Megaprocessor!

[rob_gould]

https://youtu.be/z71h9XZbAWY

http://www.sciencealert.com/this-engineer-created-an-enormous-megaprocessor-to-play-tetris?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1

I'm amazed it's only 500W!

 

[ruffrecords]

Truly astonishing!. Now that's what I call DIY.

I remember very many years ago (mid 60s)  I was very interested in computers but I just could not work out how they worked. I then cam across this incredible book which described the inner workings of a computer in minute detail. it was so beautifully written it instantly crystallised in my head. I wish I still had that book

Cheers

Ian

 

[JohnRoberts]

The most powerful computer is chinese (33 petaflops).  I think it uses all chinese processors.

It will be a bad day when we need to know chinese to program computers.

JR

 

[ruffrecords]

The most powerful computer is chinese (33 petaflops).  I think it uses all chinese processors.

It will be a bad day when we need to know chinese to program computers.

JR

And the top 10 all run Linux.

Cheers

Ian

 

[rob_gould]

It will be a bad day when we need to know chinese to program computers.

JR

Not for the Chinese

 

[benb]

It was on Hackaday too:
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/06/42300-transistor-megaprocessor-is-complete/

I'm amazed it's only 500W!

I wonder how much more it is when all the bits are 1's and all the LEDs are on.

 

[benb]

Might it have been this one? I read it back when, but I don't think it was that clear. Later, having access to my college roomate's KIM-1 taught me a lot.

"Giant Brains, or machines that think"
https://monoskop.org/images/b/bc/Berkeley_Edmund_Callis_Giant_Brains_or_Machines_That_Think.pdf

Truly astonishing!. Now that's what I call DIY.


I remember very many years ago (mid 60s)  I was very interested in computers but I just could not work out how they worked. I then cam across this incredible book which described the inner workings of a computer in minute detail. it was so beautifully written it instantly crystallised in my head. I wish I still had that book

Cheers

Ian

 

[PRR]

My father loved the link. He used to work on machines of about that complexity, little cards with a few transistors per card racked across the room. Amusing that what took a large lab of engineers and technicians and big government money in the 1960s is now home-brew.

> 33 petaflops

The cite is mega size, not mega speed. I think it runs up-to 8KHz.

> it's only 500W!

KHz-speed logic would be ample with 10mW (5V 2mA, 2.2K loads) per device. 40,000 transistors and 10,000 LEDs @ 10mW/ea comes to just 500W. It could surely be scaled to <1mA per transistor and >5mA per LED, slower but brighter.

> need to know chinese to program computers.

AFAIK, all the Big Ones understand FORTRAN, still the he-man language of arithmetic computing.

Yes, the peta-brains' O/S is unix-like so the FORTRAN is writ in C. And if you can show a loop has not been fully optimized by the C-core of the FORTRAN compiler (but they tend to be good), then you can insert C or machine-code if needed.

BTW, if you recall the Original PC or the Original Mac, the 8088 is 30,000 transistors, the 68000 is 55,000, similar to the Tetris machine.

 

[Matt Nolan]

That looks like fun. A friend of mine made a fully functioning microprocessor from 74LS logic chips. It filled the top of a medium sized dining table.

I remember very many years ago (mid 60s)  I was very interested in computers but I just could not work out how they worked. I then cam across this incredible book which described the inner workings of a computer in minute detail. it was so beautifully written it instantly crystallised in my head. I wish I still had that book

I think if you start of with a good explanation of Turing's Universal Machine and then a good explanation of the Von Neumann Architecture, you are good to go.

The most powerful computer is chinese (33 petaflops).  I think it uses all chinese processors.

That's a lot of flops! I worked on the design of a multi-processor IC a few years ago which could do 60GigaOps, and the devices could be chained or meshed up for even more. Not native floating point though, fixed point 16 or 32 bits with 40 bit accumulators. There were about 400 small Harvard Architecture processors on one chip with a clever switching fabric between them. Communications between the processors was totally deterministic, set at compile time. You could compile C onto it, or write assembler for each processor by hand - I did a fair bunch of that too. Splitting up broadband modem / radio interface functions into parallel sequential processes and coding them up. It was 202 million transistors all told, which was quite a lot back then - especially as not that much of it was RAM. most of it was actual processor. The Intel chips at the time weren't much larger, but loads of their transitor count was on chip cache RAM. I don't work there any more. Intel bought the company eventually...

AFAIK, all the Big Ones understand FORTRAN, still the he-man language of arithmetic computing.

So *that's* why they taught us Fortran 77 at university in 1992. It had a fixed maximum line length (still harking back to punched cards for program input!) I have never used it since, but plenty of C and C++, assembler and scripty stuff like Perl, Tcl and Python. I don't like Python. Too messy.

Processors - they're everywhere these days. The one in even the simplest of mobile phones is more powerful than the one that helped us get to the Moon (though less reliable....)

 

[JohnRoberts]

I learned fortran (IV) back in the 60's.

One early job interview showed me a 2 transistor flip-flop and asked me to explain it.

The progress in  technology during my lifetime is staggering, and I'm not dead yet.

JR

 

[ruffrecords]

I remember an article about the Motorola 6809 processor which showed the LSTTL prototype the development team built.

Cheers

Ian