6 ms·
Megaprocessor – A micro-processor built large (2016)
- cushychicken 5y agoWait - this thing runs Windows?! I figured it ran some kind of bytecode or toy OS. That's very neat that it runs a commercial operating system. I'd seen this post before but I'd never noticed the monitor with the Windows login screen.
- the-dude 5y agoI doubt it. There seem to be several SBCs in the picture with the Windows terminal. The Windows terminal is probably used to communicate with the megaprocessor.
- orbital-decay 5y agoHah, of course not. The PC acts as a terminal/controller for this machine. Running Windows 7 on a 8 KHz CPU is impossible, even on a x86-compatible one. WinXP has been shown to run on an extremely underclocked 8 MHz Pentium CPU, booting in half an hour: https://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_en.htm https://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_en.htm
- garaetjjte 5y agoIf you have enough RAM and patience, you can emulate anything even on small CPU. eg. https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bi...
- adrianN 5y ago30,000 minutes are more than 20 days. That's a lot of patience to boot Windows.
- colonwqbang 5y agoIt has only 256 bytes of RAM
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoIt definitely does not run Windows. It has 32 kB of RAM, 16-bit registers and a custom instruction set. That will never run Windows 1, let alone Windows 7 :)
- sundvor 5y agoThat's still more memory than my old Vic20 had. :)
- dTal 5y agoMissed opportunity to call it a "macroprocessor".
- tyingq 5y agoIn the same space of using discrete components instead of ICs , the Monster6502: https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/ Note: Well, there are some quad transistor array chips, but that seems still in the same spirit.
- trasz 5y agoThat giant slider pot to adjust clock speed is awesome.
- ryanmercer 5y agoThat is fantastically impressive and reminds me of something Sam Altman said once "Alan Kay gave me an Alto. That’s not the very last computer that I think is within my capability to understand everything that’s happening in there, but it’s getting near the end." https://mastersofscale.com/sam-altman-why-customer-love-is-all-you-need/ https://mastersofscale.com/sam-altman-why-customer-love-is-a... This is a visual representation of about what I understand about a processor and still outside of what I could actually make without a lot of reference material.
- temeritatis 5y agoI often wondered i could build some sort of general computing machine if we were pushed back to the dark ages or something. I guess you have to define exactly at what level of technological achievements we were pushed back to. But with the knowledge we have today, and without ICs (or advanced manufacturing facilities) and only "simple electronics" (whatever that would be) if this would be possible. Fun stuff to think about!
- userbinator 5y agoBabbage's analytical engine comes close, and doesn't even use electricity.
- jhgb 5y agoOn that note, I was wondering on several occasions whether it would have been technologically possible to build neon lamp logic circuits in Babbage's time. Aside from the problem of building an air liquifier a few decades early, I don't see any really major technological hurdles there. That would have nicely solved his problems with mechanical manufacturing...
- kens 5y agoLooking historically, you have a bunch of options for a pre-IC computer; there were lots of pre-IC computers. Transistors, of course, or vacuum tubes give you a useful computer. You can build a computer from relays, but the performance is pretty bad. Memory is also very important. Magnetic core memory is the way to go if you don't have ICs. None of this is going to help you if you went to the dark ages. As far as mechanical devices, mechanical calculating machines didn't arise until the late 1600s and weren't reliable for many years. It's unlikely that you'd be capable of building a mechanical computer until the industrial revolution. Note that Babbage was unsuccessful in building his machines even in the late 1800s. If your goal is to build a Turing-complete machine of some sort, even if totally impractical, you could push the date back a lot. But that would be more of a curiosity than a useful computer.
- Joker_vD 5y agoFor arithmetic, pinwheel calculator (aka "Odhner's arithmometer") [0] is a pretty decent and reliable mechanical device. You can even give it an electric motor for doing the rotations for you and a numerical keyboard. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinwheel_calculator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinwheel_calculator
- marcodiego 5y agoIf the ISA is sufficiently efficient, 8kHz is fast enough to run interpreters. An 8kHz can be useful as a calculator, running thing similar to FORTRAN and, if is has suitable I/O, maybe run a BASIC or CHIP-8 interpreter.
- alberto_ol 5y agoPrevious submission, 88 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317217
- Milner08 5y agoTom Scott has done videos where this has been either used directly as part of the video or has been in the background. For example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5JC9Ve1sfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5JC9Ve1sfI - It certainly makes for a cool background.
- diordiderot 5y agoThis is currently sitting in the computing history museum in Cambridge. 10 pounds entry. They have loads of old computers and consoles
- jazzyjackson 5y agoMassachusetts or UK?
- LaputanMachine 5y agoUK. Here's the Megaprocessor on the museum's website: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43063/The-Megaprocessor/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43063/The-Megaproces...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sbierwagen 5y agoWould a museum in the United States have an admission fee denominated in pounds?
- billsmithaustin 5y agoNo. It’s a computing museum so the admission fee would be denominated in “pound coin”.
- jdkee 5y agoMOnSter 6502 for the curious. https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/
- mdp2021 5y agoBeautiful. Inspired by this great submission, I was instead at http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html - 6502 simulator in HTML5 with visual changes on the virtual circuitry.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoThere is now https://github.com/floooh/v6502r https://github.com/floooh/v6502r as in remixed. Purposedly better, faster, and has Z80, too.
