Those worked in 4-bit slices, and you could use them as LEGO blocks to build your own design (e.g. 8, 12 ou 16 bits) with much fewer parts than using standard TTL gates (or ECL NANDs, if you were Seymour Cray).
The 1980 Mick & Brick book Bit-slice Microprocessor Design later gathered together some "application notes" - the cookbooks/crib sheets that semiconductor companies wrote and provided to get buyers/engineers started after the spec sheets.
Intel has launched in 1974 both the NMOS Intel 8080 and a bipolar bit-slice processor family (Intel 3000).
AMD has introduced in 1975 both its NMOS 8080 clone and the bipolar bit-slice 2900 family.
I do not know which of these 2 AMD products was launched earlier, but in any case there was only a few months difference between them at most, so it cannot be said that AMD "was already in the CPU market". The launch of both products has been prepared at a time when AMD was not yet in the CPU market and Intel had been earlier than AMD both in the NMOS CPU market and in the market for sets of bipolar bit-slice components.
While Intel 8080 was copied by AMD, the AMD 2900 family was much better than the Intel 3000 family, so it has been used in a lot of PDP-11 clones or competitors.
For example, the registers+ALU component of Intel 3000 implemented only a 2-bit slice and few ALU operations, while the registers+ALU component of AMD 2900 implemented a 4-bit slice and also many more ALU operations.
> big yikes for something coming out of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Besides the unit flub, there's an unpleasant smell of sales flyer to the whole piece. Hard data spread all over, but couldn't find efficiency figures. Casual smears such as "even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage" (huh, what, why?). I could also have used an explanation of why CO2, instead of nitrogen.
> provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage" (huh, what, why?)
Because the most efficient way to make money with a lithium ion battery (or rather the marginal opportunity after the higher return ones like putting it in a car are taken) is to charge it in the few hours of when electricity is cheapest and discharge it when it is most expensive, every single day, and those windows generally aren't more than 8 hours long...
Once the early opportunities are taken lower value ones will be where you store more energy and charge and discharge at a lower margin or less frequently will be, but we aren't there yet.
Advertising that your new technology doesn't do this is taking a drawback (it requires a huge amount of scale in one place to be cost competitive) and pretending it's an advantage. The actual advantage, if there is one, is just that at sufficient scale it's cheaper (a claim I'm not willing to argue either way).
It ought to be cheaper at scale. Batteries' cost scales linearly with storage capacity. Cost for a plant like this scales linearly with the storage rate - the compressor and turbine are the expensive part, while the pressure vessels and gas bags are relatively cheap.
The bigger you build it, the less it costs per MWh of storage.
> Energy Dome expects its LDES solution to be 30 percent cheaper than lithium-ion.
Grid scale lithium is dropping in cost about 10-20% per year, so with a construction time of 2 years per the article lithium will be cheaper by the time the next plant is completed
Li-ion and even LFP batteries degrade; given a daily discharge cycle, they'll be at 80% capacity in 3 years. Gas pumps and tanks won't lose any capacity.
Good job. I caused the purchase of a couple of 720s (I believe they were, plus a few X terminals mooching off the workhorses, all with megapixel color displays). They served well past the demise of then-rival Sun machines. I think one of them was still in use with legacy software a few years ago.
Fun stuff: there was one year that HP-UX got so aggressive about using free RAM for file cache that, when you tried running another program, things would slow to a crawl because it was paging virtual memory to disk ...
It's extremely convenient to have coal, iron, and waterways in the region where you wish to achieve that early industrialization.
There's a map somewhere showing where those happened - England, France/Germany, eastern/great lakes US.
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