[HN Gopher] Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k...
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Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates
Author : a1k0n
Score : 245 points
Date : 2025-12-20 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.a1k0n.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.a1k0n.net)
| glimshe wrote:
| Reminds me of college: "Hardware and Software are logically
| equivalent"
| amelius wrote:
| Writing hardware is like writing software except parallelism is
| way cheaper, but mistakes are way more expensive.
| xphos wrote:
| 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
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| Having everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture
| in some ways
|
| The internet may hypothetically homogenize culture relative
| to a society that does not have any kind of mass
| communication at all, but relative to the world it was
| actually introduced into, the internet has completely
| balkanised the culture. Prior to the internet, we had
| television, cinema, literature, radio, and newspapers, which
| were all centralised and controlled enough that they created
| a shared monoculture in nations. A signifant portion of a
| country's population would watch, read, and listen to the
| same media. The internet bucked that trend, allowing all
| kinds of new subcultures to pop up and to more easily cross
| national boundaries.
| therein wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| I remember those days. As the only kid in school who
| didn't watch Lost, those days sucked
| Neywiny wrote:
| 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
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| What are the best modern tools to get started with in
| simulation for those who have never dabbled before?
| vanjoe wrote:
| 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.
| openinfrared wrote:
| Really cool!
| Dwedit wrote:
| If you have registers, it's not "no memory".
| hackernudes wrote:
| 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!)
| a1k0n wrote:
| Ah that's what I get for self hosting. What browser?
|
| https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms
| a1k0n wrote:
| And this thread shows all of them on real hardware:
| https://x.com/i/status/1992802154370011595
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a
| register, no?
|
| Bucket-brigade delay lines?
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| bucket brigades were also used to read large scale
| sensors like a CCD camera. they are more efficient in
| their use of die space because you need fewer data paths;
| they don't need to be digital either, each bucket can be
| analog for "grey" scale
| RossBencina wrote:
| > 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Needlessly pedantic!_
|
| if you have pedantry, it's also not "no memory"
| jonathrg wrote:
| And I better not see any capacitors on there remembering any
| charge!
| layer8 wrote:
| Even simple wires can be memory:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory#Electric_del...
| startupsfail wrote:
| 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
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Reminds me of the time we repaired old pinball machines in trade
| school. Good times.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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).
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| Marazan wrote:
| > like when people start repeating advertising slogans
|
| but without the craft of a good advertising slogan. So
| worse!
| layer8 wrote:
| Or maybe ChatGPT picked it up from common usage.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It was used occasionally before chatGPT but it has _exploded_
| since then.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| Archit3ch wrote:
| I'm tempted to put together an FPAA with Tiny Tapeout, but it
| likely won't fit in the allocated area.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Not X, Not Y, just Z. Thanks, brainlet shit, didn't read.
| RossBencina wrote:
| 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
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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"
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(page generated 2025-12-20 23:00 UTC)