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Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates
- glimshe 9mo agoReminds me of college: "Hardware and Software are logically equivalent"
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 9mo agoWriting hardware is like writing software except parallelism is way cheaper, but mistakes are way more expensive.
- lucyjojo 9mo agothat doesnt seem like a good tradeoff...
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoHardware takes 20 years to learn how to build properly. Software takes 1 year under someone smart in a production environment. People that conflate the two... longer or more likely never.. =3
- jacquesm 9mo ago> Software takes 1 year under someone smart in a production environment. That's very funny.
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoBe honest, most Software people find utility in artifacts which are a mysterious black box with an emulated abstraction. During a career role most have no idea "why" chips were designed and built a certain way, nor require this information to work within abstract domains. In many ways, vibe-coders are the absurd optimization of a naive trajectory toward zero workmanship standards. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoWhoever said that was mistaken... or worked at Intel. lol =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_domain_crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_domain_crossing
- xphos 9mo agoAs a computer science guy who interlops in computer engineering i really want to find time to build something cool like this and tapeout. The retro architectures for rendering are simple but fun! I love the project
- oofbey 9mo agoIt’s amazing and wonderful to see the Internet support these tiny cliques of interest. Having everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture in some ways, but it also supports these couple dozen (?) people around the world finding each other for this amazing little competition.
- anonymous908213 9mo agoHaving everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture in some ways The internet may hypothetically homogenize culture relative to a society that does not have any kind of mass communication at all, but relative to the world it was actually introduced into, the internet has completely balkanised the culture. Prior to the internet, we had television, cinema, literature, radio, and newspapers, which were all centralised and controlled enough that they created a shared monoculture in nations. A signifant portion of a country's population would watch, read, and listen to the same media. The internet bucked that trend, allowing all kinds of new subcultures to pop up and to more easily cross national boundaries.
- therein 9mo agoYeah, back in the day you would go to school the next day after a show that everyone watches released its new episode, it aired on the prime-time slot on the primary TV channel, and you'd discuss what happened in that episode, or have some references or new jokes. Created a common culture.
- amarant 9mo agoI remember those days. As the only kid in school who didn't watch Lost, those days sucked
- openinfrared 9mo agoReally cool!
- Dwedit 9mo agoIf you have registers, it's not "no memory".
- hackernudes 9mo agoIf you have flip flops, it's not "no memory". If you have a ROM, it's not "no memory". Needlessly pedantic! I thought this was pretty cool but the first video didn't play. All this write up and I really just want to see the damn demo in action first! (Edit: reloaded the page and it worked. I still would like to see it on rela hardware!)
- a1k0n 9mo agoAh that's what I get for self hosting. What browser? https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms
- a1k0n 9mo agoAnd this thread shows all of them on real hardware: https://x.com/i/status/1992802154370011595 https://x.com/i/status/1992802154370011595
- jayd16 9mo agoI don't know. Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no? So a line exists somewhere and I think it's way before no RAM.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago> Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no? Bucket-brigade delay lines?
- jayd16 9mo agoI'm not saying every analog signal processor is surely memory free, simply that you can imagine one that is. But I'm not really familiar with what that is.
- startupsfail 9mo agoWow, I'm looking at current "Open Shuttles", a license to use 4KB of SRAM in the project is $2500. But it comes with Wishbone Bus interface! > 1024x32 Commercial SRAM > CF_SRAM_1024x32 > Commercial SRAM: 1024 words x > 32 bits (4KB) with Wishbone Bus interface > Area: 0.17mm² > GPIOs: 0 > License: Commercial - $2500 per project
- BoredPositron 9mo agoReminds me of the time we repaired old pinball machines in trade school. Good times.
- idiotsecant 9mo agoNo x, no y, just Z is a pattern so often used by chatGPT it has started to bleed into common usage by people who maybe aren't even using an LLM.
- peddling-brink 9mo agoLanguage is fluid. This is ok. There are many bad things about LLMs, but a benign shift in popular language usage isn't one of them.
- mschuster91 9mo ago> There are many bad things about LLMs, but a benign shift in popular language usage isn't one of them. Organic shifts in language are fine. What is not fine is Big Money (which most forms of AI are) manipulating society at large - and that's not just the AI companies' doing. Think of Tiktok leading people to say "unalive" instead of the various clear words before (e.g. kill, murder, executed, run over by car, mauled to death by animal).
