7 ms·

I am continually amazed that we're able to buy better and cheaper processors that no one could have dreamed about at such power/cost 50 years ago. I estimate i

• adrianN 8y ago
  You should read "From NAND to Tetris". You could totally build a CPU yourself after a year of study. Not something that can compete with a modern microprocessor of course, but then again you probably couldn't build a compressor for a fridge with the same quality as a factory either.
  • doomjunky 8y ago
    Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. [0] [0]: Milton Friedman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
    • adrianN 8y ago
      If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe - Carl Sagan
      • samstave 8y ago
        I also love this showerthought from reddit: All the materials for wverything made has existed on earth for billions of years, they just werent assembled in the right order yet.
        • sitkack 8y ago
          Humans are the right collection of molecules to form a self aware machine that can make showerthoughts. We are literally animate matter.
          • abathur 8y ago
            But did we have any of them before we invented the shower?
    • akadruid1 8y ago
      There's the guy who spent $1500 and six months making a sandwich from scratch[0], including growing, collecting and killing the ingredients [0]: https://youtu.be/URvWSsAgtJE https://youtu.be/URvWSsAgtJE
      • michaelt 8y ago
        spent $1500 (By flying from Minnesota to LA and renting a boat to get salt from the sea)
        • bazooka_penguin 8y ago
          You're right, he cheated by using premade vehicles. He should've made those himself
          • m463 8y ago
            I think the animal husbandry skill tree would be fastest, but children and a sedan chair would work if more time was available.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • agumonkey 8y ago
      Sorry to differ, I think this is twisted by an era where liberal market was held as god like status. Take the rubber and metal out because for now. To draw a dark line on a surface, you take the first bit of wood you find, grind it into a point and burn it. You have a pencil. I really believe that the free market centuries made people believe it was the only or most efficient way to get an object done, just like people thought java ee was the only way to make a web application in early 2000s.
      • todd8 8y ago
        You’ve moved the goal posts. It’s not that the construction of some thing, anything, that can be used to write with is difficult. As you point out a piece of charcoal isn’t hard to make. Milton Friedman’s point is that even something as simple and inexpensive as a pencil involves people all over the world working together to create it. Some mine graphite, some run ships to move the graphite, some manufacture paint, some grow rubber trees, etc. All of this activity, coordinated and made efficient by the market is behind even a simple thing like a pencil.
        • agumonkey 8y ago
          I agree on goalpost but still differ on Friedman's point. Culture shifts into thinking you need objects to the point of making you forget what you wanted in the first place. Friedman wants to marvel at the thought of his beloved market.
          • EForEndeavour 8y ago
            Friedman does wax lyrical about his beloved market toward the end of that video, but the main point I drew from his quote about the pencil is that it's absolutely mind-blowing to stop and contemplate the incredible cooperation and pre-existing systems required to construct so many of the mundane, dirt-cheap objects of the modern world. The fact that someone could eschew mass-produced lead pencils in favour of a self-made writing implement doesn't diminish the fact that it's practically impossible for any one individual on the planet to ever actually build a pencil you can buy for the equivalent of a few seconds to minutes of labour. That pencil, and so many other mundane items like it, are artifacts beyond the crafting capabilities of any one human.
    • dekhn 8y ago
      actually, lead pencils were all originally made in a single location. the outcome now is just due to modern manufacturing. If people wanted to build a decent pencil locally, it would be possible, just not economic.
      • onesun 8y ago
        That's not what was said. A "single person" cannot make a lead pencil. I agree. Ask yourself whether the Primitive Technology guy could make a pencil in the middle of the Australian rain forest. He can make a lot of great things, but in order to make a pencil, he would need additional tools, and those tools would be made by someone else, hence the statement that "a single person cannot make a pencil."
        • dekhn 8y ago
          My statement is 100% consistent with Friedman's original statement: https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/ https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/ Note that multiple times in history, due to war reasons, societies independently developed making pencils because they did not have access to the resources, and substituted other resources.
