Guy Macon on "how many microprocessors can dance on the head of a pin?"

Robert Adsett wrote:

>BTW the distinction I always heard between microcontroller and 
>microprocessor was the microcontroller did not have an external bus and 
>the microprocessor did.

That would make an 8051 a microprocessor. as a rough guide to
usage, Google has it's advantages:

 19,200 hits for "8051 microprocessor".

116,000 hits for "8051 microcontroller"

So "8051 microcontroller" is six times more common than
"8051 microcontroller"

>joshc says...
>
>> I have always liked to distinguish a microprocessor from a
>> microcontroller based on whether or not there are integrated
>> peripherals on the same chip or just a CPU. There are some companies
>> that seem to refer to what I traditionally thought of as
>> microcontrollers by the term du jour, System-on-a-Chip. Are these two
>> terms synonymous? Furthermore, sometimes these SOCs are referred to in
>> the same documentation as processors. Isn't this a bit imprecise, and
>> wouldn't calling them microcontrollers be better since they are a
>> processor + a bunch of integrated peripherals and memories?
>
>I think you are expecting a precision in the language that just isn't 
>there.  All definitions three terms have as much to do with marketing as 
>real distinctions, and the distinctions were not that cut and dried to 
>begin with.
>
>Although I do expect a spate of definitions to pop up with a theological 
>discussion on how many micros can dance on the head of a pin now ;)

First of all, the original question that you allude to is "how many 
angels can stand on the point of a pin", not "how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin" and the dispute was between "an infinite
number" and "an arbitrarily large but finite number."  

Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) the main architect of Roman Catholic 
theology, spent much of his life exploring this question.  He reasoned
that it is impossible for two distinct causes to each be the immediate 
cause of one and the same thing.  Following the standard methods and
intellectual climate of his time, he framed such scientific and 
mathematical questions in religious terms and chose an angel as a 
good example of such a cause.  His argument was that if two angels
occupy the same space the question of which one is the cause of an
event is indeterminate.  This can be seen as an early attempt to 
deduce the Pauli exclusion principle.

Aquinas could not not place an upper bound on the density of angels 
in a small area, because the size of an angel was undefined and 
could be arbitrarily small.

In 1995 by Dr. Phil Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute 
of Physics, revisited this problem.  He chose his smallest possible 
angelic size from the superstring theory that space is not infinitely 
divisible and thus the smallest possible angel is at least 10 to 
the -35 meters in size.

He chose his smallest possible pin point as being the tip of the 
an IBM scanning tunneling microscope which has a tip that tapers 
down to a single atom. This reduced the calculation to a simple
multiplication problem which I will leave as an exercise for the 
student.

Schewe, however, assumed without questioning that Thomas Aquinas'
non-overlap theory was correct.  Anders Sandberg of the Royal 
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden questioned this assumption.
He argued that, since angels can be presumed to obey quantum rules 
when packed at quantum gravity densities, the uncertainty principle 
will cause their wave functions to overlap significantly even if 
there is a strong degeneracy pressure.  Without the non-overlap 
assumption Schewe's approach cannot derive an upper bound.

Sandberg then turned to information theory for a solution.
First, he assumed massless angels (if the angels have mass, the 
point of the pin will collapse into a black hole) containing at 
least one bit of information: fallen/not fallen.  Assuming a
pin point that is one iron atom, he use the Bekenstein bound
on information to calculate an upper bound on pinpoint angel 
density of 2.448 times to the -5 angels, far below the Schewe 
bound. He also calculated friction effects, but these can be 
ignored because he incorrectly had the angels dancing instead 
of standing. My own contribution to this was to observe that 
it takes at least two locations per angel for them to dance.  
If they are packed at maximum density, they can't move.  Also 
there are angular momentum issues if they dance the twist.

Given the extensive research already done on the question of 
how many angels can stand on the point of a pin, I was heartened 
to see you ask how many micros can dance on the head of a pin.
It happens that I am well-qualified for examining this, having 
done extensive work with the smallest known microcontrollers;
bare dies with wire bonding that is covered with blobs of epoxy.

On would think that the lower limit would be set by complexity 
and feature size, but at the low end the wire bond pads take
up most of the room.  Assuming a one millimeter pin head and
a dance caused by Brownian motion, and assuming a micro that
is optimized for minimum size, I estimate that seven micros
in a hexagonal array can dance in the head of a pin.  Future
advances in wire-bonding technology may improve this figure.

