Category Archives: CPU

8-Bit Breadboard Computer is up to 8 Hours

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[Ben Eater] posted some videos of an 8-bit computer with no CPU chip that he built completely on a breadboard a few years ago. After being asked for schematics, he finally admitted that he didn’t have any. So, instead, he decided to rebuild it and keep a video log of each step in the process. You can see his kickoff video, below, but you can also find 30 more recent videos covering topics from the ALU design and troubleshooting to the decimal LED display. He even uses an Arduino to program a EEPROM that he uses to replace a lot …read more

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iPhone Brain Surgery

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You think you’re good at soldering? Can you solder a CPU? A CPU inside an iPhone? A decapped CPU inside an iPhone? Can you solder inside a decapped CPU inside of an iPhone?

If you can’t, fear not – someone can, and we found him or her courtesy of a video that [Bunnie Huang] tweeted a while back. There’s not much information in the video, but from what we can gather it comes from an outfit called G-Lon Technology in Guang Zhou. Their Facebook page suggests that they teach cellphone repair, and if they take their repairs this far, we’d …read more

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Oracle Patches 270 Vulnerabilities in Year’s First Critical Patch Update

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Oracle patched 270 vulnerabilities, many remotely exploitable, across 45 different products as part of its quarterly Critical Patch Update (CPU) on Tuesday. Continue reading Oracle Patches 270 Vulnerabilities in Year’s First Critical Patch Update→

The Cardboard Computer

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Every time we say “We’ve seen it all”, along comes a project that knocks us off. 60 year old [Mark Nesselhaus] likes to learn new things and he’s never worked with hardware at the gate level. So he’s building himself a 4-bit Computer, using only Diode-Transistor Logic. He’s assembling the whole thing on “card board” perf-board, with brass tacks for pads. Why — because he’s a thrifty guy who wants to use what he has lying around. Obviously, he’s got an endless supply of cardboard, tacks and Patience. The story sounds familiar. It started out as a simple 4-bit full …read more

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FPGA Computer Covers A to Z

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[F4HDK] calls his new computer A2Z because he built everything from scratch (literally, from A to Z). Well, strictly speaking, he did start with an FPGA, but you have to have some foundation. The core CPU is a 16-bit RISC processor with a 24-bit address bus and a 128-word cache. The computer sports 2 megabytes of RAM, a boot ROM, a VGA port and keyboard, and some other useful I/O. The CPU development uses Verilog.

Software-wise, the computer has a simple operating system, a filesystem, and basic programs like a text editor and an image viewer. Development software includes an …read more

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Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!

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Now, over the holiday season there seems to be a predilection towards making merry and bright. As many an engineer and otherwise are sure to note, fine alcohols will facilitate this process. One such warm holiday beverage is mulled wine; there are many traditions on how to make it, but a singular approach to preparing the beverage would be to re-purpose an old PC and a CPU liquid cooling unit into a mulled wine heating station.

Four years ago, [Adam] found himself staring at a pile of mostly obsolete PCs in his IT office and pondering how they could be …read more

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Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!

Posted on by

Now, over the holiday season there seems to be a predilection towards making merry and bright. As many an engineer and otherwise are sure to note, fine alcohols will facilitate this process. One such warm holiday beverage is mulled wine; there are many traditions on how to make it, but a singular approach to preparing the beverage would be to re-purpose an old PC and a CPU liquid cooling unit into a mulled wine heating station.

Four years ago, [Adam] found himself staring at a pile of mostly obsolete PCs in his IT office and pondering how they could be …read more

Continue reading Make Mulled Wine With A Processor Heatsink!→

One Bit, One Instruction Discrete CPU

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There is a certain benefit to being an early adopter. If you were around when Unix or MSDOS had a handful of commands, it wasn’t hard to learn. Then you learn new things as they come along. If you started learning Linux or Windows today, there’s a huge number of details you have to tackle. You have the same problem trying to learn CPU design. Grappling with the design of a 16-bit CPU with a straightforward data path is hard enough. Throw in modern superscalar execution, pipelining, multiple levels of microcode, speculative execution, and all the other features modern processors …read more

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One Bit, One Instruction Discrete CPU

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There is a certain benefit to being an early adopter. If you were around when Unix or MSDOS had a handful of commands, it wasn’t hard to learn. Then you learn new things as they come along. If you started learning Linux or Windows today, there’s a huge number of details you have to tackle. You have the same problem trying to learn CPU design. Grappling with the design of a 16-bit CPU with a straightforward data path is hard enough. Throw in modern superscalar execution, pipelining, multiple levels of microcode, speculative execution, and all the other features modern processors …read more

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1MHz, 2 Boards, 4 Bits and a Homebrew CPU

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[Agp.cooper] saw a vintage 4Kx4 bit RAM chip and decided that it needed a CPU design to match. The TTL design fits on two boards and has a functional front panel.

This custom CPU project has a few interesting bits worth noting. First, it is small enough that you can wrap your head around it pretty easily. And [Agp.cooper] gives  a good account of the instructions set architecture choices he considered and why he settled on the final design.

Another interesting twist is the testing. Each of the boards can mate with an Arduino which will exercise and test its …read more

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