A New CPU

Daryl wants to make his very own CPU…

Decoded from the bubbles of his last beer, this YACPU[*] is to be:

• His own empirical design;
• Something that is ‘different’;
• “Just for fun”!

Can the parallel accumulated might of NLUG guide him on his search?…

 

All at our usual Organ Grinder venue, usual 7:30pm start, details as below.

All welcome! 🙂

 

*:

• YACPU – Yet-Another-CPU
• CPU – Central Processing Unit

 

SPOILERS! (Not for Daryl’s eyes…)

🙂

Some of the further details are… 😉

(Has anyone mentioned this talk to Daryl yet?!… 😮 )

As is often the case, our combined array of loosely coupled neuronal nodes may well be awash with a combinatorial explosion of possibilities as well as enjoying good beer for added creativity…

 

A few ideas may well be gleaned from:

• John Graham-Cumming TED talk YouTube: The greatest machine that never was – Building today to the designs of Babbage. The race is on!
• Earlier details are given on: “The 100-year leap – Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was a century before its time. So why not build it now?”

 

Pre-dating that with some earlier examples:

• xkcd: A Bunch of Rocks
• Stonehenge was more than a temple, it was an astronomical calculator: Archaeoastronomy at Stonehenge
• Banging together 19 million cubic metres of modern-day rocks: Youtube – 32 Bit Calculator in Minecraft

 

For a few ‘alternative’ ideas:

• In 1936 Soviet scientist Lukyanov built an analog water computer
• MONIAC – The 70-Year-Old Computer That Runs on Water
• Rolling along some more: YouTube – Giant Digi-Comp II

 

Mention must be made of two other-worldly designs that closely follow some of the developments made here on Earth:

• Discworld Monthly: Hex
• lspace – Hex
• Discworld Hex Structure and technology
• Discworld Glooper “the Thing in the Cellar”

 

Combining some of the aspects listed so far we get this amazing amalgamation:

• YouTube: Wintergatan – Marble Machine (C64 SID Chip Cover)
• … which follows on from YouTube: Wintergatan – Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)

 

Going a little more ‘home/research-brew’ recent, there are these examples:

• YouTube: Relay-Based Floating Point Square Root Calculator
• YouTube: [Electromechanical] The Numbotron – finding prime numbers
• YouTube: Analog computer game on a modular synthesizer
• YouTube: Solving Mazes With Analog Computers
• YouTube: Living Computer Created With Slime Mold?
• YouTube: … advantages of [optical] analog computing system[s]

 

Due to the “on-off” electrical operation of the commonly used transistor, our present day computers predominantly use binary codes. This may well move to a quaternary system if devices using qubits are successfully developed further for quantum computing. And then there is a possible advantage to using a ternary counting system:

• Ternary computer
• Fredkin gate

 

For a fabulous glimpse of what is involved for two early CPU designs and for reverse engineering them, see:

• YouTube – 27c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU
• Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer

For stark comparison, this is the sort of thing to be found in present day ‘General Purpose’ GPUs:

• Inside Nvidia’s Pascal-powered Tesla P100

 

And here’s an ongoing connected group of ‘FLOSS‘ projects:

• RISC-V: The Free and Open RISC Instruction Set Architecture – RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is a new instruction set architecture (ISA) that was originally designed to support computer architecture research and education and is now set to become a standard open architecture…
• Welcome to the lowRISC project! Creating a fully open-sourced, Linux-capable, RISC-V-based SoC, that can be used either directly or as the basis for a custom design.
• Kestrel Computer Project – Aiming to build a full-stack, open source, and open hardware home computer.

 

Phew!

For something a little less heavyweight and for a more ‘rapid development‘… Could the FPGA on the Parallella be subverted to create an alternative “coprocessor”?…

See what develops on the night!!…

 

All welcome, whether Cray-supercomputer-designer or lego-builder or philosophical spectator…

See ya there 🙂