[HN Gopher] From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice ...
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From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon
Author : a1k0n
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-01-12 17:36 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.a1k0n.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.a1k0n.net)
| binarymax wrote:
| So great to see this excellent explanation. Have been a fan of
| donut.c since it first came out. Also I'm way better at golfing
| js than c so it kinda feels like you wrote this just for me :)
| malux85 wrote:
| The thing about donut.c is that its source code is shaped like a
| donut, that's a huge part of its charm.
|
| While altering it to use shifts and adds is a fun exercise, since
| its source code is no longer shaped like the donut it renders, I
| would argue that a large part of its charm has disappeared and
| it's no longer a donut.c
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| It's trivial to reformat the source code into a donut shape.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Sometimes it's those trivial changes which add a lot of the
| overall charm.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Non-trivial, IMHO - automating it sounds non trivial, and
| doing by hand is quite non-trivial, right? We gotta go make
| hand edits line by line?
| mianos wrote:
| Considering the language, C and the size of the file, I
| would not argue it is not trivial. The key feature of
| donut.c is how small the file actually is.
|
| For something larger or in other languages, or having text
| strings, certainly not trivial.
| swores wrote:
| Going slightly off topic, I was interested to learn from this
| blog about Tiny Tapeout, the service they've used to order their
| custom chip design. The concept for anyone as unfamiliar with it
| as me is that lots of people pay a few hundred dollars each to
| get a small part of a chip being made, and once it's made they
| receive the chip ready to use with their section everyone else's,
| too, with a way to choose which bit gets run.
|
| I know basically nothing about chip design, and I'm wondering if
| anyone could tell me: is this only useful for education purposes,
| for example learning how to make a chip that creates a donut on a
| screen, or are there people using Tiny Tapeout for useful
| projects, too?
|
| For each of their chip runs, they publish a list of the different
| people's projects that got included -
| https://tinytapeout.com/runs/ - but it's not easy to spot which
| ones might be more than somebody just learning how to play with
| chip design.
|
| Essentially, if someone were to pick this up as a hobby, what is
| the most interesting thing they could make using this?
| refulgentis wrote:
| I've been _deeply_ curious about the sort of speedup you get from
| doing what was in software, on hardware:
|
| I know the chips hasn't been delivered yet, but, the statements
| at the beginning re: we can expect a new frame every N
| nanoseconds, give me hope there's a rough heuristic for what
| speedup we'd expect in this particular case.
|
| Do we have a rough* understanding of what the speedup will be?
|
| * Within 2 OOMs
| megous wrote:
| New pixel. Not new frame.
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