Home made GPU escalated quickly [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#21

Post by ReptileMan » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

stymaar wrote: post #15

ReptileMan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Modern yes. But olden times atmospheric diesels without turbo were really efficient space heaters.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#22

Post by stymaar » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 12:37 PM UTC

ReptileMan wrote: post #21

stymaar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern yes. But olden times atmospheric diesels without turbo were really efficient space heaters.

Good ol' days.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#23

Post by superxpro12 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #19

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…)

The automated programming fixture/conversion was pretty sweet, im not gonna lie about that.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#24

Post by Karliss » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

randyrand wrote: post #16

Im curious what FLOPS and per CPU bandwidth this has. It might be okay at running compute intensive shaders!

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.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#25

Post by roger_ » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

quietfox wrote: post #5

The determination to pull through a project of this scale is mind blowing and the joy is contagious.

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.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#26

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

Karliss wrote: post #24

randyrand wrote: post #16

Im curious what FLOPS and per CPU bandwidth this has. It might be okay at running compute intensive shaders!

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.

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.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#27

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

I love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe.

Computers need more blinking lights.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#28

Post by antonvs » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

thenthenthen wrote: post #2

@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!

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!

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#29

Post by palmotea » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #14

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).

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.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#30

Post by rwmj » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #29

rwmj wrote: post #14

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).

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.

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-...