5 ms·
Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
- thenthenthen 3mo ago@3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
- mjg59 3mo agoIsn't that lower than a purely resistive heater?
- Bendy 3mo agoOnly if the resistive heater in question is DC or AC with reactive power compensation
- ruperthair 3mo agoA purely resistive heater, by definition, has no reactive component so there's no reactive power considerer. The 0.1% mentioned might be the light that the project produces.
- choo-t 3mo agoAssuming you're not in an endless vacuum, the light will also become heat.
- stymaar 3mo agoI think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in space.
- wat10000 3mo agoIt's hardly a second order effect if you're talking about heating a space and the light is absorbed by the walls of that space.
- smrq 3mo agoIt's quite literally a second order effect. The first order effect is light generation, and a consequence of that effect is heat generation via light absorption.
- wat10000 3mo agoDepends on where you want to draw the lines. Heating the room and emitting light could both be a second-order effect if you want to say that the first order is heating up the actual heater.
- ruperthair 3mo agoNice point! Would it be the same for sound that doesn't escape a room?
- nicman23 3mo ago? that is just any computer
- zipy124 3mo agoNot really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago> Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat In fact they are converting 100% of it, they are just also collecting and moving additional heat in the process.
- thenthenthen 3mo agoTIL, thanks, we mostly burn gas and coal
- imtringued 3mo agoStop calling coefficient of performance "efficiency". The heat pump takes input heat and just concentrates it. It turns out that the energy spent on concentrating heat also turns into heat, so you have a 100% efficient heater.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoOne could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
- thenthenthen 3mo agoSo what happens to the 0.01%? Ah thats.. the light? The sound? Not sure.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoMy bet would be some lucky photons that end up heading to outer space from some window. Hahaha
- ReptileMan 3mo agoEvery computer is just space heater with side effect of computations. The same way every diesel engine is just oil stove with side effect of rotary motion. If the engine was in the back of the car you could totally put a pot on it and braise something.
- stymaar 3mo agoA diesel engine is a very inefficient stove though, as only half (more or less, depending on the exact engine) of the energy is converted to heat, the leftover being mechanical energy.
- ReptileMan 3mo agoModern yes. But olden times atmospheric diesels without turbo were really efficient space heaters.
- stymaar 3mo agoGood ol' days.
- ReptileMan 3mo agoThe Volkswagen 1.6D is probably the most reliable engine ever made. Only two failure modes - overheat or shitty fuel for the span of decades to break the fuel pump.
- thenthenthen 3mo agoMy gaming laptop is surely 90% noise and heat (so heat?), but my m1 macbook… is less heat.. but still heat? From reading this thread everything will become heat, which sorta confuses me, but yeh i guess bitluni was nit talking about efficiency but more thermodynamically?!
- antonvs 3mo agoI’m curious about what you’re thinking of, but for both electric heaters and computers, essentially 100% of the input energy is converted to heat one way or another. What you may be thinking of is efficiency when the output is intended to be something other than heat. In those cases, efficiency is lost because a significant proportion of the input energy is converted to heat. But if heat output is what you’re interested in, I’m happy to report that 100% is a perfectly achievable, in fact hard to avoid, number!
- thenthenthen 3mo agoYeah, i was totally confused with efficiency, still curious about that 0.01% now tho
- swiftcoder 3mo agoThere will be an LED somewhere, so some of it gets converted to light, rather than heat.
- antonvs 3mo agoLight is a way of transferring energy, that ultimately translates into heat. Essentially, light is one of the principal agents of entropy.
- fragmede 3mo agoWhere the heat goes is the problem I have with that rating. An electric resistive stove is 100% efficient at converting input electricity to heat, but an induction stovetop is far better, better even than gas, for cooking on.
- quietfox 3mo agoThe determination to pull through a project of this scale is mind blowing and the joy is contagious.
- lnenad 3mo agoFor me it's the skill. So many things you have to be good at to build this. Really impressive and slightly jealous.
- yetihehe 3mo agoI have the skills, but not determination. Believe me, high skills are required and usable, but determination is more important here. And with enough determination, you will acquire skills too.
- roger_ 3mo agoYeah I don’t think I could ever commit to a project like this and of this scale. Might be different if it was something truly useful or novel vs a nerd snipe. Very impressive that he pulled it off in a relatively short amount of time.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoVery cool project. A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
- rwmj 3mo agoThis is great. It somewhat reminded me of Steve Ciarcia's build of a Mandelbrot-generating supercomputer from around 1990. That was also made from microcontrollers (Intel 8052 in that case).
- palmotea 3mo agoDo you have a link? As far as I can tell you're referring to a BYTE magazine article, but I can only find vague references to it, not anything specific enough that would allow me to locate it.
- rwmj 3mo agoIt was in Byte circa 1989-1991 & I've been trying to search for it with no luck so far. FOUND IT! https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-byte-magazine-21533/1988%2012%20BYTE%2013-12%20-%20Byte%20Magazine_21640/page/327/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-...
