from Hacker News

Building Processors from the Ground Up

by coadytech on 9/30/23, 11:21 AM with 16 comments

• by creer on 10/1/23, 4:08 AM

  > We do not use any integrated circuits, there is no hiding complexity.

  Call me nit-picking but it's not a great idea to "not hide complexity". Largish designs and up are all about managing complexity. It doesn't help you to try and keep everything flat in front of you - whether in schematic or hardware form. The advance made with VLSI design was to use hierachical abstraction as much as possible to keep each level of the design clear and at least somewhat in control. This is about diagrams, consistent logic design families and signals, abstractions solid enough that they can be simulated, repeatedly encapsulated, composed - and so understood and kept in mind by the human designer.

  And in this case they probably do. At least the PCB seems hierarchical. But that earlier wording is alarming.

• by itishappy on 10/1/23, 1:50 AM

  The red and green are nearly impossible for me to distinguish (colorblind). Also navigating between pages took me a while to figure out (dumb).

  That's a helluva chip and site though. I love how you can move all the diagrams around.

• by kibwen on 9/30/23, 10:26 PM

  This is extremely cool (note that you can use the hamburger menu to view other pages of the book, though it's not yet complete).

  I wonder what sort of clock speeds a CPU like this could hit?

• by hsbauauvhabzb on 9/30/23, 11:41 PM

  I would highly recommend ben eaters kits - they build a microprocessor on a breadboard, pretty cool stuff!

• by sashank_1509 on 9/30/23, 9:28 PM

  Extremely impressive, the world needs more such projects!

• by p1esk on 10/1/23, 1:27 AM

  They used 2008 transistors. In my opinion that’s not enough to do anything interesting. What can this computer do?

• by juunpp on 10/1/23, 2:55 AM

  Where's the book?