I hope this helps.

-- 
Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/>

Guy Macon wrote:
> 
... snip about 100 lines ...
> 
> On would think that the lower limit would be set by complexity
> and feature size, but at the low end the wire bond pads take
> up most of the room.  Assuming a one millimeter pin head and
> a dance caused by Brownian motion, and assuming a micro that
> is optimized for minimum size, I estimate that seven micros
> in a hexagonal array can dance in the head of a pin.  Future
> advances in wire-bonding technology may improve this figure.
> 
> I hope this helps.

Not really.  However, it did consume about 100 lines. :-)

-- 
 <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt>
 <http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423>
 <http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html>
 <http://kadaitcha.cx/vista/dogsbreakfast/index.html>
                        cbfalconer at maineline dot net



-- 
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

CBFalconer wrote:
>
>Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
>> 
>> I hope this helps.
>
>Not really.  However, it did consume about 100 lines. :-)

I am *saving* those lines for future generations.  You would,
no doubt, have filled them with informative and interesting 
content, making it hard to clean them out for future use.
I, on the other hand, filled them with worthless drivil, 
thus making it easy for future generations to discard the
content and re-use them.  No need to thank me.  Recycling is
it's own reward.

They all laughed at me when I predicted a newgroup line 
shortane.  We will always be able to create new lines 
as needed!" they cried.  Well. I showed them.  ...That 
they were right.  D'oh!

-- 
Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/>

Guy,

your initial post - the one that consumed about 100 lines - is
just wonderful. Some imagination and sense of humour - of that
class - are obviously welcome to just about everyone most if
not all of the time.

Dimiter

On Jun 10, 9:09 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
> CBFalconer wrote:
>
> >Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
>
> >> I hope this helps.
>
> >Not really.  However, it did consume about 100 lines. :-)
>
> I am *saving* those lines for future generations.  You would,
> no doubt, have filled them with informative and interesting
> content, making it hard to clean them out for future use.
> I, on the other hand, filled them with worthless drivil,
> thus making it easy for future generations to discard the
> content and re-use them.  No need to thank me.  Recycling is
> it's own reward.
>
> They all laughed at me when I predicted a newgroup line
> shortane.  We will always be able to create new lines
> as needed!" they cried.  Well. I showed them.  ...That
> they were right.  D'oh!
>
> --
> Guy Macon
> <http://www.guymacon.com/>

Didi wrote:
>
>Guy,
>
>your initial post - the one that consumed about 100 lines - is
>just wonderful. Some imagination and sense of humour - of that
>class - are obviously welcome to just about everyone most if
>not all of the time.

Thanks, mom!  :)


CBFalconer, larwe, Spehro Pefhany, etc. and I go way back.
Anything said that sounds like criticism is just good-natured
joking around among buddies.


Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/>

Didi wrote: *** and top-posted - fixed ***
> Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
>> CBFalconer wrote:
>>> Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
>>
>>>> I hope this helps.
>>
>>> Not really.  However, it did consume about 100 lines. :-)
>>
>> I am *saving* those lines for future generations.  You would,
>> no doubt, have filled them with informative and interesting
>> content, making it hard to clean them out for future use.
>> I, on the other hand, filled them with worthless drivil,
>> thus making it easy for future generations to discard the
>> content and re-use them.  No need to thank me.  Recycling is
>> it's own reward.
>>
>> They all laughed at me when I predicted a newgroup line
>> shortane.  We will always be able to create new lines
>> as needed!" they cried.  Well. I showed them.  ...That
>> they were right.  D'oh!
> 
> your initial post - the one that consumed about 100 lines - is
> just wonderful. Some imagination and sense of humour - of that
> class - are obviously welcome to just about everyone most if
> not all of the time.

Please do not top-post.  Your answer belongs after (or intermixed
with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all
irrelevant material.  See the following links:

-- 
  <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>
  <http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>
  <http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
  <http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/>  (taming google)
  <http://members.fortunecity.com/nnqweb/>  (newusers)



-- 
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

CBFalconer wrote:

>Please do not top-post.  Your answer belongs after (or intermixed
>with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all
>irrelevant material.  See the following links:

>  <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>
>  <http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>
>  <http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
>  <http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/>  (taming google)
>  <http://members.fortunecity.com/nnqweb/>  (newusers)

Good advice.  Other good links on the topic:

http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ewijnands/nnq/nquote.html
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/mail-news-errors.html#quoting
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html
http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/quote.html

 "Top posting classically or stereotypically involves no 
 trimming and of course no contextualizing.of prior posts;  
 contrasted with contextualized posts, which sequence 
 questions and responses in order and context, along
 with trimming of unnecessary lines.
 
