Re:Complete computer designed and built from logic gates
by joshu on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @04:19PM
(#744161)
This is awesome.
Surely there's some ROM in there. I can't imagine the microcode is in an FSM.
When I was at CMU, my capstone engineering class was to build a machine that was capable of a small set of tasks (One that I remember was multiply two 16-bit numbers.) We were to optimize for some specific thing -- ours was "most sleep" (that is, least work) and "least wire wrapping." So it was as simple as possible; entire control path fit in a PLA for example.
Anyway, one of the other groups apparently optimized for AWESOME. We were there with our single board and a multicolor cloud of wire-wrap; they showed up with a multiple board computer. The boards had a pair of 68-pin IDC connectors and two huge wide cables as a bus.
The machine basically was fully asynchronous and had no clock. One board was an ALU, one was the control unit, etc. For their demo they both ran with one or two ALU boards and got different performance.
This was 1995 or so, so quite progressive for the time.
Surely there's some ROM in there. I can't imagine the microcode is in an FSM.
When I was at CMU, my capstone engineering class was to build a machine that was capable of a small set of tasks (One that I remember was multiply two 16-bit numbers.) We were to optimize for some specific thing -- ours was "most sleep" (that is, least work) and "least wire wrapping." So it was as simple as possible; entire control path fit in a PLA for example.
Anyway, one of the other groups apparently optimized for AWESOME. We were there with our single board and a multicolor cloud of wire-wrap; they showed up with a multiple board computer. The boards had a pair of 68-pin IDC connectors and two huge wide cables as a bus.
The machine basically was fully asynchronous and had no clock. One board was an ALU, one was the control unit, etc. For their demo they both ran with one or two ALU boards and got different performance.
This was 1995 or so, so quite progressive for the time.