- idiotsecant 9mo agoI disagree. It's a sign of what is essentially cultural contamination by an LLM. There is something vaguely gross about it, like when people start repeating advertising slogans. It's a sign that someone spent enough money that they directly rewired our brains.
- Marazan 9mo ago> like when people start repeating advertising slogans but without the craft of a good advertising slogan. So worse!
- attila-lendvai 9mo ago...and way more centralized and powerful.
- peddling-brink 9mo ago
- Archit3ch 9mo agoI'm tempted to put together an FPAA with Tiny Tapeout, but it likely won't fit in the allocated area.
- Taniwha 9mo agoTT allows you to pay more and build multi-block designs
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoCheck the switching speed specification, and shared i/o bank configuration. The project has a narrow scope of use-cases. =3
- Archit3ch 9mo agoSwitching speed: should be good enough for audio in the kHz range, even for off-chip control. Analog i/o pins: definitely limited, even if you purchase the highest option available (6).
- Uptrenda 9mo ago[flagged]
- RossBencina 9mo agoI was curious about the long-term stability of the cited HAKMEM sin/cos generator. I found an overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3111501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3111501 (EDIT: I'm still not sure about stability, apparently it is stable in exact arithmetic under certain conditions.) Coincidentally it is related to the Verlet integration video I posted last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253592
- a1k0n 9mo agoYeah, it is exact in this specific circumstance. But yes, it's exactly the same trick; I also enjoyed that video in my Youtube recommender feed last week!
- fsckboy 9mo ago>Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates ok, but silicon is doped so it's slightly impure, and CPUs are also silicon and memory is also silicon. you actually meant "4K gates, no clock, no synchronization, no timing" and maybe a little "not exactly sure when the output is rea... is rea... is ready"
- chrisjj 9mo agoThere is sync and there is timing. Else there'd be no meaningful image.
- intalentive 9mo agoI like how the grid pulses with the kick drum. Nice touch.
- datameta 9mo agoVery impressive stuff. I used to frequent the JS demoscene, mostly dwitter - but this is on a whole other level. Oh shit, this prompted me to check and turns out TinyTapeout is back to life! https://tinytapeout.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/
- xecaz 9mo agoWow, nice work!! Coming from demo/intro coding where you have memory and a driver for audio(x86), this is very impressing.
- yoan9224 9mo agoThis is absolutely wild. Rendering graphics with just combinational logic and no frame buffer is the kind of constraint that breeds creativity. The HAKMEM sine/cosine generator is such an elegant choice - it's numerically stable in fixed-point and requires only adds and bit-shifts. Perfect for hardware. I used a similar approach once for generating test patterns in an FPGA. The fact that you can iterate on this in simulation, then deploy to actual silicon via Tiny Tapeout for $150 is honestly mind-blowing. We're living in the future.
- tails4e 9mo agoHow does this compare to CORDIC for sin/cos generation? Which is more accurate, etc ?
- a1k0n 9mo agoCORDIC is more accurate, but takes as many iterations as you have bits of precision in your angle. Another demo called Warp in this contest used pipelined CORDIC to do atan2 on every pixel to create a tunnel, which is super impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mu3getxhU&t=780s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mu3getxhU&t=780s
- yoan9224 9mo agoGood question! CORDIC and HAKMEM Item 149 are both hardware-friendly, but have different trade-offs: CORDIC: - Iterative algorithm (needs multiple clock cycles) - Accuracy improves with more iterations - Generates both magnitude and phase - Typical hardware implementation: 12-16 iterations for decent precision HAKMEM (Item 149): - Single-cycle computation (just two adds per step) - Uses the recurrence: x' = x - εy, y' = y + εx - Accuracy depends on word width and epsilon choice - Numerically stable in exact arithmetic if ε² < 2
- zahlman 9mo ago> The fact that you can iterate on this in simulation, then deploy to actual silicon via Tiny Tapeout for $150 is honestly mind-blowing. We're living in the future. It's really cool but it doesn't seem practical at all. They aren't setting up print runs, just one-offs (https://tinytapeout.com/faq/#how-many-chips-will-i-receive-can-i-order-more https://tinytapeout.com/faq/#how-many-chips-will-i-receive-c...) and $150 could get you... many orders of magnitude more power than that. ... For that matter, apparently the microcontroller in the dev kit is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP2040 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP2040 , which seems like a beast in comparison. And it's still available for less than $1 USD on PiShop.