[deleted]
Simple CPU
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: Simple CPU
#12Very nice.
One request: don't introduce the concept of 'nibble' on the first page. It's jargon that no one needs in this general introduction. And it just sounds silly.
Re: Simple CPU
#13I wish they would give us such a summary at the college before talking about all those confusing stuff.
Excellent work!
Re: Simple CPU
#14Reminds me of this course: http://nand2tetris.org/
Easily accessible, fun, and if you find it too simple, you can always introduce others to it.
Re: Simple CPU
#15It's very similar to Charles Petzold's "CODE" book. An excellent read.
Re: Simple CPU
#16Anyone who cares about this topic is welcome to contribute to https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programmable_Logic/Verilog_for... I started it at the request of some HN users, and I hope it continues to hopefully enlighten some software folks who wonder how the CPU they rely on actually works.
I'll rant for a moment here, because I think this is something that the Simple CPU link has the potential to get right, and that I think is a common pitfall with digital design tutorials.
I think one of the pain points that you commonly see with tutorials is the concept that the hard part is the language. As a digital designer, I think that's explicitly not the case: just like teaching functional programming, the syntax is not the challenge, but the mode of thinking. Digital design is a skill that really requires deep thought about what a given piece of syntax will compile down to; it's possible to skim over the "building blocks" of software (for instance, it is possible to be a very good JavaScript programmer without knowing what the JIT will transform your code to), but in order to build effective (or even possible-to-synthesize!) hardware designs, I believe that it is very important to start with the fundamentals of how hardware actually works.
So, I plead: if you have cause to write a digital design book, don't write it as a "Verilog for Computer Scientists"! Verilog is a big language, and not all of it is good for writing hardware. What you really want is "Digital Design for Computer Scientists".
Re: Simple CPU
#17Anyone who cares about this topic is welcome to contribute to https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programmable_Logic/Verilog_for... I started it at the request of some HN users, and I hope it continues to hopefully enlighten some software folks who wonder how the CPU they rely on actually works.
I'm not sure how and where or indeed if to contribute, but as a programmer who learned digital electronics (stack of free 74xx chips) before diving into programmable logic, one thing that really helped make these things click for me was thinking about hardware as transistors and learning the very basics of electricity and related physics. This helped me see digital electronics not as a sequential process but as a consequence of natural laws, like something dropping due to gravity.
Thinking of a transistor as a voltage controlled switch (obviously simplified to the point of being wrong but works for understanding digital) and seeing how you can use those to build logic gates, and then use gates to build muxes and flip-flops and so on up was essential for my understanding HDLs.
(Incidentally, all that has also made how computers and machine code work much clearer to me).
I don't think I could've really done it without that foundation. And I certainly couldn't have done it by just thinking of Verilog with my programmer's idea of concurrency.
It's obviously very low level and you'd have to gloss over a bunch of things, but I'd definitely start with transistors if I had to explain programmable logic to somebody.
Re: Simple CPU
#18Here Feynman explains the basic logic behind building of all of the computers. He is inspiring even if you know more details about the topics he talks about, because he stimulates you to a fresh view. The youtube title is, IMHO, misleading. The lecture is about the basic hardware concepts and not about heuristics, so I think it fits perfectly with the OP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA Edit: At the start…
Thanks for that. Man, Robin Williams would've played the heck out of a Feynman movie..
Re: Simple CPU
#19Just as an aside the D latch you're showing is the more traditional NMOS circuit rather than CMOS (see the diagram at the bottom of page 510.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5zUABAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA511&ot...
Re: Simple CPU
#20If you want a comprehensive read on this topic, check out the book Code by Charles Petzold: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...