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Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

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Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#31

Post by idiotsecant »

peddling-brink wrote: post #22
idiotsecant wrote: post #18

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.

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.

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.

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#32

Post by idiotsecant »

layer8 wrote: post #27
idiotsecant wrote: post #18

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.

Or maybe ChatGPT picked it up from common usage.

It was used occasionally before chatGPT but it has exploded since then.

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#33

Post by RossBencina »

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

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#34

Post by Marazan »

idiotsecant wrote: post #31
peddling-brink wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> like when people start repeating advertising slogans

but without the craft of a good advertising slogan. So worse!

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#35

Post by RossBencina »

jayd16 wrote: post #13
hackernudes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

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.

> 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.

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#36

Post by fsckboy »

>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"

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#37

Post by vanjoe »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #23
Neywiny wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are the best modern tools to get started with in simulation for those who have never dabbled before?

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.

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#38

Post by fsckboy »

idiotsecant wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#39

Post by fsckboy »

hackernudes wrote: post #6
Dwedit wrote: post #5

If you have registers, it's not "no memory".

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!)

>Needlessly pedantic!

if you have pedantry, it's also not "no memory"

Re: Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

#40

Post by fsckboy »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #19
jayd16 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 yo…

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
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