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Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

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Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#41
post #39

I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at th…

That we can fit a more computing power in an adapter cable than it took to take us to the moon is what gets me.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#42
post #28

@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 interes…

Where the heat goes is the problem I have with that rating. An electric resistive stove is 100% efficient at converting input electricity to heat, but an induction stovetop is far better, better even than gas, for cooking on.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#43
post #39

I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at th…

That we can fit a more computing power in an adapter cable than it took to take us to the moon is what gets me.

I would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit range. So these microcontrollers are a bit apples to oranges (just like my WCH570 vs 486 comparison, to be clear) but even with all those caveats, yes it's basically true.

And yeah, that's wild.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#44
post #27

I love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe. Computers need more blinking lights.

My fav job was an internship with a EW company that made these massive rackmount radar systems. My boss, the lead engineer, loved blue LED status lights. So the massive boards we made had hundreds on them. There were thousands total in the rack. GPIOs, busses, fpga signal outputs, all got an individual LED and mosfet.

It was crazy when it was running. You could visually debug a bus, if you wanted to.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#45
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we can fit a more computing power in an adapter cable than it took to take us to the moon is what gets me.

I would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit range. So these microcontrollers are a bit apples to oranges (just like my WCH570 vs 486 comparison, to be clear) but even with all those caveats, yes it's basically true. And yeah, that's wild.

Not an area I'm familiar with, but do the chips really handle up in the gigabit IO? I thought they just handle connection setup. I had thought the gigabytes were not processed at all by the chips. They just flow through the wires.

?

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#46
post #27

I love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe. Computers need more blinking lights.

My fav job was an internship with a EW company that made these massive rackmount radar systems. My boss, the lead engineer, loved blue LED status lights. So the massive boards we made had hundreds on them. There were thousands total in the rack. GPIOs, busses, fpga signal outputs, all got an individual LED and mosfet. It was crazy when it was running. You could visually debug a bus, if you wanted to.

My dad programmed minicomputers, which normally had LEDs on the front panel that showed the binary contents of the program counter, and maybe the current instruction and some other status indicators. I remember him saying that he could tell if his program was running normally by the patterns in the lights.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#47
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interes…

Yeah, i was totally confused with efficiency, still curious about that 0.01% now tho

There will be an LED somewhere, so some of it gets converted to light, rather than heat.

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit range. So these microcontrollers are a bit apples to oranges (just like my WCH570 vs 486 comparison, to be clear) but even with all those caveats, yes it's basically true. And yeah, that's wild.

Not an area I'm familiar with, but do the chips really handle up in the gigabit IO? I thought they just handle connection setup. I had thought the gigabytes were not processed at all by the chips. They just flow through the wires. ?

The chips in an active TB cable perform signal retiming. https://plugable.com/blogs/news/what-s-the-difference-betwee...

Re: Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

#50
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Depends on where you want to draw the lines. Heating the room and emitting light could both be a second-order effect if you want to say that the first order is heating up the actual heater.
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