


Making a cpu transistor how to#
Making a cpu transistor full#
At full throttle, it runs at about 8 kHz clock frequency, but to follow the execution of a single instruction you can just turn it down to 1 Hz, or even stop the processor to study its state. Detailed diagrams show the information flow between the functional blocks – and through the room.

mounted all PCBs on large frames, which add up to a 10m long and 2m tall “computation display”. Each logic gate displays the current IO state through LEDs, which also turns the RAM into a gigantic LED wall on which you can play Tetris.ĭespite its complexity, the Megaprocessor is pretty much self-documenting. This incredible amount of discrete transistors makes up the thousands of logic gates that eventually form the Megaprocessor’s registers, its arithmetic logic unit, its sequence control and also: its 256 bytes of RAM. 200 x 200 mm)Įveryone of the ~42,300 transistors were hand-soldered to one of the massive PCBs, which look more like interactive circuit diagrams than actual circuit boards. His monumental machine is now finished, and it’s the ultimate answer to how a processor – and pretty much everything that contains a processor – works.Ĩ bytes of Megaprocessor RAM (ca. documented his work in great detail, and by doing so, took us on a journey through the inner workings of microprocessors. Megaprocessor, a seriously enlarged version of a microprocessor, is a project we’ve been following with awe as it took shape over the last couple of years. That’s how many discrete transistors spread across the 30 m 2 room housing this massive computation machine. As it turns out, the answer is not 42, it’s 42.3 - thousand.
