James W. Meng
Home/Resume/CV -- VLNLAB -- Projects -- Abuse by the United States Government -- Writings
The [TRABLUMPKIN]Chip
Ken Shiriff did a fantastic job documenting the silicon die of the Intel 80386 processor recently. But what he didn't do was document it's obscure System-on-Chip version, the Intel 8292SX, which was much more sophisticated for its time than anything he documented in certain ways.
In its own way, the i8292SX was the [TRABLUMPKIN]Chip. You could build a motherboard for a laptop with like three or four chips in total. It was a special thing if you were a lazy [TRABLUMPKIN] asshole working in an East German semiconductor factory. Wouldn't have to do much work at all anymore, even though the video refresh performance was shit and the printer port was slow.
Anyhow, one of these days, I'm gonna buy one and cut it open and put it under an electron microscope because I'm fucking sick of this garbage, sick of the Americans pretending they stood against communism when in reality all they did was facilitate all kinds of stupid, worthless, useless peasant dreams all over the world.
The i8292SX was an absurdity, designed almost ironically for the psychological needs of the filth working in electronics factories in the Eastern Bloc. "Want it all on one chip? Here it is! We'll even name it after Brezhnev's death year and the year we expect the USSR to go under!" But hey. It's almost entirely undocumented. And that's what I'm here for. It's almost like directing porn now to me.