Computer Chips and Art

While at the library I cam across a magazine called, Technology Review. It is published by MIT. Specifically, the one I was looking at was the February 2009 issue. I picked it up and just started flipping through the pages. While at it, I came across these wonderful pictures of computer chips; large and detailed. I was pretty stunned at how beautiful they are.

These pictures brought to mind some artists…specifically the painter Peter Halley and  Hans Hoffman. Halley’s definitely have a circuit or diagram influence. Being that his paintings started showing up in the 1980s, computer circuitry influence doesn’t seem far fetched. In comparison to an actual chip, they are extremely simplified. However, Hans Hoffman started gaining a reputation as an abstract expressionist painter in the early-mid 20th century. So I doubt a connection could be made to computer chips. I just thought of him because of the hard-edged geometric squares and rectangles that lay in contrast to free-form “painterly” brush strokes. With some of the chips there are some ridged areas and some areas that seem more murky. There isn’t the “push” or “pull” that made the Hoffman paintings so famous.

Here are a couple Halley paintings:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a couple of Hoffman paintings:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, here are the chips I was looking at in the magazine:

L to R top: Intel 8080, Intel 8086; L to R bottom: Intel 386, AMD 386

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

motorola 68000 introduced in 1979. Powered the Macintosh 128K

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L: Intel Pentium processor introduced in 1993; R: IBM PowerPC 601 also introduced in 93

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The IBM PowerPC chip was developed jointly with Apple and Motorola. This chip was used in Power Macs.

Intel Pentium 4 chip introduced in 2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2007's Intel Core 2 Duo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will make note that these chips are in chronological order. The first one was introduced in 1974 and had 5,000 transistors and was the heart of the Altair personal computer. The last one, introduced in 2007, has 410 million transistors and more than one” core” plus a huge data cache. It is amazing how complex these things are and the size of todays chips are tiny in comparison to ones in the past.