★ PEOPLES ★ SINCLAIR TO "TRANSFORM" COMPUTING ★

Sinclair to Transform Computing
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Electronics guru Sir Clive Sinclair last week outlined his plans to "transform" computing through a revolutionary new device which could put memory and processor chips together on the same unit.

Sinclair owns 20 per cent of Cambridge based Anamartic. which is preparing to launch the fust wafer scalo integration (WFI) memory device He claimed to Express that the new chip would “completely transform computing"

“You'll be able to use the waferscale instead of a hard disk," he said. “It will mean a one thousand times increase in the speed of memory access compared to current hard disk standards."

He added: “This has been seen as the holy grail of computing for the last twenty years We at Sinclair Research have solved the problems through Anamartic."

Waferscale: chips with everything

Conventional chips are manufactured by setting layers on top of a wafer of silicon, slicing them up and throwing away the inevitable number which don't work This is costly and wasteful but until now there has been do other reasonable alternative, because the more you uy to cram on to a chip, tbe more certain it becomes that some part of it is going to fail, making the whole chip useless With WFI all the chips can be kept on the one wafer, effectively making one big chip. What makes WFI different is that most parts are built so they can work in more than one way Special circuitry built into the wafer then tests tbe chip and can devise alternative routes round parts that don't work, increasing the proportion of working chips per batch. Testing the chip now involves just testing the special circuitry, caving the time taken to test each part of the wafer individually.

The intentional redundancy built into wafers mimics the wiy the human brain can work through different pathways, as when a stroke victim who has lost the power to speak can re-learn the skill using slightly different parts of the brain.

Extra speed and performance is attained because all the workings are oo one chip, so the different chips don't need to spend time communicating with one another.

Sinclair has been working on this project lor some time For the past two years he has been seeking funding for research and development. Anamartic itself is refusing to comment on developments, and on the suggestion that its gadgetry will be shown for the first time at the International Solid State Circuit conference in New York on February 15th. The firm is expected to show off a six inch diameter wafer which can store the equivalent of several hard discs Anamartic is currently in negotiation with high end hardware manufacturers. If successful, this technology will first be scooped up by the manufacturers of very expensive super computers and prices are likely to be high, just as transputer technology is available currently in machines such as the Atan Transputer Workstation These cost a few thousand pounds but deliver performance equal to a machine ten times more expensive. Sinclair said that the home and small business ends of the market would be the last to benefit from such a development but acknowledged nonetheless that cheap computers would be able to use WFI in the near future.

When asked if WFI would make him very rich he replied: “I should very much expect so."

New Computer Express #11 (01-1989)

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L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent  du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko.