The Ware for July 2026 is shown below.

I’ve got silicon on the brain, so I’m going to give a die shot another go at name that ware. Hopefully this one is a bit easier than the last one. This excerpt is a design pattern I look for and find on almost every SoC. It’s technically showing a bit more than just the part I’m focused on, so as a hint I’m primarily interested in identifying the structure towards the lower left corner of this image.

If you’ve seen one of these before, you’ll know what it is – it’s pretty unmistakable, and a design pattern that’s highly conserved across processes, nodes and foundries. Bonus points to anyone that can explain some of the reasons why things are organized the way they are!

The Ware for June 2026 is an SGI RM6-64 raster manager, from a KONA/InfiniteReality graphics system. Congrats to Christian for naming it! email me for your prize.

This gem of a board was gifted to me by someone at SGI back when I worked there in…I want to say 1998? I even still have the name plate from my cubicle, from back before the ‘bunnie’ nickname really stuck…

Back then, if you wanted to do graphics, SGI was the only game in town, but I joined the party late. Within six months of joining, most of the division I was in had jumped ship for these then little-known upstarts of nVidia and ATI. Lacking any connections and the office a ghost town (my office building was eventually acquired by another startup that’s become a household name, you might have heard of them: Google. Still really weird visiting friends that work on that campus…), I went back to the familiarity of MIT and got my PhD, and that was the last time I held a job in Silicon Valley. Ironically, my main project today is doing silicon, just not in the Valley. What’s that old saying…you can take the boy out of Silicon Valley, but you can’t take the silicon out of the boy?

It was pretty impressive what they could do at the board level at SGI. That all got eaten up by Moore’s Law and integrated graphics…and now that Moore’s Law has run out of steam, we’re returning with gusto to the huge rack servers with lots and lots of interconnect!

The Ware for June 2026 is shown below:

This board is from my personal collection of “favorite boards” that I’ve collected over the years. A lot of old memories associated this one – both figuratively and literally.

I’ve received some feedback that gmail in particular is marking my email updates as spam. Not sure I have a good way to fix this yet, as the blog is also under heavy attack from automated AI spammers at the same time (to the tune of several thousand requests a day).

You’ll notice that the blog has no ads, so I also have no budget for moderation, paid mailers, or fancy anti-spam tools. I’ll noodle on a durable solution to this problem in my copious spare time, but for now, if you’re not receiving the email updates, please try to convince Google this is not spam by marking it as ham in your inbox. Yes, have also received feedback that this is ineffective and that “the way” is to pay a service that specializes in sending spam *ahem* marketing emails, but see my previous comment about this being a lean, ad-free blog. But, maybe if enough readers mark the emails as not spam, “The Algorithm” might be convinced people actually wanted the updates they signed up for?

The Ware for May 2026 is, in FETguy’s words: “one of many large pc boards of a Rodgers Instrument Co church organ. The core memory was used to store and recall settings of the organ’s “stops”. There were 5 core memory boards in this instrument which differ in how many words were implemented. I photographed the largest one, which has 19 x 10 bit words, of which one is a spare, and then another word, I guess also spare, with no corresponding drive circuitry populated. So, 200 cores of which 180 were actually used.”

Here’s the unredacted version of the ware – includes a patent number which has more details about how it works. I love the design-for-repair, self-documenting nature of this board!

Nobody quite guessed the true nature of the ware, so this month there’s just a solution and no prize.

The Ware for May 2026 is shown below.

This month’s ware is on a theme similar to last month’s but about…50 years older. Lots of things change over the years, but the geometric organization of an array never goes out of style. On the other hand, I increasingly miss things that were designed for repair, containing self-documenting features like this one.

Huge thanks again to FETguy and Renew Computers in San Rafael, CA for contributing this gem!