SoC systems. It's an easy way yo reduce the cost, yet provide the functions the majority of people will want.

In addition to signal speed limitationa, voltage loss over say 10x to 10,000X greater distance with the 1960s motherboard technology is not insignificant. + increased radiation emmissions. It seems there should be a huge market for highly upgradable SOS's. True computer modding "enthusiasts" would of course need to learn to solder or pop down to the repair shop to have our new componets hooked up. Seems motherboards and all the rediculas connector cables and cable managment nonsence needs to become irrelivent relics! We would love an episode on the SIC modding going on at the institution there.

The idea that squiggly routing of connection wires would impact transfer speed, isn't that in contrary to the point made in the latest Veritasium video, The Big Misconception About Electricity?

The case of Diet Coke on the desk is just... _Chef's kiss_

Is there a way to audit SoC to prevent big tech from adding subsystem or backdoor?

I'm going to start calling my pile of dusty electronics "the archive" also. Might improve partner approval factor.

Most flat screen televisions today have SOC (custom ASCI) Also when you combine more silicon on one chip you reduce less power and therefore less heat dissipation because more transistors are decreasing in size on the die.

It's not just cost reduction, there is also the electrical engineering principle that the lower the component count, the higher the reliability.

Hey!

Box of Diet Coke + bunch of old computers = great office

oh... I thought that were a "photoshop chip", a "crysis chip" to address "can it run crysis", a "Epeen chip" to run cpu-z exclusively, and an nvidia chip so that linus (both of them) can give nvidia the finger. Not exactly the exact understanding, but close enough. I do CS too!

Has anyone noticed how poetic it is , an iMac and acron sitting on the same table.

Goto work

and the new Apple SoCs have the RAM on chip too so you can't expand it after you've configured the system. (Non-upgradeable RAM has been a "feature" since before Apple went to ARM SoCs it must be said, just that it was still a separate component on a motherboard)

0:51 Amiga :)

Awesome video also I am making my own coding security company while in 11th grade lol

It does concern me a little that the chip could be more easily damaged, and there's no chance of recovering anything. Or that it's less upgradable.

Thought I spotted an A3010 in the thumbnail... slightly disappointed it's not an early production model with a mini-motherboard...

Hey Ryan

BACK IN THE 1880S MY GRANDPA BUILT A SOC LOG CABIN USING PANTIES AND BUTTER LOGIC GATES

This stuff is so complicated by now that everything is both a system on a chip and a system not on a chip

i love you

Good phones still have separate audio connections

if you would have dc power rails, not ac, you would not have to have complicated power systems in the box, also if you had memory in the chip, just one chip