A Chip Off the Old Rug: Ken Shirriff Finds a Pentium Processor Hiding in a Navajo Weaving
Commissioned by Intel, this faithful reproduction of an Intel Pentium die uses traditional weaving and dying techniques.
Noted reverse engineer Ken Shirriff is no stranger to high-resolution photographs of unencapsulated silicon dice, but his latest look at the inner workings of an Intel Pentium is rather more unusual — as it's based on a Navajo rug woven back in 1994 by Marilou Schultz.
"Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern," Shirriff explains. "Suddenly, I realized the pattern was strangely familiar, so I stopped and looked closely. The design turned out to be an image of Intel's Pentium chip, the start of the long-lived Pentium family. The weaver, Marilou Schultz, created the artwork in 1994 using traditional materials and techniques."
Commissioned, Shirriff discovered, by Intel as a gift for the American Indian Science & Engineering Society, Schultz' artwork was created using traditional weaving techniques — but rather than nature-inspired imagery or abstract patterns, it depicts what an original Intel Pentium processor looks like if you remove the silicon die and put it under a high-power microscope.
Discussing the artwork with Schultz, a Navajo/Diné and math teacher, Shirriff learned that the weaving was created using a photograph of the Pentium die and with a weaving technique that raised the outline of each section — providing a three-dimensional aspect. Traditional plant dies were used for color, while the wool was harvested from Navajo-Churro sheep. The process was painstaking, with a full day's weaving required roughly an inch of rug — with the result, Shirriff points out, being a surprisingly accurate interpretation.
"The rug is accurate enough that each region can be marked with its corresponding function in the real chip," Shirriff writes. "The weaving is [even] accurate enough to determine that it represents a specific Pentium variant, called P54C. The motivation for the P54C was that the original Pentium chips (called P5) were not as fast as hoped and ran hot. Intel fixed this by using a more advanced manufacturing process, reducing the feature size from 800 to 600 nanometers and running the chip at 3.3 volts instead of 5 volts."
Shirriff's full write-up is available on his website; Schultz is currently working on another chip-based weaving, representing the Fairchild 9040 — a part built by Navajo workers on Navajo land.