 In this contrast, the top post is disorderly, messy, 
 and most notably egocentrical, because it leaves all 
 of the cleaning up and reorganization to the correspondent 
 context posters and because it inappropriately emphasizes 
 the importance of whatever the top poster has to say or 
 ask while mostly disregarding everything anyone else has 
 been said before.  It also expects the next reader to try 
 to guess at what part of the previous posts the top poster 
 is referring.and makes it nearly impossible to
 contextualize hir own responses."     -Mike Easter

--  
Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/>

Guy,

> Good advice.  Other good links on the topic:

I top-posted in part deliberately because I anticipated
Chucks response... In part I did so because I just did not
want to go into much depth about context etc.

Typically I use my sense to make my post best readable,
if I feel bottom posting provides that I do bottom posting
and if I feel top posting is better then I top post.
 Most frequently I do a mixture of both (call it muxed
posting if you like :-), that is, my message is designed
with quoted excerpts (just relevant excerpts I _want_
quoted in that place) in botom-posting style and at the end,
in order to provide the entire context, the original message is
quoted in top posting style. (It took Chuck > a year
to make up his mind what sort of posting this was and
surprise surprise, eventually it ended up on his
"top-posting" list of world threats... :-).

I do not follow any religion when I post (nor anywhere else,
for that). Frankly, I have little other than a laugh-away
attitude for religion followers, and I may seek fun sometimes
by just annoying them - but not very often, it is too damn
easy to do so it typically proves to be no fun after all.

Dimiter


On Jun 11, 4:06 am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
> CBFalconer wrote:
> >Please do not top-post.  Your answer belongs after (or intermixed
> >with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all
> >irrelevant material.  See the following links:
> >  <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>
> >  <http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>
> >  <http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
> >  <http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/>  (taming google)
> >  <http://members.fortunecity.com/nnqweb/>  (newusers)
>
> Good advice.  Other good links on the topic:
>
> http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ewijnands/nnq/nquote.htmlhttp://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/mail-news-errors.html#quotinghttp://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.htmlhttp://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/quote.html
>
>  "Top posting classically or stereotypically involves no
>  trimming and of course no contextualizing.of prior posts;  
>  contrasted with contextualized posts, which sequence
>  questions and responses in order and context, along
>  with trimming of unnecessary lines.
>
>  In this contrast, the top post is disorderly, messy,
>  and most notably egocentrical, because it leaves all
>  of the cleaning up and reorganization to the correspondent
>  context posters and because it inappropriately emphasizes
>  the importance of whatever the top poster has to say or
>  ask while mostly disregarding everything anyone else has
>  been said before.  It also expects the next reader to try
>  to guess at what part of the previous posts the top poster
>  is referring.and makes it nearly impossible to
>  contextualize hir own responses."     -Mike Easter
>
> --  
> Guy Macon
> <http://www.guymacon.com/>

> Thanks, mom!  :)

Hey, I know you are big enough and don't need my protection,
but I thought you would also like to know someone did appreciate
a nice message you posted.
 And then again, being one year older than you I may have
been giving you the "youth" attitude,
one never knows.... :-) :-) :-).

Cheers,

Dimiter

On Jun 11, 1:51 am, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote:
> Didi wrote:
>
> >Guy,
>
> >your initial post - the one that consumed about 100 lines - is
> >just wonderful. Some imagination and sense of humour - of that
> >class - are obviously welcome to just about everyone most if
> >not all of the time.
>
> Thanks, mom!  :)
>
> CBFalconer, larwe, Spehro Pefhany, etc. and I go way back.
> Anything said that sounds like criticism is just good-natured
> joking around among buddies.
>
> Guy Macon
> <http://www.guymacon.com/>

