Discussing System On Chip (SoC) - Computerphile 

I’m mostly impressed the camera guy casually knew what week number it is

I'm sure everyone would like to join me in wishing the Acorn A3010 SoC a very happy birthday 🎂

Very good video. As a retired HDD firmware engineer, I can tell you that storage devices had systems on a chip (multicore). In fact everything on an hdd has gotten smaller, use less power, and faster over the decades.

Thank you Computerphile and Steve for a lovely video, once again ! Probably my favorite channel on RU-vid.

"I am not a chip designer" - never thought I'd hear that disclaimer, hooray for engineers :)

What we had before a microcontroller? A suitcase full of TTL circuits.

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Actually I think you can go back a bit further, because in the early/mid 1980s there already were quite a few MCUs that combined CPU with timer(s), A/D converter, UART, etc.

Thanks! Very interesting discussion of the differences and pros and cons. The 3GHz track length thing was fascinating! Hadn't appreciated at that speed we were getting into such considerations.

It's crazy that in one clock cycle light can only travel 10cm. These are some incredible machines

I think you should have mentioned the most important leap in modern SoC design: incorporating the RAM.

As far as signaling, all of this is true, even without taking capacitance and em interference into account, which are far bigger problems for high frequency signals, and are much easier to manage / plan for in an SOC.

I already know what a SoC is, but I watch the video anyway because I know I'll still learn a thing or two from Dr. Steve.

This video was absolutely amazing. Please, do more like these. Similar topic, maybe about other HW…

Nowadays if you want to customize the entire thing down to the cpu, you can always plonk down an fpga, use a soft ARM or RISC-V core and build the rest of your custom circuity into the firmware without ever needing to design and produce a custom physical chip.

I love that CTM644 in the background, on top of the MP-3 TV tuner. Really nice!

I'm sure I heard somewhere that the latest Raspberry Pi is originally a SoC for a set top box.

Dr. Steve Bagley, what a lovely guy. Looks like he's living the dream with all the retro devices in his office!

There is also a tremendous speed and power advantage to routing high fan out peripherals on chip vs. off chip. Anytime you have to pass a signal through a pad driver and externally, the driver power goes up and the speed of the line goes down. One of the great drivers of SOCs were the making of cells out of standard design blocks such as CPUs. To do this, silicon designers would separate the cells (CPUs, peripherals, etc) from their pad ring drivers. Thus a single cell design could be dropped into a SOC using multiple cells internally, or drop into a pad ring to make a stand-alone design.

ARM250 based Archimedes ( A3010, A3020, A4000 ) can be very easily overclocked up to 24 Mhz thanks to faster DRAMS.