From Nand to Tetris: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

Re:From Nand to Tetris: Building a Modern Computer from Firs... by all2 on Saturday November 24, 2018 @10:45AM (#18522501)

During my intro to computer engineering course, lectures touched on why NAND gates, and the conclusion was that you can build anything you need in a basic computer using NAND gates. It boils down to expense. A BOM (bill of materials) with fewer line items tends to be cheaper.

This doesn't really hold in today's world of silicon prints, but at the start I think it was price that drove the decision.

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Re:From Nand to Tetris: Building a Modern Computer from Firs... by tankenmate on Saturday November 24, 2018 @07:41PM (#18524733)

Actually if you take an XOR gate with a naive translation into NAND gates you would use 20 transistors, but if you don't need a large fan out from the output you can actually do it with 6 transistors using a pass gate layout (which is neither NAND nor NOR). So typically you don't use NAND vs NOR because of transistor count.

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Re:From Nand to Tetris: Building a Modern Computer from Firs... by all2 on Saturday November 24, 2018 @10:02PM (#18525201)

Oh! Good to know. Thank you!

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