How hard is to build a processor?

[Don McKenzie]

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/


Cheers Don...


--
Don McKenzie

Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
E-Mail Contact Page: http://www.dontronics.com/email
Web Camera Page: http://www.dontronics.com/webcam
No More Damn Spam: http://www.dontronics.com/spam

Product Sellout: 15% OFF 4DSystems OLED Displays & modules.
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/micro-oled.html

 

[fritz]

"Don McKenzie" <5V@2.5A> wrote in message
news:7uoa2jF5dnU1@mid.individual.net...

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

Why not ?
Someone should be keeping the old craft alive. Good on him !
You could ask 'why build museums' ?
I think you agree.

 

[Jon Kirwan]

On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:57:31 +1100, Don McKenzie <5V@2.5A>
wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/


Cheers Don...

Thanks, Don. I absolutely LOVE doing this kind of thing. It
should be required work for anyone in embedded programming,
at least. 35 years ago I tried my hand at it and failed to
get much useful. It wasn't until I later got access to a
logic simulator that I was finally able to complete a
successful processor design with 7400 logic, not using the
74181 ALU by the way, though I never built what seemed to
work so well. Later, I picked up a Xilinx 4000 series demo
board and, for the very first time, learned to write VHDL and
finally coded up my first processor that worked!!! (I didn't
do the floorplanning by hand -- way over my head at the
time.)

I learned so much doing this, though.

Anyway, thanks for the link!!

Jon

 

[TTman]

"Don McKenzie" <5V@2.5A> wrote in message
news:7uoa2jF5dnU1@mid.individual.net...

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/


Cheers Don...

Reminds me of the pdp11 look alike I worked on back in the early 70's... few
hundred ttl chips , 64 bit diode matrix microcode, 8K ferrite sotore driven
by loys of monostables to get the timing right....
I was used to poser some of the very first CNC machines in the UK- Herbert
BatchMAtic and in Germany - Boehringer Vxxx series lathes.
Those were the happy days......

 

[petrus bitbyter]

"Don McKenzie" <5V@2.5A> schreef in bericht
news:7uoa2jF5dnU1@mid.individual.net...

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/


Cheers Don...


--
Don McKenzie

Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
E-Mail Contact Page: http://www.dontronics.com/email
Web Camera Page: http://www.dontronics.com/webcam
No More Damn Spam: http://www.dontronics.com/spam

Product Sellout: 15% OFF 4DSystems OLED Displays & modules.
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/micro-oled.html

Back in '74 Elektor published a design of a computer built with TTL-logic.
They really made it work though I doubt any subscriber built it too.

petrus bitbyter

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Cool! Over on alt.folklore.computers there was a recent thread about
projects implementing old CPUs with an FPGA. Very neat stuff out there
for the retrocomputing world.
--
As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should
be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours;
and this we should do freely and generously. (Benjamin Franklin)

 

[Ian Bell]

petrus bitbyter wrote:

"Don McKenzie" <5V@2.5A> schreef in bericht
news:7uoa2jF5dnU1@mid.individual.net...
It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/


Cheers Don...


--
Don McKenzie

Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
E-Mail Contact Page: http://www.dontronics.com/email
Web Camera Page: http://www.dontronics.com/webcam
No More Damn Spam: http://www.dontronics.com/spam

Product Sellout: 15% OFF 4DSystems OLED Displays & modules.
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/micro-oled.html


Back in '74 Elektor published a design of a computer built with TTL-logic.
They really made it work though I doubt any subscriber built it too.

petrus bitbyter

Back in '73 I worked on a 16 bit mini computer built entirely out of
TTL, complete with a row of toggle switches on the front panel so you
could enter machine code by hand. It had a paper tape reader and along
with a paper tape punch you could use the two pass assembler - that's a
lot of paper.

Cheers

ian

 

[Tim Watts]

James Harris <james.harris.1@googlemail.com>
wibbled on Friday 26 February 2010 10:52

On 25 Feb, 22:24, Jon Kirwan <j...@infinitefactors.org> wrote:
On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:57:31 +1100, Don McKenzie <5...@2.5A
wrote:



It seems that Google engineer Bill Buzbee isn t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own.

...

Thanks, Don. I absolutely LOVE doing this kind of thing. It
should be required work for anyone in embedded programming,
at least.

That reminds me that there are some excellent course videos by David
Culler of Berkeley showing how to build a CPU from logic gates. A bit
of searching for his webcasts for course 61CL Fall 2009 in H.264 video
should bring them up.

I had no idea until working through the lectures that *I* could build
a CPU using components I already knew about. As part of the course he
shows how to do so by working up from logic gates.

James

I knew a chap (York University Computing Services) who claimed to have a
mate who built an elementary CPU from fruit machine relays[1]. Occupied a
bit of board about one square yard. He lost interest in building RAM from
more relays, so wedged a 1k RAM chip with suitable interfacing on the side.
Ran at about 1 IPS apparently...

