Canon EOS 5D Mark II
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Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
23 responses to “What’s That? (97)”
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I wish it were a wine cellar!
Although I am sure it is not that, looking from far away it looks like a storage room for some precious product (i.e.vaccines or a dangerous chemical). Just having fun as my technological knowledge limits me to guess more accurately. Playing the game is what counts.
Looking at the largest version, it looks like a gigantic computer chip!
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solerena, look at the largest view. I do not think that these are boxes.
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that is some serious backplane action. what are those, like 50 TQFP-100’s per plane?
and why are the chips made of ceramic with gold…heatsinks?
Processors made by fujitsu (MB prefix)? But the PCBs are clearly prototype-style. which is odd because youd think with something expensive they’d get masking.
for some reason im thinking either a chip-testing rig or some massive-multi-core processor.
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or a mil-spec/rad-resistant RAM array?
man, talk about intense engineering – nepp.nasa.gov/mafa/talks/MAFA07_04_Oneill.pdf
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that’s easy… Skynet! 🙂
It’s strange – the rather large pitch surface mount devices, together with the hand-soldered look appears old, but the shiny cabinet and the fact that someone apparently still wants to have this in their basement makes it look recent. Some sort of prototype?
I’m going with a test system for a new neural processor, silicon modelled after the brain, that can rewire itself. And maybe one day, the AI that will bring the ‘singularity’ and overthrow mankind… 🙂
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A one-of-a-kind, (well, maybe one of a few or a prototype) DSP signal processor from the ’80s?
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Bingo nhr, our first solution embedded in a puzzle itself (Cyrillic)… and decoded by photon~wave. Some good historic machine guesses from gskich1 and lady Ada, so nicely named… for this is located in back of the construction section of the Computer History Museum (which will open in January, and I highly recommend).
This the Amdahl 470 V/6 number 2, installed at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in 1975.
The 470 V/6 was Amdahl’s first product after breaking away from IBM. It was faster and cheaper than the IBM System/370, and over the next 25 years of fierce competition, Amdahl gained 24% market share.
Notice the nod to obskura’s singularity in the use of 42 chips per module.
"Amdahl engineers, working with Fujitsu circuit designers, developed unique air-cooled chip designs using high speed ECL (emitter-coupled logic) circuit macros packaged in a chip with a heat dissipating cooling attachment (looked like the heat dissipating fins on a motorcycle engine) mounted directly to the top of the chip. This patented technology allowed the Amdahl mainframes of this era, unlike IBM systems, to be completely air cooled, and did not require “plumbing” for chilled water.
In the 470 systems, the chips were mounted in a 6×7 array on multi-layer cards which were then mounted in vertical columns. The cards had eight connectors that attached the micro-coaxial cables that interconnected the system components. A conventional backplane was not used in the central processing units." (source)
Here is a photo around the back side…. Signal timing synchronization was optimized by using customized wire lengths.
The arms race of the big iron systems (before monolithic integration into the "black box" of the IC) provide such an interesting visual manifestation of the system level innovations.
Six years later, IBM took the heat sink concept to the extreme in this helium infused multi-chip module (the subject of puzzle 86):
More info on the IBM "Future System" module i have in my office. =)
When I did my first chip designs at HP in 1987-89 they were also bipolar ECL. 1GHz fT if I recall. I designed a QPSK modulator and some unusual amps. I wish I still had the circuit diagrams….as I spent a bit of effort on a Devo plant pot hat rendered in iridescent SiO2 thin films.
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I still think its just the wiring for your home sound system…
As for the "plant pot hat"……well you do live in California..go for it. -
As Ladyada remarked, the chip names are prefixed MB-, which is a characteristic of Fujitsu devices.
The pictured contraption looked, um, a bit too large to be a personal computer or a workstation, and the PCB looked too anitiquated 😉 to hold RISC chips like Fujitsu SPARCs.
I thus googled "Fujitsu air-cooled mainframe", which quickly led me to Amdahl, Fujitsu’s US partner.
A Google image search for "Amdahl circuit board" immediately yielded this picture, on which a PCB with the quite characteristic 6×7 chip layout and the cylindrical cooling elements were easily recognizable.
A Google image search for "amdahl 470" then immediately led to this quite unequivocal page.
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@Phool Proof "After eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth." -Sherlock Holmes 😉
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nhr, good work. even though i determined they were fujitsu chips and they were heatsunk i decided to research the package to see if i could find that package used in any modern chips – i assumed it was still manufactured. which sort of lead me in a different direction. shoulda gone with my first instinct 🙂
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