Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "The Growing Semiconductor Design Problem" video.

  1. Botched the wording a little bit, not to speak of the kind of vocabulary not used by lead representatives of a polite, child friendly company. Shigeru Miyamoto, quoted regarding N64 delay: "A delayed game is eventually good; but a rushed game is forever bad." Interestingly reviews don't even play into it, as they knew they had young loyal fans who would be buying the product without consulting any reviews. Disappointing them would burn this relationship forever, which is much worse than bad reviews. Remember, people didn't have Internet access back then. Magazines were around, but their reach was in tens of thousands copies while product reach was in millions for the same given region.
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  2. x86 is a prefixed instruction set, so it has potentially millions of valid instructions, most of which are redundant, and more byte sequences that do SOMETHING in spite of not being reasonably expected to be an instruction; see "Sandsifter - breaking the x86 ISA". It is probably more or less tested for a few thousand instructions that compilers and assemblers will actually emit; but for one, nontrivial bugs do pop up from time to time, where an instruction performs correctly under some circumstances and incorrectly under others; and for other, data can become executable.
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  3. But FPGA is also an SRAM device, which makes it somewhat slow, space and power inefficient and cost inefficient compared to dedicated silicon at sufficient volume. Back decades ago, you'd have antifuse FPGAs which were essentially programmable ROM based configurable logic devices, but those seem to have died out, having been in a bit of a no-mans-land between in-system programmable devices and dedicated silicon. Before that, there were ULAs, which were mask ROM configurable logic devices. And then microcontrollers and configurable peripherals such as DMAC and if you look at something like RP2040's PIO peripheral probably eat quite substantially into CPLD/FPGA territory for a lot of tasks these would have been used for prior, as they're much easier to program. You're also correct in recognising a configurability increase in insanely complex circuits, and that it's absolutely vital, like PC CPUs contain fixed ALUs but the actual software facing instruction set is implemented as "microcode", a rough and usually barely functional version of which is on the silicon, but it gets updated from the PC firmware on every boot. Spinning up such a device costs a fortune and they are prone to bugs being discovered in the field which need to be fixed. Also so many hardware designs have leaned into SoC territory as time went, like "oof, this is hard - let's stick a processor core in there", and thus everything even devices which you think of as fixed functionality like SD-Cards and just about every USB peripheral have become firmware driven. When you buy a USB-to-serial dedicated function chip today, you find inside a 8051-compatible core and a ROM. As universal as FPGA are, they have also always been a niche device. The promise of FPGA everywhere somehow is always nearer and always further away and this has been this way for like 20 years.
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  4.  @someonespotatohmm9513  I suppose the effort alone is neither here nor there; it's whether if you make a copy, you can make a better price, which can be extremely difficult at times, and then whether you can actually shift enough of a volume to offset that effort.
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  5. There existed a number of NKRO (n-key rollover, so ability to register and release an arbitrary combination of keys) keyboards before gaming keyboards came about, and because there is no limit over AT/PS2 keyboard bus to the number of keys held down, they actually were more universal and worked better than modern gaming keyboards. Also it's not quite like every key needs to be input separately, standard keyboards with a not fully disambiguated matrix do guarantee a 2-key rollover and with anti-ghosting logic (which i'd call shadowing logic) are usually made to support 3 key rollover in the usual input situations plus modifier keys. NKRO was valued by fast typists and has always been a feature you'd have to pay extra for though. One example of an old NKRO PC keyboard i can think of is the fittingly named Omnikey. The stock keyboard that came with Commodore Amiga 2000 computer was also NKRO, as were a number of early IBM keyboards and others.
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