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How to Make a CPU – A Simple Picture Based Explanation
- userbinator 3y agoFor those who read the comments first: The article is about semiconductor fabrication, not computer architecture.
- tpoindex 3y agoYeah, I was expecting the geek equivalent of "How to Draw an Owl in Two Simple Steps" meme. Step 1: Start with some NAND gates. Step 2: Now make the rest of the fucking CPU. Random reference: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/28/29/d42829227cd7526d75af5bdac631d77e.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/28/29/d42829227cd7526d75af...
- satvikpendem 3y agoIt's actually funny that that meme is now not viable anymore, due to the proliferation of text-to-image generators.
- troupe 3y agoThis course is pretty much what you described, but incredibly good pedagogy. https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/
- dahart 3y agoThere’s a lovely game called Turing Complete on Steam that will take you from a nand gate through making a simple game in your own assembly that run on the processor you built. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/
- gdprrrr 3y agoAlso MHRD https://steamcommunity.com/app/576030/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/576030/
- hiichbindermax 3y agoAnd https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/
- zestyping 3y agoI immediately thought of this as well. Step 12 cracked me up! 12) Take a chromium-etched photo-lithographic quartz mask with your desired circuit pattern and shine a laser beam through it to project the circuit pattern onto the wafer. "Your desired circuit pattern" might as well be "draw the rest of the fucking owl."
- grishka 3y agoThat's the hardest part of "making a CPU" anyway, if you define CPU specifically as a microprocessor, because people have built working hobby CPUs with all kinds of more easily approachable tech, like relays, vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, and logic gate ICs. Basically anything that can act as one of the universal logic gates (NAND, XOR) will work as a CPU building block.
- clnq 3y agoFor those who want to know how to build a CPU on a breadboard, I recommend the book “But How Do It Know?” and the Scott CPU architecture.
- bux93 3y agoI followed the instructions carefully and ended up with a bunch of RAM because I used the wrong "chromium-etched photo-lithographic quartz mask" or whatever. The guy on ebay said it was an i7. Took ages.
- huytersd 3y agoI wish he broke down step 16 into a lot more steps explaining how individual features where built up in this easy, eli5 way.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoOk so now I have a dream. Is not as good as the dream the other guy had but it's my dream. I want to build a course, or a series of courses, where one rebuilds the world. It's the sort of thing one could do slowly with one's kids. Yes it's like that book "the knowledge" and related stuff. But Inhave done things like building a sextant to use that to measure the circumference of the earth and so on, and really I never imagined Incoukd actually build my own cpu to run my own language - but it's there. One could literally go from fire, to solar system, to lime and then to CPUs. The world we live in is insanely complex, but it is ... rebuildable I guess I am inspired by the quote Feynman left on his blackboard - "that which I cannot recreate I do not understand"
- satvikpendem 3y agoIs the other guy this one?: https://www.youtube.com/@htme https://www.youtube.com/@htme
- skinner927 3y agoIt’s actually probably not possible. We’ve exhausted all the easy to find/surface layer minerals. Oil doesn’t just leak out of the ground anywhere. Iron, copper, coal, are all underground.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoRight, we've made it easy, it's all on the surface now in scrapyards and landfills </grew up watching junkyard wars and was highly dissapointed to find out the better gear was planted among the junk to make the tv show viable>
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kaon123 3y agoVery good point. I read Olaf Stapledon's First and Last man, a sci-fi book which describes the next few billion years for mankind and deals with this issue. In one scenario, human society collapses, spends 80 million years living as hunter/gatherers (with some evolution) and then develops once again to a technological civilization, in part because the minerals and fossil fuels have been replenished.
- jgn 3y agoIf optics and photolithography interest you I recommend Huygens Optics on YT [0]. Jeroen, the creator, has an engrossing passion for the material. Jeri's process [1] is wild compared to Sam's lab. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoWhat are the key differences between CPUs now are CPUs twenty years ago? Sure we can pack more transistors into a smaller space, but clock speed has plateaued. Are all the innovation purely in pipelines and branch prediction?
- jazzyjackson 3y agoI think clever choice of instruction set is another one. Today's x86-64 is a far cry from what an 8088 could do, and Apple's Silicon does more in one clock cycle than its predecessors by a mile.
- drdrey 3y agoplus out of order execution, hyperthreading, SIMD, better and bigger memory caches, more cores, more power efficiency
- nxobject 3y agoIn the spirit of increasingly large memory caches, don't forget other increasingly large microarchitectural buffers (e.g. reorder/retire buffer), and the hella microarchitectural parallelism that it enables. Apple went all in on this strategy, and it paid off.
- deepfriedginger 3y agoSo, basically just like baking a cake
- logbiscuitswave 3y agoThis reminds me of a text file I found back in the 1990s on a BBS about “how to build your own atomic bomb”. The first step was something along the lines of “obtain 50 lbs of weapons grade plutonium” as if you could just walk into your local military surplus store and pick up a crate. It was pretty obvious at that point that the whole thing was meant to be humorous.
- aivisol 3y agoAnother one from that era was something like: "how to destroy the Earth". There were several methods proposed, one of which was to use a black hole: "step1: take a reasonably sized black hole, step2..." etc.
- harry8 3y agoMonty Python's "Today on how to do it" sketch is the classic of the genre maybe? Definitely a worthwhile minute out of your day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM
- retrofeel 3y ago[dead]
- nicman23 3y agothis reads like a Nile Green meme
- aivisol 3y agoI have some doubts about step 15: I used to work in a post-Soviet lab which produced chips in early 90s and as far as i remember etching happened in a high temperature (was it 1200C ?) environment where you would pass some chlorine type gas over the wafers. The temperature was achieved by induction heating with 8kHz AC passing through water cooled copper coils. The generators were mechanic, big water cooled machines placed in the basement of the building due to the noise they generated. Another reason for placing them in a basement was that water leaks were common. I was responsible for maintaining the heating setup and transitioning to electronic, thyristor based generators. The job was kind of electronic-engineer-plumber type of duty.
- PawgerZ 3y ago> etching happened in a high temperature (was it 1200C ?) environment where you would pass some chlorine type gas over the wafers. This is plasma etching or dry etching. Step 15 shows acid etching or wet-chemical etching. I don't know the pros/cons of each, but both have been used as viable options to etch a circuit.
- aivisol 3y agoYou are probably right. What I remember there was this chlorine gas, and there was some other gas (oxygen?). And in between them we had to flush everything with lots of nitrogen to prevent formation of potentially explosive mixture. The wafers would be placed on a graphite support, which was heated by that induction coil (as copper itself would melt at that temperature I guess).
- jstanley 3y agoVery important to make sure you pick the right sort of rock! Not all rocks are made of silicon dioxide.
- JoachimS 3y agoNot so much a CPU as chip fabrication. But otoh that is soo cool by itself. Making your own ingot ffs, that is crazy.
- reedlaw 3y agoThis was mostly about making a silicon wafer. This video shows more detail on the rest of the process in a home lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg (blog here: http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/)
- abhaynayar 3y agoI was just watching Outlander and wondering what value could I bring if I went back in time. Thankfully now I will be able to make a computer now that I've skimmed through this article. :)