- nekusar 3mo agohttps://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n6/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n6/mode... Page 399 This one as well. :)
- palmotea 3mo agoJust cleaning up the links for future searchers and adding the first part: Steve Ciarcia, CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR BYTE Octover 1988, A Supercomputer Part 1. Steve begins a supercomputer project by looking at multiprocessing basics. https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-byte-magazine-21533/1988%2010%20BYTE%20-%20Byte%20Magazine_21604/page/282/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 283 in the magazine, page 315 in the PDF) BYTE November 1988, A Supercomputer Part 2. Steve continues the supercomputer project with a look at the Mandelbrot set. https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n465/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n465/mo... (page 399 in the magazine, page 466 in the PDF) BYTE December 1988, A Supercomputer Part 3. This final part looks at hardware nuts and bolts and also at the driver program. https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-byte-magazine-21533/1988%2012%20BYTE%2013-12%20-%20Byte%20Magazine_21640/page/327/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 327 in the magazine and PDF)
- randyrand 3mo agoIm curious what FLOPS and per CPU bandwidth this has. It might be okay at running compute intensive shaders!
- Karliss 3mo ago0 FLOPS those MCUs only support IMBC instructions. No hardware floating point, at least it has integer multiplication/division. My estimate is maybe 1-8Gflop total using software float. If you avoid float and design around fixed point, might do some interesting stuff.
- rbanffy 3mo agoIIRC, the Connection Machine CM-1 also was not designed for floating point ops, but Richard Feynman convinced Danny Hillis that it could compete with supercomputers in the scientific market.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoSo much in there: so much hand-soldering of SMD, the way he made an SMD resistor bridge to bodge his MOSI/MISO mixup, using the Bambu 3D printer as a test harness (with pogo-pin attachment) to test his "blades"… (I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)
- superxpro12 3mo agoThe automated programming fixture/conversion was pretty sweet, im not gonna lie about that.
- klysm 3mo agoI always leave a 0 ohm DNP on any TX/RX line.
- rbanffy 3mo ago> I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going This is still a partial build, so things might change a bit. For me, I think it’d be cool to have the boards back to back so LEDs would always show.
- rbanffy 3mo agoI love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe. Computers need more blinking lights.
- birdsongs 3mo agoMy fav job was an internship with a EW company that made these massive rackmount radar systems. My boss, the lead engineer, loved blue LED status lights. So the massive boards we made had hundreds on them. There were thousands total in the rack. GPIOs, busses, fpga signal outputs, all got an individual LED and mosfet. It was crazy when it was running. You could visually debug a bus, if you wanted to.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoMy dad programmed minicomputers, which normally had LEDs on the front panel that showed the binary contents of the program counter, and maybe the current instruction and some other status indicators. I remember him saying that he could tell if his program was running normally by the patterns in the lights.
- gertrunde 3mo agoThere were some telephone engineers I used to know who worked in telephone exchanges in the electromechanical era, and they could tell when they walked in if things were not working correctly by the sound...
- rbanffy 3mo agoWhen I got my first Apple II+ (a Brazilian clone) I didn't have money for a floppy drive, so I used cassettes extensively (I learned to... erm... backup games to tape). By the sound of the tape you could identify code and bitmap segments, code being more random and data being more "rhythmic". Pattern recognition is a wonderful ability.
- budman1 3mo agoIf the system was used to control something it was obvious. There would be some kind of main / idle loop. When this was running, you could see the pattern in the data buss and in the address buss. The loop of code would not be many instructions, they would all be together, so the pattern on the address buss would be quickly repeating. If you had a slow peripheral, you could see the ISR getting called. It would be at a different address than the main loop, and you could see it flash periodically, like every time a line went to the printer. As an operator of the system, you had a unique perspective of watching the program run as the system operated; if it was data processing it would not mean much but in a control system it was uncanny.
- jmyeet 3mo agoI don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at the time). And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later. A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU. I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time. [1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-ch572-risc-v-mcu-features-2-4ghz-wireless-bluetooth-le-5-0-usb-2-0/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...
- fragmede 3mo agoThat we can fit a more computing power in an adapter cable than it took to take us to the moon is what gets me.
- jmyeet 3mo agoI would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit range. So these microcontrollers are a bit apples to oranges (just like my WCH570 vs 486 comparison, to be clear) but even with all those caveats, yes it's basically true. And yeah, that's wild.
- ____tom____ 3mo agoNot an area I'm familiar with, but do the chips really handle up in the gigabit IO? I thought they just handle connection setup. I had thought the gigabytes were not processed at all by the chips. They just flow through the wires. ?
- sonabinu 3mo agoGreat project for kids interested in EECS. I wonder if a miniature version can we done at a fraction of the cost as a cool high school project.
- alienbaby 3mo agoOk, I watched it, it looks amazing, what's it for/do ?
- rbanffy 3mo agoBeing amazing, mostly. Showing how amazing the guy is would also a predictable side effect. I’d guess he just wanted to practice and build something insane and pretty.
- saikoko 3mo agoJoker
- dogman1050 3mo agoIn the late '90s I worked for a startup that was building a video server based on a massive custom SIMD engine, each processor having its own disk drive in a RAID 3 configuration in totality. Our integration lab had a 256 proc system, with each disk having an activity LED. Open all the disk cabinet doors, turn off the lights, play a video, and watch 256 lights blink in unison every 0.8 sec or so. Neat!