  • illuminati1911 8y ago
    You don't even need a year. If you pick a really simple instruction set like in "Mano's basic computer" you can get it done within couple of months. Ref: http://sandsduchon.org/duchon/cs311/ManoTutorial/ManoIntroduction.html http://sandsduchon.org/duchon/cs311/ManoTutorial/ManoIntrodu... I built one years ago for university course in Matlab Simulink.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • redsky17 8y ago
    If you're not counting physical hardware, it can take even less time than that. I built a MIPS processor in verilog over the course of a month or so back in college
  • jdietrich 8y ago
    See also Sam Zeelof's DIY silicon fab. Even using commercial equipment and supplies, the amount of work needed to make even the most rudimentary IC is quite staggering. http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/
• djmips 8y ago
  Everyone's missing his point. Yes you could make a computer but an absolute toy compared to a Jetson. You could reasonably get close to the other technologies including a fridge compressor given a year of study. Your home built CPU isn't going to touch the Jetson.
  • lnsru 8y ago
    We had a procesor design course at the university. Single participants made 68k complexity designs, groups went to 286 and more complex parts. It was 6-8 hours workload every week for 4 months. A year time is a lot! Manufacturing technology is another issue. Same design will deliver different results on 28 nm and 160 nm nodes.
    • llampx 8y ago
      What I wonder about is the 10x factor here - all of these designs have already been invented and are available for perusal. How many people could come up with something like this with nothing but a knowledge of mathematics? I sometimes don't even know if I could invent the wheel if it wasn't already invented.
      • lallysingh 8y ago
        Ref: https://github.com/dugagjin/MIPS https://github.com/dugagjin/MIPS A MIPS implementation in VHDL. Most of the source files are < 50 lines of code. After a little bit of magic, almost any technical field is the application of a few principles. If you saw a rock roll down a hill, you'd probably wish you could roll your own stuff instead of lifting it.
  • dTal 8y ago
    I doubt you'd even get as far as hand-making the brushless motor that powers the compressor. And that's just the start - the fluid dynamics to design an efficient compressor is years of study in itself. It's easy to underestimate the complexity of everyday things. But note that fridges are 100 years old, and today's fridges are much better than the fridges of 100 years ago. It took the collective effort of the human race 100 years to get this far.
• amelius 8y ago
  And audiophile-quality HiFi hasn't dropped in price a bit ...
  • dmos62 8y ago
    Depends which component, maybe speakers or headphones, but there seem to be top-quality open-source DACs that are very cheap to assemble or buy assembled. A google search should turn them up. Last time I researched it, I found the headphone DAC that I'd buy if I wanted one, but I can't find it now. It had an interesting story around it. It was released anonymously in a blog and then suddenly, after posting dozens of posts per year, the author just dropped off the grid. No one knows what happened to him. When one of the parts went out of production, others made modifications and rehosted the source, even though the original author did not want derivative works, but that kind of gets voided when the original author is, for all intents and purposes, not on this planet anymore.
    • paulmd 8y ago
      That's NwAvGuy and the ODAC/O2 units. I think "audiophile grade" is an ill-defined target there. You can get headphones like the Superlux HD668B for practically nothing (they were running under $30 at one point), and they sound pretty damned good for a pair of $30 headphones. When I was a kid you paid $30 for a pair of crappy discman headphones let alone a nice pair of over-ear. Meanwhile you've got the name brand Audio Technica and AKG sets running $100-200 thanks to moving production to China. I kind of think people are under-selling just how cheap the "95% solutions" have become nowadays. The really exotic gear made in smaller runs and with meticulous quality control is still expensive, because that's inherently expensive to do, but the consumer-grade stuff has really moved up in quality and down in price. At this point if you're paying thousands of dollars for audio gear, you're either chasing that last 5% of quality, or you're buying a name and a placebo effect, or both.
      • hvidgaard 8y ago
        Right on point. It's a difficult topic to navigate in. Most of what you buy in stores are the name, royalties, and R&D of digital circuits and a complex new IoT interface. For true audiophile gear you pay for them to individually test each and every component. Only select the ones that match, and for the overall circuitry to work as expected. All that manual labor to get the last 5% is very expensive, and completely irrelevant for the vast majority of people. They're going to stream their music from an inferior source anyway.
