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X-WR-CALNAME:Nottingham Linux Users Group
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://nlug.ml1.co.uk
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Nottingham Linux Users Group
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20160519T193000
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UID:5126-1463686200-1463698800@nlug.ml1.co.uk
SUMMARY:A New CPU
DESCRIPTION:Daryl wants to make his very own CPU…\nAnthropopithecus troglodytes \nDecoded from the bubbles of his last beer\, this YACPU[*] is to be: \n\nHis own empirical design;\nSomething that is ‘different’;\n“Just for fun”!\n\nCan the parallel accumulated might of NLUG guide him on his search?… \n  \nAll at our usual Organ Grinder venue\, usual 7:30pm start\, details as below. \nAll welcome! 🙂 \n  \n*: \n\nYACPU – Yet-Another-CPU\nCPU – Central Processing Unit\n\n  \n \nSPOILERS! (Not for Daryl’s eyes…)\n \n🙂 \nSome of the further details are… 😉 \n(Has anyone mentioned this talk to Daryl yet?!… 😮 ) \nAs 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… \n  \nA few ideas may well be gleaned from: \n\nJohn Graham-Cumming TED talk YouTube: The greatest machine that never was – Building today to the designs of Babbage. The race is on!\nEarlier 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?”\n\n  \nPre-dating that with some earlier examples: \n\nxkcd: A Bunch of Rocks\nStonehenge was more than a temple\, it was an astronomical calculator: Archaeoastronomy at Stonehenge\nBanging together 19 million cubic metres of modern-day rocks: Youtube – 32 Bit Calculator in Minecraft\n\n  \nFor a few ‘alternative’ ideas: \n\nIn 1936 Soviet scientist Lukyanov built an analog water computer\nMONIAC – The 70-Year-Old Computer That Runs on Water\nRolling along some more: YouTube – Giant Digi-Comp II\n\n  \nMention must be made of two other-worldly designs that closely follow some of the developments made here on Earth: \n\nDiscworld Monthly: Hex\nlspace – Hex\nDiscworld Hex Structure and technology\nDiscworld Glooper “the Thing in the Cellar”\n\n  \nCombining some of the aspects listed so far we get this amazing amalgamation: \n\nYouTube: Wintergatan – Marble Machine (C64 SID Chip Cover)\n… which follows on from YouTube: Wintergatan – Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)\n\n  \nGoing a little more ‘home/research-brew’ recent\, there are these examples: \n\nYouTube: Relay-Based Floating Point Square Root Calculator\nYouTube: [Electromechanical] The Numbotron – finding prime numbers\nYouTube: Analog computer game on a modular synthesizer\nYouTube: Solving Mazes With Analog Computers\nYouTube: Living Computer Created With Slime Mold?\nYouTube: … advantages of [optical] analog computing system[s]\n\n  \nDue 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: \n\nTernary computer\nFredkin gate\n\n  \nFor a fabulous glimpse of what is involved for two early CPU designs and for reverse engineering them\, see: \n\nYouTube – 27c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU\nMagic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer\n\nFor stark comparison\, this is the sort of thing to be found in present day ‘General Purpose’ GPUs:  \n\nInside Nvidia’s Pascal-powered Tesla P100\n\n  \nAnd here’s an ongoing connected group of ‘FLOSS‘ projects: \n\nRISC-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…\nWelcome 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.\nKestrel Computer Project – Aiming to build a full-stack\, open source\, and open hardware home computer.\n\n  \n \nPhew! \nFor something a little less heavyweight and for a more ‘rapid development‘… Could the FPGA on the Parallella be subverted to create an alternative “coprocessor”?… \nSee what develops on the night!!… \n  \nAll welcome\, whether Cray-supercomputer-designer or lego-builder or philosophical spectator… \nSee ya there 🙂
URL:https://nlug.ml1.co.uk/event/a-new-cpu
LOCATION:The Organ Grinder\, 21 Alfreton Road\, Canning Circus\, Nottingham\, NG7 3JE\, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:Talks
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