Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#2Fantastic achievement. Would love to know some more details about the project and hardware design.
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#3Fantastic achievement. Would love to know some more details about the project and hardware design.
Agreed, this is super cool. I've read the book "Code" a few times, so I understand a lot of this stuff in theory, but I sure don't understand the practice. Awesome work.
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#4I really wish he'd document even the barest scraps of the CPU architecture. Is it microcoded? There's 7400 series like 7402 or 7473, and there's 7400 series like 74154, 74181, etc.
"hey kid, I built one of these too, back in the day, and it was damn hard and time consuming, but oh a labor of love. I had no internet, nor any schooling. I read articles in Popular Electronics and I read the TI 7400 series databook. Then I reread them. Then I reread them." Yes, in fact it was snowing, uphill, and I in fact had no shoes!
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#5Does it do pipelining, branch prediction and (hyper)threading? How is its memory hierarchy (cache levels) organized? Does it support a privileged mode? Does it support hardware page faults? Did you implement floating-point operations?
> In order to be able to program it at all, I wrote a very simple compiler (strictly speaking it’s actually an assembler)
Does that compiler/assembler run on your hardware?
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#6Any idea where I could go about learning to do this myself? A few google searches mainly led me to things saying it was impossible.
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#7It sounds cool and interesting but has almost no detail. Come on, Jack! Give us some details, RTL, code, board schematics, whatever.
@ All
This is how you do homebrew CPU's and presentation best:
Links to others for anyone wanting to learn about this stuff:
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#8Does it do pipelining, branch prediction and (hyper)threading? How is its memory hierarchy (cache levels) organized? Does it support a privileged mode? Does it support hardware page faults? Did you implement floating-point operations? > In order to be able to program it at all, I wrote a very simple compiler (strictly speaking it’s actually an assembler) Does that compiler/assembler run on your hardware?
In a word: no. Processors this simple don't implement any of the features you mention, including multi-level memory hierarchies, and I doubt the author had any inclination to make the assembler self-hosting.
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#9I really wish he'd document even the barest scraps of the CPU architecture. Is it microcoded? There's 7400 series like 7402 or 7473, and there's 7400 series like 74154, 74181, etc. "hey kid, I built one of these too, back in the day, and it was damn hard and time consuming, but oh a labor of love. I had no internet, nor any schooling. I read articles in Popular Electronics and I read the TI 7400 series databook. Then…
Judging from the small number of chips in the photograph, they used the higher integration 74 series logic rather than the lower level flip-flop/NAND type.
Re: Here's to the systems programmers – Writing Hello World on a home brew CPU
#10I wrote Hello World for my relay computer- only 27 lines (uses self modified code, same as Jack!):