• null000 8y ago
  I recognize and respect the point, but there's a pretty major differences: Raw material cost, automate-ability, and scale. We have processes to get super pure silicon in huge chunks that can be processed basically entirely by computers and robots there on out (and in fat people touching it would be actively bad). Yeah, sure, there's a huge upfront cost in terms of machines to handle and etch the silicon and so on, but you get to amortize it over milllions and millions of units - a new fab was not created for the Jetson Nano. Meanwhile, basically every appliance, furniture piece, etc both requires more expensive of raw materials, and requires a decent amount of human intervention and, especially for furniture, expertise during manufacturing, meaning that cost per unit doesn't scale as well as electronics. Not to mention they all sell in lower volumes per up-front skill person hour dedicated to that thing.
• Kurtz79 8y ago
  I saw this exposed a couple of weeks ago at the Vitra Design Museum near Basel: https://www.dezeen.com/2009/06/27/the-toaster-project-by-thomas-thwaites/ https://www.dezeen.com/2009/06/27/the-toaster-project-by-tho... The author tried, as an art project, to build from scratch a <10$ toaster using locally sourced materials and methods of production. It cost him more than 1000$ bucks, 9 months, and the result was, well, what you see in the photos.
• oflannabhra 8y ago
  There was a guy that decided to make a toaster from scratch [0]. Literally from scratch: as in, mining and refining ore, etc. It was a bit of a stunt [1], but it definitely highlighted the advantage of scale and industry we typically take for granted. [0] - http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm http://www.thetoasterproject.org/page2.htm [1] - https://gizmodo.com/one-mans-nearly-impossible-quest-to-make-a-toaster-from-5794368 https://gizmodo.com/one-mans-nearly-impossible-quest-to-make...
  • samstave 8y ago
    I love both of these comments. I ised to talk to friends about “deep thinking” of what it took to make the sinple object in front of them, which they took for granted. My favorite example was a pen. Youre so abstracted from what it takes to actually make a simple pen. Imagine it was post-apocolypse, and youre the only person left on earth - and in addition to all other humans who have dissapeared, all pens/pencils have also dissapeared. You must build a pen - a ball point pen, to chronicle humanity. Where do you start? The simplest of objects have such a complex origin story.
    • heavenlyblue 8y ago
      Haven't China only a few years ago managed to produce an actual ballpoint pen? [1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18/finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.84b0d9ea531b https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
      • riku_iki 8y ago
        Its probably not because they couldn't 'manage', it is likely because it was not economically interesting, they could import tips cheap enough and don't bother manufacturing their own.
  • vishnugupta 8y ago
    Thanks for the links! I've bookmarked those, I'll show it to those who say 'from first principles', to check if that's what they mean :-)
• Kurtz79 8y ago
  For me, the "wow" moment was the first Raspberry Pi. A fully working computer, in the palm of your hands, powered by USB with Full HD video out and Ethernet, for 35 bucks? Mind blowing.
• imtringued 8y ago
  Good that cannot be manufactured by hand require specialized tools. These can be as simple as a hammer or a fully automated CNC machine. Nowadays the most desired goods can only be manufactured by those specialized tools. Therefore if you want to manufacture a single unit you need those tools. However after building a single tool it doesn't matter how many units you actually produce. Therefore it becomes more expensive to produce less and cheaper to produce more. This is called economies of scale. You cannot build a CPU because building a single one is incredibly expensive per unit. A million? Dirt cheap (only $99 in this case).
• jsjohnst 8y ago
  > I could not invent that given 10,000 years Invent CPUs, probably not. That took tens of millions of hours across decades of iterations. But it’s actually not impossible to create your own CPU from scratch. I’d suggest starting off with a $50 or less FPGA and start learning about the logical building blocks of a modern CPU. You can then advance to building up a basic CPU fairly easily. Creating a full featured ISA and then designing out the circuits and having the chip actually fabbed is not trivial, but I know of many hobbyists who have, so it’s certainly doable if you’re dedicated enough.