[1] he got a box load from a surplus store, old stripped out ones. Had an
unusual contact configuration that made them quite suitable.

--
Tim Watts

Managers, politicians and environmentalists: Nature's carbon buffer.

 

[James Harris]

On 25 Feb, 22:24, Jon Kirwan <j...@infinitefactors.org> wrote:

On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:57:31 +1100, Don McKenzie <5...@2.5A
wrote:



It seems that Google engineer Bill Buzbee isn t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own.

....

Thanks, Don.  I absolutely LOVE doing this kind of thing.  It
should be required work for anyone in embedded programming,
at least.

That reminds me that there are some excellent course videos by David
Culler of Berkeley showing how to build a CPU from logic gates. A bit
of searching for his webcasts for course 61CL Fall 2009 in H.264 video
should bring them up.

I had no idea until working through the lectures that *I* could build
a CPU using components I already knew about. As part of the course he
shows how to do so by working up from logic gates.

James

 

[Walter Banks]

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

It is a lost art. In the 70's I taught a course that students built
a small computer out of lab modules of TTL chip's. My first
personal computer was micro coded PDP-8 hand built.

Ram was 1K (bits) parts on a wirewrap board.

Walter..

 

[Jon Kirwan]

On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:10:55 -0500, Walter Banks
<walter@bytecraft.com> wrote:

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

It is a lost art. In the 70's I taught a course that students built
a small computer out of lab modules of TTL chip's. My first
personal computer was micro coded PDP-8 hand built.

Ram was 1K (bits) parts on a wirewrap board.

Walter..

Oh, my, Walter. That would have been a wonderful class to
have taken. I only wish...

Jon

 

[Bill Cooke]

Walter Banks wrote:

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

It is a lost art. In the 70's I taught a course that students built
a small computer out of lab modules of TTL chip's. My first
personal computer was micro coded PDP-8 hand built.

Ram was 1K (bits) parts on a wirewrap board.

Walter..


In 1961 a colleague told me of a machine in a lab at Cornell named

CADET, which reputedly stood for "can't add, doesn't even try". But it
was a universal (Turing) machine. Most everyone has stood on the
shoulders of software to extend behavior. In another sense, cpu
development has also stood on the shoulders of software arts, for needs
drive real engineering, not possibilities, and software disciplines
provide the languages for expressing these needs.

Each to his own. Some yearn to create a theory, some to create a
bridge, some to create an impression. I still ponder the structure of a
(programmable) computer of light and heavy marbles, gates, and a bunch
of elevators.

-- Bill Cooke

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Bill Cooke <bcooke@cookedata.com> writes:

Walter Banks wrote:

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

It is a lost art. In the 70's I taught a course that students built
a small computer out of lab modules of TTL chip's. My first
personal computer was micro coded PDP-8 hand built.

Ram was 1K (bits) parts on a wirewrap board.

Walter..


In 1961 a colleague told me of a machine in a lab at Cornell named
CADET, which reputedly stood for "can't add, doesn't even try". But
it was a universal (Turing) machine. Most everyone has stood on the
shoulders of software to extend behavior. In another sense, cpu
development has also stood on the shoulders of software arts, for
needs drive real engineering, not possibilities, and software
disciplines provide the languages for expressing these needs.

IBM 1620. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620

Each to his own. Some yearn to create a theory, some to create a
bridge, some to create an impression. I still ponder the structure of
a (programmable) computer of light and heavy marbles, gates, and a
bunch of elevators.

Another fun project!
--
As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should
be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours;
and this we should do freely and generously. (Benjamin Franklin)

 

[Vladimir Vassilevsky]

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked.

It is trivial to build a processor. This type of project is a semester
work for a student. It is hard to make commercially viable processor,
though.

VLV

 

[Swanny]

Walter Banks wrote:

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

It is a lost art. In the 70's I taught a course that students built
a small computer out of lab modules of TTL chip's. My first
personal computer was micro coded PDP-8 hand built.

Ram was 1K (bits) parts on a wirewrap board.

Walter..

I wonder how many kiddies these days actually own a wirewrap tool?

 

[D Yuniskis]

Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/

In the early 80's it was common to build "custom" processors
out of 2900 bit-slice components. There was an excellent text
(and some good AMD appnotes) devoted entirely to this (Mick 'n'
Brick? yellow dust jacket).

In grade school, I build a combination (burglar) alarm using
(bistable?) inter-latching relays for the code store. With
a fire department klaxon as the annunciator (you *really*
didn't want to get the combination wrong! :> )

In high school, I built a two-player (offense + defense) football
(left-pondian football, that is :> ) game out of analog computers
(integrators, adders), DTL and VOM's (to display: "down", field
position, yards gained/lost on the play and yards 'til first down)
but that just ran at "DC". It was also quite large (4' x 8'
sheet of plywood to hold all the bits) and, thus, impractical
to preserve.

Many years ago, I built a "digital clock" out of relays. But,
it was very noisey and cost a fortune to keep replacing the
incandescent lamps used in the "7 segment" displays.

