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I’m sorry, what has this guy done? It really doesn’t sound like he’s actually done much? I’ve also read about fabrication and that means jack all - it doesn’t s

by olliej 3y ago

I’m sorry, what has this guy done? It really doesn’t sound like he’s actually done much? I’ve also read about fabrication and that means jack all - it doesn’t sound like this guy is doing his own fabrication, if anything it sounds like pretty run of the mill 2nd/3rd year logic circuit design? From other comments though I’m not sure it’s even that? I can’t tell because twitter makes it hard to read threads now and I can’t tell if details are missing from the article, or literally there nothing to actually report on? Also the comments on GPUs is really confusing? It sounds like someone has bought into the mythology of GPUs being somehow magic, rather than simply many parallel micro-micro processors.

kristopolous 3y ago
The guy that wrote it looks like he's on a pretty brutal publishing schedule: https://www.tomshardware.com/author/mark-tyson https://www.tomshardware.com/author/mark-tyson That's like 2 articles a day. I can't imagine. I spend at least 10 weeks on each one I write.
jcranmer 3y ago
As best as I can tell, this is someone who's speed-run something like nand2tetris and an intro-to-EDA-tools tutorial, and is now trying to move into GPUs and is somehow distraught about how hard it is to make that conceptual leap. And this was picked up by a reporter trying to make a quick article who doesn't fully understand what he is reporting on and thinks it's something more impressive than it really is. To be clear: I think that a decently motivated person can go from "0 knowledge" to a toy implementation of a CPU in a digital logic simulator in something like 20 hours of focus or so (especially if the digital logic simulator gives you prebuilt components for things like adders and memory). I've never done digital design for circuits before, but I imagine it's a similar level of difficulty. From parsing the Twitter user's comments, the GPU confusion seems to be the Twitter user skipping any attempt to learn advanced computer architecture because he thinks it's not on the critical path to building a GPU and doesn't realize that the information he's struggling to find is really just computer architecture 301.

by olliej 3y ago

kristopolous 3y ago

The guy that wrote it looks like he's on a pretty brutal publishing schedule: https://www.tomshardware.com/author/mark-tyson https://www.tomshardware.com/author/mark-tyson That's like 2 articles a day. I can't imagine. I spend at least 10 weeks on each one I write.

jcranmer 3y ago

As best as I can tell, this is someone who's speed-run something like nand2tetris and an intro-to-EDA-tools tutorial, and is now trying to move into GPUs and is somehow distraught about how hard it is to make that conceptual leap. And this was picked up by a reporter trying to make a quick article who doesn't fully understand what he is reporting on and thinks it's something more impressive than it really is. To be clear: I think that a decently motivated person can go from "0 knowledge" to a toy implementation of a CPU in a digital logic simulator in something like 20 hours of focus or so (especially if the digital logic simulator gives you prebuilt components for things like adders and memory). I've never done digital design for circuits before, but I imagine it's a similar level of difficulty. From parsing the Twitter user's comments, the GPU confusion seems to be the Twitter user skipping any attempt to learn advanced computer architecture because he thinks it's not on the critical path to building a GPU and doesn't realize that the information he's struggling to find is really just computer architecture 301.