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You need two things to build your own CPU from scratch: 1) Understanding that computers are not magic, but actually state machines built from relatively simple
by dfox 16y ago
You need two things to build your own CPU from scratch:
1) Understanding that computers are not magic, but actually state machines built from relatively simple and understandable parts.
2) Enough patience and self-discipline to actually design and build something like that, which at least to me seems like larger problem. In software you get some meaningful partial results that are to some extent interesting by themselves pretty early in development (mostly). In hardware project of this kind you have to build it almost completely for it to do something meaningful.
- Someone 16y agoI think the larger problem is that hardware at this scale is so finicky. You can get 'meaningful' results fairly soon (say a half-adder, a working clock, or an instruction decoder), but making them work reliably, so that parts that work in isolation still work when connected to each other is problematic. Voltages drops may get too large, the clock signal might get too diluted, etc.