Now, I am much more fascinated by electro-mechanical *mechanisms*.
I have been working on a kinetic "sculpture" to act as a timepiece
in the back yard. A tribute to Rube Goldberg -- with the exception
that it must run *continuously* (most of his contraptions were
"one-shot" devices). But, in order to keep *good* time, I need
to "close the loop". Doing so without being noticed means
using some "non-discrete" device that you can control. I.e.,
something like a liquid whose rate of flow can be varied without
a critical observer being able to *easily* determine that this
is happening. Living in the DSw poses a problem using water as
it evaporates too fast (replenishing it from the domestic water
supply would be "cheating" :< ). I also need to locate some
larger solar panels so the device has no connection to the electric
utility.

I would also like to build a "Jetson's" style doorbell (though
programmable) to replace the electronic version I made some years
ago. But, apparently, the design of tubular bells is more art
than science (and, mistakes can be costly). So, I have a lot
more research to do. :<

"Toys" <grin>

 

[Bill Cooke]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote:

Bill Cooke <bcooke@cookedata.com> writes:

Walter Banks wrote:
Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/
It is a lost art. In the 70's I taught a course that students built
a small computer out of lab modules of TTL chip's. My first
personal computer was micro coded PDP-8 hand built.

Ram was 1K (bits) parts on a wirewrap board.

Walter..


In 1961 a colleague told me of a machine in a lab at Cornell named
CADET, which reputedly stood for "can't add, doesn't even try". But
it was a universal (Turing) machine. Most everyone has stood on the
shoulders of software to extend behavior. In another sense, cpu
development has also stood on the shoulders of software arts, for
needs drive real engineering, not possibilities, and software
disciplines provide the languages for expressing these needs.

IBM 1620. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620

Hah! My leg's been pulled. and to think I'd just finished a year on
1401, 705 code! I'd thought 'cadet' was a lab project, not a for-real
machine. I've even read a 1620 manual, but never got to write for one.

-- Bill

Each to his own. Some yearn to create a theory, some to create a
bridge, some to create an impression. I still ponder the structure of
a (programmable) computer of light and heavy marbles, gates, and a
bunch of elevators.

Another fun project!

 

[TTman]

"Ian Bell" <ruffrecords@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:hm8aia$ajc$2@localhost.localdomain...

petrus bitbyter wrote:
"Don McKenzie" <5V@2.5A> schreef in bericht
news:7uoa2jF5dnU1@mid.individual.net...
It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to
build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors
, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project
website.

http://www.embedds.com/how-hard-is-to-build-a-processor/


Cheers Don...


--
Don McKenzie

Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
E-Mail Contact Page: http://www.dontronics.com/email
Web Camera Page: http://www.dontronics.com/webcam
No More Damn Spam: http://www.dontronics.com/spam

Product Sellout: 15% OFF 4DSystems OLED Displays & modules.
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/micro-oled.html


Back in '74 Elektor published a design of a computer built with
TTL-logic. They really made it work though I doubt any subscriber built
it too.

petrus bitbyter

Back in '73 I worked on a 16 bit mini computer built entirely out of TTL,
complete with a row of toggle switches on the front panel so you could
enter machine code by hand. It had a paper tape reader and along with a
paper tape punch you could use the two pass assembler - that's a lot of
paper.

Cheers

ian

@Ian, who did you work for in 73 ???

 

[TTman]

"Vladimir Vassilevsky" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote in message
newsLadnf-Fi6vCsRXWnZ2dnUVZ_gednZ2d@giganews.com...


Don McKenzie wrote:

It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in
microprocessors that can be purchased in marked.

It is trivial to build a processor. This type of project is a semester
work for a student. It is hard to make commercially viable processor,
though.

VLV
But you have to add to that all the software to make it do something....
starting with a boot loader...

 

[D Yuniskis]

TTman wrote:

"Vladimir Vassilevsky" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote in message
newsLadnf-Fi6vCsRXWnZ2dnUVZ_gednZ2d@giganews.com...

It is trivial to build a processor. This type of project is a semester
work for a student. It is hard to make commercially viable processor,
though.

But you have to add to that all the software to make it do something....
starting with a boot loader...

.... and there's the rub! :>

I designed a processor some years ago. A friend was responsible
for writing the code for it.

*Nothing* worked! :< This was completely unexpected as we were
both very competent in our individual responsibilities.

We soon realized that I had designed the instruction set expecting
"word" addresses (memory was 16b wide and only accessible *as* 16-bit
words -- hence it seemed *obvious* that addresses would be of "words")
whereas he had assumed *byte* addresses. :< Simple fix. Took
all of the drama out of the event! ;-)

I've seen other silly issues like this confound the initial
startup of custom processors: e.g., confusion over which
way the stack grows, whether the SP points to the last *used*
location on the stack or the next *available*, etc. They are
almost always "fun" problems to solve as they usually are
easy to find and have dramatic consequences once found!