- zanethomas 5y agoI think the minicomputers of the 70s well-represent the halfway point between there and what we have today. At Basic Four Corporation I worked on systems built from 8"x11" circuit boards. A CPU might consist of two such cards joined on the front by a couple flat 50-pin cables and to the other components by a backplane. Disk Controller: 1 board Terminal controller: 1 board etc https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipment/mai-basic-four-model-1200 https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipme... Would be interesting to see some enterprising soul recreate a modern computer in such a form factor.
- bitwize 5y agoI am unaware of many Hackernews who had even heard of Basic Four, let alone worked there! Did you know Chuck Milden?
- zanethomas 5y agoIf I did I don't remember him. :) How are you familiar with Basic Four?
- bitwize 5y agoChuck was president of ICS, which was acquired by Basic Four in like the mid-70s. I only met him long after, but he told me stories. Including one about how he wheeled an Apple II into the Basic Four boardroom and demonstrated it, saying in effect "this is the future, and if you're not on board with the microcomputer revolution you'll be left behind". They decided to pass, and continue figuring out ways to sell $50,000 hard disks to existing customers. And that's why most of Hackernews hasn't heard of Basic Four :) I do know that MAI ended up selling microcomputer based products eventually, but by that time they were well into day-late-dollar-short territory and would continue to lose ground along with all the other minicomputer vendors like PRIME that hardly anyone these days has heard of.
- zanethomas 5y agoBasic Four was about 300 employees when I landed there and having spent most of my time in manufacturing I didn't rub elbows with upper management. Although they did rub elbows with me once when they thought I was stealing their operating system. But that's a whole nother story. :)
- qwerty456127 5y agoCan it run Doom? Or NetBSD? or whatever people would normally run on a PC?
- Delk 5y agoIt seems to have an address width of 16 bits, there's no mention of a memory management unit, and the website lists its RAM size as 256 bytes, so I'm going to say no, regardless of speed. The RAM size is of course the most limiting out of those three, but even if it were larger (and one could somehow build it without resorting to integrated circuits), you'd probably run into problems with the other fundamental limits if you wanted fancy things like memory in the order of megabytes. Of course that's not the point, though, because building an entire general-purpose CPU from scratch at such a human-visible scale and from basic components is a feat in itself.
- areactnativedev 5y agoThis is so good. I've just watched his 8 videos explaining from transistors to logic and memory. Wonder why he unfortunately stopped at SS8 : Time and Memory now...
- dennis714 5y agoEat this: https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/%7Eharry/Relay/ https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/%7Eharry/Relay/
- ozarkerD 5y agoThis is AWESOME
- LolWolf 5y agoIt is very, very cool :)
- osamagirl69 5y agoThe mega processor is one of my all-time favorite computers, along with the Magic-1 https://homebrewcpu.com/ https://homebrewcpu.com/ The megaprocessor is just absolutely wonderful in how it bridges from 'here is a transistor, it lights an LED' to 'here is a computer, it plays tetris'. I always struggled to unwind the layers of abstraction in a modern computer from atoms in the CPU to running python, but being able to just look at a bunch of literal transistors (with LEDs on each gate!) wired up playing tetris shows how a computer really works in such a profound and awe inspiring fashion. Magic-1 is sort of the next level higher complexity, where it is made out of very simple TTL (most complicated chip function is the ALU--a circuit I had to build as an EE undergrad out of or- and and- gates) and it hosts a webpage. It currently seems to be down, but you can see it on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20210815180101/http://www.magic-1.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210815180101/http://www.magic-... I will never forget when I came across that site and realized that I was interacting with a wirewrapped pile of ram and nor gates over the internet. There was even a time when you could telnet in and play some retro text-based adventure games, To this day, the only time I have played Adventure was on Magic-1.
- IanWard1 5y agoLove this kind of build, so I'm working on a little breadboard one myself https://www.youtube.com/IanWard1 https://www.youtube.com/IanWard1 similar to the Ben Eater 8-bit CPU videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBy... (which are amazing and everyone should watch)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI'm partial to the Gigatron[0] myself. Built entirely using a mere 34 TTL ICs available in the 70s (930 logic gates) and it's capable of driving a VGA monitor and 4-bit sound while running at 6.25Mhz. In my opinion, it is beautifully simple and elegant. [0] https://gigatron.io https://gigatron.io
- criddell 5y agoCharles Petzold's book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software explains a computer from the ground up. I don't know if the ideas still apply to modern computers, but it's pretty cool understanding how things like addresses are decoded and instructions are constructed and executed at the gate level in a very basic microprocessor.
- FpUser 5y agoCurious what factors limit clock to 8kHz.
- sbierwagen 5y agohttps://www.quora.com/How-is-transistor-density-related-to-clock-speed-Why-does-higher-transistor-density-enable-faster-processors https://www.quora.com/How-is-transistor-density-related-to-c...
- errcorrectcode 5y agoWorst case propagation delay.
- FpUser 5y agoThis does not make any sense. I can get way better delay / frequency wise on long USB cables. Something here does not compute.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoThen you don't understand digital logic or how processors are designed, single cycle or pipelined.
- mrlonglong 5y agoI'm astonished it's running Windows !
- asdf_snar 5y agoThe quality of not only the product, but the accompanying explanations is outstanding. I think it's a work of art, because not only is it visually impactful (especially at 1Hz, as in the demu), it also uses the medium to convey an idea that would be difficult to convey in any other way. I'm interested in making (stochastic) algorithms fast, which always seems to eventually lead back to looking at code in compiler explorer. The extent of my knowledge there is basically "short assembly good, long assembly bad". But I've always lacked some "tactile" feeling (for lack of a better phrase) for what a register like "eax" or "rax" is. I hope that learning more about the megaprocessor might help get a glimpse of this.