Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates (a1k0n.net)

335 points by a1k0n 15 hours ago

xphos 14 hours ago

As a computer science guy who interlops in computer engineering i really want to find time to build something cool like this and tapeout. The retro architectures for rendering are simple but fun! I love the project

Neywiny 13 hours ago

I recommend getting started like the author did: simulation first, then FPGA. Honestly FPGA will take you very far. I always get a kick out of being able to design my own SoC. "Hmmm I need 9 separate I2C ports... Ok, copy block, paste paste paste..." Or if you have an operation in software that's taking forever you can write an accelerator for it

8f2ab37a-ed6c 11 hours ago

What are the best modern tools to get started with in simulation for those who have never dabbled before?

Neywiny 5 hours ago

sweetjuly 8 hours ago

y1n0 2 hours ago

vanjoe 9 hours ago

oofbey 13 hours ago

It’s amazing and wonderful to see the Internet support these tiny cliques of interest. Having everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture in some ways, but it also supports these couple dozen (?) people around the world finding each other for this amazing little competition.

anonymous908213 12 hours ago 

   Having everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture in some ways
The internet may hypothetically homogenize culture relative to a society that does not have any kind of mass communication at all, but relative to the world it was actually introduced into, the internet has completely balkanised the culture. Prior to the internet, we had television, cinema, literature, radio, and newspapers, which were all centralised and controlled enough that they created a shared monoculture in nations. A signifant portion of a country's population would watch, read, and listen to the same media. The internet bucked that trend, allowing all kinds of new subcultures to pop up and to more easily cross national boundaries.

adrianN an hour ago

therein 11 hours ago

intalentive 4 hours ago

I like how the grid pulses with the kick drum. Nice touch.

RossBencina 10 hours ago

I was curious about the long-term stability of the cited HAKMEM sin/cos generator. I found an overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3111501 (EDIT: I'm still not sure about stability, apparently it is stable in exact arithmetic under certain conditions.) Coincidentally it is related to the Verlet integration video I posted last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253592

a1k0n 9 hours ago

Yeah, it is exact in this specific circumstance. But yes, it's exactly the same trick; I also enjoyed that video in my Youtube recommender feed last week!

glimshe 14 hours ago

Reminds me of college: "Hardware and Software are logically equivalent"

amelius 11 hours ago

Writing hardware is like writing software except parallelism is way cheaper, but mistakes are way more expensive.

lucyjojo 7 hours ago

that doesnt seem like a good tradeoff...

datameta 2 hours ago

Very impressive stuff. I used to frequent the JS demoscene, mostly dwitter - but this is on a whole other level.

Oh shit, this prompted me to check and turns out TinyTapeout is back to life! https://tinytapeout.com/

Archit3ch 11 hours ago

I'm tempted to put together an FPAA with Tiny Tapeout, but it likely won't fit in the allocated area.

Taniwha 7 hours ago

TT allows you to pay more and build multi-block designs

idiotsecant 12 hours ago

No x, no y, just Z is a pattern so often used by chatGPT it has started to bleed into common usage by people who maybe aren't even using an LLM.

peddling-brink 11 hours ago

Language is fluid. This is ok.

There are many bad things about LLMs, but a benign shift in popular language usage isn't one of them.

mschuster91 10 hours ago

> There are many bad things about LLMs, but a benign shift in popular language usage isn't one of them.

Organic shifts in language are fine. What is not fine is Big Money (which most forms of AI are) manipulating society at large - and that's not just the AI companies' doing. Think of Tiktok leading people to say "unalive" instead of the various clear words before (e.g. kill, murder, executed, run over by car, mauled to death by animal).

idiotsecant 10 hours ago

I disagree. It's a sign of what is essentially cultural contamination by an LLM. There is something vaguely gross about it, like when people start repeating advertising slogans. It's a sign that someone spent enough money that they directly rewired our brains.

peddling-brink 8 hours ago

Marazan 10 hours ago

fsckboy 9 hours ago

when i was running for 5th grade class president a number of decades ago, my campaign sign slogan was a "no x, no y, just z" snowclone.

layer8 10 hours ago

Or maybe ChatGPT picked it up from common usage.

idiotsecant 10 hours ago

It was used occasionally before chatGPT but it has exploded since then.

BoredPositron 12 hours ago

Reminds me of the time we repaired old pinball machines in trade school. Good times.

openinfrared 14 hours ago

Really cool!

startupsfail 13 hours ago

Wow, I'm looking at current "Open Shuttles", a license to use 4KB of SRAM in the project is $2500. But it comes with Wishbone Bus interface!

> 1024x32 Commercial SRAM > CF_SRAM_1024x32 > Commercial SRAM: 1024 words x > 32 bits (4KB) with Wishbone Bus interface > Area: 0.17mm² > GPIOs: 0 > License: Commercial - $2500 per project

Dwedit 14 hours ago

If you have registers, it's not "no memory".

jonathrg 11 hours ago

And I better not see any capacitors on there remembering any charge!

hackernudes 13 hours ago

If you have flip flops, it's not "no memory".

If you have a ROM, it's not "no memory".

Needlessly pedantic!

I thought this was pretty cool but the first video didn't play. All this write up and I really just want to see the damn demo in action first! (Edit: reloaded the page and it worked. I still would like to see it on rela hardware!)

a1k0n 13 hours ago

Ah that's what I get for self hosting. What browser?

https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms

a1k0n 13 hours ago

jayd16 12 hours ago

I don't know. Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no? So a line exists somewhere and I think it's way before no RAM.

RossBencina 10 hours ago

ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago

fsckboy 9 hours ago

>Needlessly pedantic!

if you have pedantry, it's also not "no memory"

layer8 10 hours ago

Even simple wires can be memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory#Electric_del...

fsckboy 10 hours ago

>Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

ok, but silicon is doped so it's slightly impure, and CPUs are also silicon and memory is also silicon.

you actually meant "4K gates, no clock, no synchronization, no timing" and maybe a little "not exactly sure when the output is rea... is rea... is ready"