LSI in the 99II

I started a thread on FM because I didn't understand the significance of the LSI chip in the 99II. Thought some of you folks may be interested.

Laughing Silently Internally

That is what google search gave me!

Tequila MockingjayBird said:

Laughing Silently Internally

That is what google search gave me!

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Large Scale Integration.

LSI defines the technology used to build powerful microchips or integrated circuits (IC) in a very small form factor.

The Front-end LSI is to support the Bionz X to improve process speed.

The A99mk1 also have a newly develop Front-end LSI 4 years ago.
(The A7 series use the same LSI from A99mk1)

lhkjacky said:

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Overwhelming Resolution ... is that similar to Shock and Awe?

steelhead3 said:

I started a thread on FM because I didn't understand the significance of the LSI chip in the 99II. Thought some of you folks may be interested.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1453198

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I would think that a good analogy for the LSI chip is the relationship of a computer's GPU is to the main CPU processor. Certainly the main processor can do everything on its own, but the GPU does the things that are time consuming for the main CPU and presents the results to the main CPU so that it doesn't have to do work so hard. The result is a big improvement in performance.

And that is what we are looking for here. A big improvement in performance.

And by the way, producing a LSI type chip is not trivial. It may incur engineering costs of several million dollars. And Sony needs to have engineers peaked on chip development that can make this work and to work with the supplier to make this thing work. And then there is all the SW effort to make this thing do what its supposed to do. And finally, if they are creating this from scratch, there is a huge learning curve to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Probably have to emulate it with other hardware and to figure out what has to go in this LSI chip. I'm sure they worked on this for quite a long time.

LSI is a very generic term and really just refers to stuffing more stuff on a single chip. It probably originates in late 1960s/early 1970s. At the time computers were built on large circuit boards with such things as TTL logic where there were a few logic gates per chip known as Integrated Circuits. Things really changed in the 1970s. Intel produced the first micro processor - the 8008 and by the end of the 70s there were machines such as DEC's LSI-11 and microprocessors from other companies such as Motorola. Large Scale Integration or LSI had arrived with a bang, followed by VLSI or Very Large Scale Integration.

In this sense LSI is now ubiquitous and nobody gives it second thought. The usage of the term LSI has probably changed and I would guess now refers more to fairly large circuits designed and manufactured for specific applications.

Makes the mind boggle at how they first sent a man to the moon with all the "low" tech that was available at that time.

MiamiDolphin said:

Makes the mind boggle at how they first sent a man to the moon with all the "low" tech that was available at that time.

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I was a computer science student towards the end of the 70's. The first line of code I wrote was on a DEC PDP-10 mainframe. It had magnetic core memory, not semiconductor memory. Core memory is made from a gazillion ferrite rings woven into a 3-D matrix storing one bit per magnetic ring. There was a whole 240k 36 bit words of it - a bit over one megabyte. Despite this it could support more than 40 concurrent interactive terminal sessions and batch streams. Terminals were either paper teletype devices or early VDUs. Things have changed.