Sadly, both processors lost to the dust, in the end. Back around 2005, there were a lot of people who couldn't spell dual though, and 'duel processor' machines were going for about half what people were paying people who could spell for 'dual processor' machines on eBay. It was an object lesson in the financial value of learning to spell...

lowRISC is cool, but it's not that useful for universities. For research (and teaching), FPGAs are much more useful because of the short turn-around. It takes me about 1-2 hours to go from making changes to our processor to finishing the boot of an OS on the FPGA and doesn't require anyone else's input (unless there are bugs, then some help is often useful!). The cycle for getting a chip fabbed is a much longer process, usually requiring a small team and a lot of money.

If you want a MIPS implementation that you can run in an FPGA, then we've built one and released it under an Apache-style license (not exactly the Apache license, because the Apache license says 'the software' in a lot of places). It's an implementation of a version of the (64-bit) MIPS ISA that is over 20 years old, so any relevant patents have expired. We've been using this in teaching for a couple of years (one exercise is to replace the branch predictor, for example). It's written in a high-level HDL, so more amenable to research and teaching uses, because the code is easy to make invasive changes to.

It's not clear what version of the MIPS ISA they're implementing (the article I read just said MIPS32, which covers a whole range of things). It sounds like it's MIPS32r6, which is not backwards compatible with any previous MIPS version. The only value of MIPS over something like RISC V (which is increasingly the standard ISA for computer architecture research) is that there's a large body of existing software for it, so you can do real evaluation.

We've done a clean-room reimplementation of MIPS III (R4K compatible) implementation in BlueSpec, which is a high-level HDL. MIPS III and the R4K are over 20 years old, so any architecture-specific patents will have expired. In comparison, this core is only 32-bit (really not interesting for research) and is written in a low-level HDL (making the kind of invasive changes that you want to do in research difficult), and is an ISA that has very little software support.

There were probably some people with very expensive AGP cards that were needed for some custom display hardware. I used a PCI (not PCIe) graphics card for a while because it was the only thing that could drive a small LCD monitor that I'd bought cheaply.

We use the Terasic DE4 for most things, but it's insanely expensive - definitely only a board to use if someone else is paying. The SoCKit is quite nice - much cheaper and has a dual-core ARM board. We've ported FreeBSD to the ARM (adding devices for programming the FPGA) and our MIPS-compatible softcore to the FPGA, with virtio communicating between the two, which makes it easy to play with heterogeneous multicore. It's mainly intended for prototyping accelerator cores and there's a fast cache-coherent interconnect between the ARM cores and the FPGA so it's quite a nice platform to play with if you want to try and offload computation to the FPGA. It's a fairly small FPGA by modern standards, but still big enough for our CPU, which is a 6-stage in-order pipeline with caches, TLB, branch predictor and so on.

It wasn't like that when they started. For one thing, the ads were just how they made money, the search was their core business and they did change web search considerably. I also remember that Google ads were quite disruptive. They only accepted plain text adverts and they used the contents of the page to identify relevant ads. This meant that, unlike their competitors, their ads were both relevant (I'm looking at a page about X, therefore I'm probably interested in buying X) and non-obtrusive. Now they try to personalise the ads (just because I was interested in X last week doesn't mean that I'm interested in buying X now, sorry) and they have annoying video ads.

And it turns out that people were still launching boards with AGP in 2010. You can probably still buy one...

True, but SMP systems are older. I used a dual P3-700 for years, which I picked up cheaply on eBay because not many people searched for 'duel processor' (I think eBay now does some phonetic matching in their search). Before that, the ABit BP6 (1999) was quite popular. It ran two Celerons, so you could get a dual-processor machine for cheaper than a single-processor one (though you needed to run Windows NT or *NIX to be able to use the second one, as XP was the first SMP-capable consumer OS from MS). The 300MHz Celerons overclocked to 450MHz by bumping the FSB from 66MHz to 100MHz, making it quite competitive with the P2 (the L2 cache in the Celeron was half the size, but twice the speed, and the core was the same).

Really? Wikipedia tells me that kindergarten in the USA means up to age 6. By that time, I had been taught to read, write and do arithmetic (though I sucked at long division and found long multiplication hard until I was taught a third method a few years later). My handwriting is not much better now than it was then, though it did improve a bit in the middle as a teenager when I was writing on a regular basis.

I don't, but if you want to get the same fun without all of the old annoyances there are two things I'd recommend:

The first is to get an FPGA dev board. BlueSpec is a nice proprietary high-level HDL that is free for academic use, but if you don't qualify for that then CHISEL from Berkeley is also not bad - they're both a nice step above Verilog / VHDL.

The second is the mbed boards from various ARM partners. Some ARM folks handed me one of these to play with a few months back. These are aimed at getting embedded development to people who don't normally do it. They've got all of the fun I/O stuff from the BBC micro (plus some new stuff like USB and Ethernet) and a nicely put together development environment.

They're increasingly hard to justify though. Cortex-M cores are really, really cheap (M0 and M0+ especially) and a modern 32-bit instruction set can be a significant win. You can't justify a 16-bit microcontroller on cost grounds anymore, let alone an 8-bit one. The main places Z80s are used is in systems designed in the early '80s that would cost too much to change, but which need periodic repairs.

I've seen a few things recently that have taken an amusing middle ground and bought ARM cores and used them to run a Z80 emulator, because it was cheaper to get the associated peripherals to attach to the ARM core.

I don't understand why Microsoft wants to go down that path. Their big money comes from businesses. They should be trumpeting private clouds (buy Windows server, install on a rack, run all of the cloudy stuff that you want under control of your company) and privacy to actively differentiate themselves from Google.

I've spent a depressing amount of the last couple of weeks looking at hotel web sites to find somewhere to stay for a business trip. About a year ago, almost all of them would have used Google Maps for their location page. Now about half used Bing Maps. I was quite surprised by this, though I vaguely remember Google starting to charge businesses for using GMaps (it could also be that Google highlights all of the competing hotels in the map, which probably isn't something that hotels want...). I didn't find the Bing map any worse than the Google one. Both were annoying in different ways.

I expect Google to die in the same way that IBM died: it will still be a huge and influential player for a long time, but won't be the company that defines an industry that people care about. The same sort of path as Microsoft.

When I interviewed at Google a few years I was reminded of something that JWZ wrote about Netscape, claiming that it started to decline when it started hiring people who were there because it was a cool place to work, not because they wanted to change the world and believed in the things that the company was doing. Everyone I met at Google told me that I should would there because it was a cool place to work...