Ariel Hendel CMT musings

The warmth of vacuum tubes

I grew up listening to vacuum tube nostalgia. Radio technicians could diagnose a radio receiver with just a screwdriver, and sometimes even fix it. But beyond that, the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductors was a religious topic within the Radio Amateur circles. It got harder to build your own gear, some said it didn't sound the same, the non-linearities of transistor amplifiers, you know. But the main complaint was not technical. Radio Amateur operators missed them because vacuum tubes kept their hands warm during the cold winter nights.

Radio Amateur anecdotes are some of the most memorable stories I could tell, maybe some other day, on some other blog. And I would also join the mourning of the vacuum tube, if it weren't for a more profound and recent displacement I need to mourn. The displacement of the HF radio Amateur at the hands of the Internet... A 3khz voice channel, shared, that may or may not work on a given day to a given place, displaced by a DSL line and a browser. I am not the only deserter, just look at the roofs of a city like Montevideo, once the highest density of Yagi antennas on the planet, you walk its streets today and there are few antennas to be seen. Victims of the ubiquitous Internet.

Yet I appreciate irony, and with modern life's Internet addiction filling my once HAM radio nights, I discover that the Athlon laptop gets warm just like the old vacuum transceivers. Deja Vu. We replaced hot vacuum tubes with cooler solid state radio, then things got pretty hot when we put lots of transistors in NMOS integrated circuits. I recall my first IC design in NMOS, clocked at a meager 10MHz, it required a ceramic package and got too hot to touch. They got cooler again with CMOS, so we started building bigger and faster semiconductors. Up to the point that the semiconductors running a lowly laptop keep my hands warm. The Internet server infrastructure (replacing the Ham radio ether) requires major ventilation and air-conditioning. At the rate we are going we might have to host the planet's infrastructure at the poles. How is that for an idea, dual home the entire net infrastructure to the North and South poles, no single point of failure, affordable land, maximum redundancy, cooled by keeping the windows open, and solar cells for 24 hours a day (well, half a year). I digress, but you read it here first. Hosting the net at the poles...

What is next? How do we pull the CMOS cool device trick again? For the moniker we can certainly reuse the letters CM, that is a start. As for the substance, let me narrate a customer lab visit we had here in Newark. We were showing off our first UltraSPARC T1 bringup machine, verbally conveying how naturally Horizontal Micro-scaling fits telephony infrastructure network elements. Brought Solaris up, showed our demo, and asked the customer to do the honors and check how many processors Solaris reported. Impressing somebody by printing the number 32 on a screen may not get you very far socially with your friends, or at bar, but for a skeptical techie the number 32 out of a single processor socket was meaningful. He lived on that side of the fine line between skepticism and paranoia. He touched the processor, and feeling it cold, accused us of smoke and mirrors; basically of running the demo from a different machine. We proved the accuser wrong, and ended up making the unintended point that Niagara really is a Cooler technology. We earned the right to reuse the letters for the next cool technology, CMT.

But before you start asking about how to keep your hands warm in the CMT era, fear not, there is still Memory, that is, plenty of DIMMs to keep the operator warm. What a coincidence, every train of thought takes me back to the Memory theme.

[ Technorati: NiagaraCMT, Solaris ]

Posted at 12:14PM Dec 06, 2005 by Ariel Hendel in Sun  |  Comments[1]