"Guy Macon" <http://www.guymacon.com/> wrote in message 
news:yeGdnXiPtfKsUvbb4p2dnA@giganews.com...
>
>
>
> Robert Adsett wrote:
>
>>BTW the distinction I always heard between microcontroller and
>>microprocessor was the microcontroller did not have an external bus and
>>the microprocessor did.
>
> That would make an 8051 a microprocessor. as a rough guide to
> usage, Google has it's advantages:
>
> 19,200 hits for "8051 microprocessor".
>
> 116,000 hits for "8051 microcontroller"
>
> So "8051 microcontroller" is six times more common than
> "8051 microcontroller"
>
>>joshc says...
>>
>>> I have always liked to distinguish a microprocessor from a
>>> microcontroller based on whether or not there are integrated
>>> peripherals on the same chip or just a CPU. There are some companies
>>> that seem to refer to what I traditionally thought of as
>>> microcontrollers by the term du jour, System-on-a-Chip. Are these two
>>> terms synonymous? Furthermore, sometimes these SOCs are referred to in
>>> the same documentation as processors. Isn't this a bit imprecise, and
>>> wouldn't calling them microcontrollers be better since they are a
>>> processor + a bunch of integrated peripherals and memories?
>>
>>I think you are expecting a precision in the language that just isn't
>>there.  All definitions three terms have as much to do with marketing as
>>real distinctions, and the distinctions were not that cut and dried to
>>begin with.
>>
>>Although I do expect a spate of definitions to pop up with a theological
>>discussion on how many micros can dance on the head of a pin now ;)
>
> First of all, the original question that you allude to is "how many
> angels can stand on the point of a pin", not "how many angels can
> dance on the head of a pin" and the dispute was between "an infinite
> number" and "an arbitrarily large but finite number."
>
> Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) the main architect of Roman Catholic
> theology, spent much of his life exploring this question.  He reasoned
> that it is impossible for two distinct causes to each be the immediate
> cause of one and the same thing.  Following the standard methods and
> intellectual climate of his time, he framed such scientific and
> mathematical questions in religious terms and chose an angel as a
> good example of such a cause.  His argument was that if two angels
> occupy the same space the question of which one is the cause of an
> event is indeterminate.  This can be seen as an early attempt to
> deduce the Pauli exclusion principle.
>
> Aquinas could not not place an upper bound on the density of angels
> in a small area, because the size of an angel was undefined and
> could be arbitrarily small.
>
> In 1995 by Dr. Phil Schewe, spokesman for the American Institute
> of Physics, revisited this problem.  He chose his smallest possible
> angelic size from the superstring theory that space is not infinitely
> divisible and thus the smallest possible angel is at least 10 to
> the -35 meters in size.
>
> He chose his smallest possible pin point as being the tip of the
> an IBM scanning tunneling microscope which has a tip that tapers
> down to a single atom. This reduced the calculation to a simple
> multiplication problem which I will leave as an exercise for the
> student.
>
> Schewe, however, assumed without questioning that Thomas Aquinas'
> non-overlap theory was correct.  Anders Sandberg of the Royal
> Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden questioned this assumption.
> He argued that, since angels can be presumed to obey quantum rules
> when packed at quantum gravity densities, the uncertainty principle
> will cause their wave functions to overlap significantly even if
> there is a strong degeneracy pressure.  Without the non-overlap
> assumption Schewe's approach cannot derive an upper bound.
>
> Sandberg then turned to information theory for a solution.
> First, he assumed massless angels (if the angels have mass, the
> point of the pin will collapse into a black hole) containing at
> least one bit of information: fallen/not fallen.  Assuming a
> pin point that is one iron atom, he use the Bekenstein bound
> on information to calculate an upper bound on pinpoint angel
> density of 2.448 times to the -5 angels, far below the Schewe
> bound. He also calculated friction effects, but these can be
> ignored because he incorrectly had the angels dancing instead
> of standing. My own contribution to this was to observe that
> it takes at least two locations per angel for them to dance.
> If they are packed at maximum density, they can't move.  Also
> there are angular momentum issues if they dance the twist.
>
> Given the extensive research already done on the question of
> how many angels can stand on the point of a pin, I was heartened
> to see you ask how many micros can dance on the head of a pin.
> It happens that I am well-qualified for examining this, having
> done extensive work with the smallest known microcontrollers;
> bare dies with wire bonding that is covered with blobs of epoxy.
>
> On would think that the lower limit would be set by complexity
> and feature size, but at the low end the wire bond pads take
> up most of the room.  Assuming a one millimeter pin head and
> a dance caused by Brownian motion, and assuming a micro that
> is optimized for minimum size, I estimate that seven micros
> in a hexagonal array can dance in the head of a pin.  Future
> advances in wire-bonding technology may improve this figure.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> -- 
> Guy Macon
> <http://www.guymacon.com/>
>
>

But wait... you are thinking in 2D.. how may would there be if they were 
stacked ?? :)