from Hacker News

How does a computer chip work?

by pinkyand on 10/5/14, 5:05 PM with 27 comments

  • by ernestipark on 10/6/14, 1:29 AM

    The class 6.004 at MIT basically steps through these abstractions one week/lab at a time. This was my favorite class in school. Each lab is a higher level of abstraction and eventually you've built a basic processor. It gives you a very clear picture of how "1s and 0s" can turn out to become what you see on your computer screen.

    OCW Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

  • by th3iedkid on 10/5/14, 8:27 PM

    why would someone have so much of patience/energy/motivation to write it all over an answer to a question in Quora?

    He/She has certainly done a wonderful job but just curios at alternatives and reasons for choices they made..

    Why not just refer to an article in the series of ... 'What every programmer should know about ...'

  • by dfox on 10/6/14, 12:50 AM

    It amazes me that in almost every single article of this kind, there is this huge leap from binary adder to "computer as a bunch of labeled boxes", where these boxes mostly describe the data-path and all the control and sequencing is omitted. I think that most people after reading this kind of description will still think that it is some kind of impenetrable black magic (I certainly did for a long time). And it is not and somehow showing how one could build state-machine sequencer out of register and some logic is not that hard nor complex.

  • by derefr on 10/6/14, 3:00 AM

    The subheading of the question was never addressed—"how do we get all of that information compacted onto that ever shrinking chip?"

    That's always been the biggest mystery to me: what are chip manufacturers doing differently with each of these "process nodes" that makes them able to do photolithography at slightly smaller scales, but with the scale only shrinking a little bit per five-year-interval?

    Naively, I'd expect a process like photolithography to be mostly scale-invariant (you can lens a mask down to whatever size you like) down to a size where it hits a wall due to quantum effects. So when photolithography was invented, why didn't chips suddenly jump from 100um to 100nm scale?

  • by pacofvf on 10/6/14, 3:02 PM

    ohh I remember when I built my first Von Neuman machine with eeproms, gals, flipflops and multiplexers, it was a 16 buttons "simon says" game, I used 6 protoboards and kilometers of copper wire.