rbanffy2 hours ago
I love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe.
Computers need more blinking lights.
PowerElectronix5 hours ago
Very cool project.
A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
JKCalhoun3 hours ago
So much in there: so much hand-soldering of SMD, the way he made an SMD resistor bridge to bodge his MOSI/MISO mixup, using the Bambu 3D printer as a test harness (with pogo-pin attachment) to test his "blades"…
(I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)
superxpro122 hours ago
The automated programming fixture/conversion was pretty sweet, im not gonna lie about that.
rwmj4 hours ago
This is great. It somewhat reminded me of Steve Ciarcia's build of a Mandelbrot-generating supercomputer from around 1990. That was also made from microcontrollers (Intel 8052 in that case).
palmoteaan hour ago
Do you have a link? As far as I can tell you're referring to a BYTE magazine article, but I can only find vague references to it, not anything specific enough that would allow me to locate it.
rwmjan hour ago
It was in Byte circa 1989-1991 & I've been trying to search for it with no luck so far.
FOUND IT! https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-...
nekusaran hour ago
quietfox6 hours ago
The determination to pull through a project of this scale is mind blowing and the joy is contagious.
lnenad5 hours ago
For me it's the skill. So many things you have to be good at to build this. Really impressive and slightly jealous.
roger_2 hours ago
Yeah I don’t think I could ever commit to a project like this and of this scale.
Might be different if it was something truly useful or novel vs a nerd snipe.
Very impressive that he pulled it off in a relatively short amount of time.
randyrand3 hours ago
Im curious what FLOPS and per CPU bandwidth this has. It might be okay at running compute intensive shaders!
Karliss2 hours ago
0 FLOPS those MCUs only support IMBC instructions. No hardware floating point, at least it has integer multiplication/division. My estimate is maybe 1-8Gflop total using software float. If you avoid float and design around fixed point, might do some interesting stuff.
rbanffy2 hours ago
IIRC, the Connection Machine CM-1 also was not designed for floating point ops, but Richard Feynman convinced Danny Hillis that it could compete with supercomputers in the scientific market.
thenthenthen6 hours ago
@3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
PowerElectronix5 hours ago
One could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
zipy1245 hours ago
Not really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
fc417fc8023 hours ago
> Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat
In fact they are converting 100% of it, they are just also collecting and moving additional heat in the process.
nicman235 hours ago
? that is just any computer
mjg596 hours ago
Isn't that lower than a purely resistive heater?
Bendy6 hours ago
Only if the resistive heater in question is DC or AC with reactive power compensation
ruperthair5 hours ago
A purely resistive heater, by definition, has no reactive component so there's no reactive power considerer.
The 0.1% mentioned might be the light that the project produces.
choo-t4 hours ago
Assuming you're not in an endless vacuum, the light will also become heat.
stymaar3 hours ago
I think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in space.
wat10000an hour ago
It's hardly a second order effect if you're talking about heating a space and the light is absorbed by the walls of that space.
smrqa minute ago
It's quite literally a second order effect. The first order effect is light generation, and a consequence of that effect is heat generation via light absorption.
ruperthair3 hours ago
Nice point! Would it be the same for sound that doesn't escape a room?
ReptileMan4 hours ago
Every computer is just space heater with side effect of computations.
The same way every diesel engine is just oil stove with side effect of rotary motion. If the engine was in the back of the car you could totally put a pot on it and braise something.
stymaar3 hours ago
A diesel engine is a very inefficient stove though, as only half (more or less, depending on the exact engine) of the energy is converted to heat, the leftover being mechanical energy.
ReptileMan3 hours ago
Modern yes. But olden times atmospheric diesels without turbo were really efficient space heaters.
stymaar2 hours ago
Good ol' days.
ReptileMan39 minutes ago
The Volkswagen 1.6D is probably the most reliable engine ever made. Only two failure modes - overheat or shitty fuel for the span of decades to break the fuel pump.
antonvsan hour ago
I’m curious about what you’re thinking of, but for both electric heaters and computers, essentially 100% of the input energy is converted to heat one way or another.
What you may be thinking of is efficiency when the output is intended to be something other than heat. In those cases, efficiency is lost because a significant proportion of the input energy is converted to heat.
But if heat output is what you’re interested in, I’m happy to report that 100% is a perfectly achievable, in fact hard to avoid, number!