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>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"

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

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

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

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

Verilator is very good. It's faster than anything else, and it is free. The downsides are it won't stimulate encrypted IP blocks. And it doesn't do mixed language sim, so vhdl is no bueno.

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.

   Having everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture in some ways

Yeah, back in the day you would go to school the next day after a show that everyone watches released its new episode, it aired on the prime-time slot on the primary TV channel, and you'd discuss what happened in that episode, or have some references or new jokes. Created a common culture.

I remember those days. As the only kid in school who didn't watch Lost, those days sucked

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

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

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

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.

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.

Or maybe ChatGPT picked it up from common usage.

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

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.

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.

> like when people start repeating advertising slogans

but without the craft of a good advertising slogan. So worse!

> 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).

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

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

Really cool!

Not X, Not Y, just Z. Thanks, brainlet shit, didn't read.

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

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

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!)

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

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

And this thread shows all of them on real hardware: https://x.com/i/status/1992802154370011595

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.

> Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no?

You are going to have a hard time doing analog signal processing with memoryless elements. In the linear domain all you can do is apply gain and mix signals together. If you work with memoryless nonlinearities you can do waveshaping, which is generally only useful when applied to special signals (e.g. sine waves).

Any time you want to do frequency-dependent behavior (filtering, oscillation) you need energy storing elements, usually capacitors, sometimes inductors. A capacitor is just like a register: it stores charge, similarly, inductors store energy in the magnetic field. Needless to say these devices are not memoryless. In fact, since the quantity that they remember is a continuous variable, they store a lot of information.

> Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no?

Bucket-brigade delay lines?

I'm not saying every analog signal processor is surely memory free, simply that you can imagine one that is.

But I'm not really familiar with what that is.

They're a kind of analogue dynamic memory. I'd hesitate to call them RAM because the Access is not Random, but they are a kind of shift register and early computers used those for RAM.

Imagine a pair of MOSFETs connected to a pair of capacitors, and a bunch of those joined together in a chain. All the gates of each one of the pair of MOSFETS are connected together, giving you a "left" and "right" clock input.

When you put a signal in if you pulse the "left" and "right" inputs, it'll store the signal voltage in one capacitor, then pass it off to the next capacitor in turn, like old-timey firefighter handing buckets of water down a line of people.

They used to use this for delaying audio signals before digital memory and analogue to digital conversion was cheap enough to use.

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