Originally posted by: taltamir
i honestly never heard of the practice... it sounds very marginal and "nerdy"... don't get me wrong, I am a nerd, but I am having a hard time imagining an average kid enjoying a cryptography project in his cereal.
I remember when I was a kid they had cereal boxes "Fruity Pebbles" or "Lucky Charms" or some other sugar-sweetened cereal, and your find a pair of red glasses inside the lid that would let you read the code letters on the outside of the box and then there was a rotating wheel inside the box that you would spin for each letter to get the coded answer... which was always some marketing thing as I recall.
At the time, I thought it was pretty cool. But I've always been a nerd.
Back on the original topic, I'm always amazed that the PLL's can lock at these frequencies and the Hypertransport SerDes connection can train. It's one thing to run CMOS digital binary logic inside the CPU at some insane speed... it's CMOS, noise-margins are amazing, it scales. What always boggles my mind is that analog circuitry - particularly cryogenically frozen analog circuitry which interfaces with non-cryogenically frozen circuitry - is able to work. If I'd never seen anyone do it and people asked me if it could be done, I'd have to say "no, that would never work". But I must be overanalyzing it because it does work.