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.
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…)
A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
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.
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.
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 the time).
And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.
A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.
I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.
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.
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.
One could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
Not really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
I think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in 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.
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.
My gaming laptop is surely 90% noise and heat (so heat?), but my m1 macbook… is less heat.. but still heat? From reading this thread everything will become heat, which sorta confuses me, but yeh i guess bitluni was nit talking about efficiency but more thermodynamically?!
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.
The Volkswagen 1.6D is probably the most reliable engine ever made. Only two failure modes - overheat or shitty fuel for the span of decades to break the fuel pump.
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!
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.
Great project for kids interested in EECS. I wonder if a miniature version can we done at a fraction of the cost as a cool high school project.
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.
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.
Very cool project.
A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
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-...
https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n6/mode...
Page 399
This one as well. :)
Just cleaning up the links for future searchers and adding the first part:
Steve Ciarcia, CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR
BYTE Octover 1988, A Supercomputer Part 1. Steve begins a supercomputer project by looking at multiprocessing basics.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 283 in the magazine, page 315 in the PDF)
BYTE November 1988, A Supercomputer Part 2. Steve continues the supercomputer project with a look at the Mandelbrot set.
https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n465/mo... (page 399 in the magazine, page 466 in the PDF)
BYTE December 1988, A Supercomputer Part 3. This final part looks at hardware nuts and bolts and also at the driver program.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 327 in the magazine and PDF)
The determination to pull through a project of this scale is mind blowing and the joy is contagious.
For me it's the skill. So many things you have to be good at to build this. Really impressive and slightly jealous.
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.
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.
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 the time).
And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.
A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.
I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.
[1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...
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.
?
The chips in an active TB cable perform signal retiming. https://plugable.com/blogs/news/what-s-the-difference-betwee...
@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!
One could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
So what happens to the 0.01%? Ah thats.. the light? The sound? Not sure.
Not really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
> Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat
In fact they are converting 100% of it, they are just also collecting and moving additional heat in the process.
TIL, thanks, we mostly burn gas and coal
? that is just any computer
Isn't that lower than a purely resistive heater?
Only if the resistive heater in question is DC or AC with reactive power compensation
A purely resistive heater, by definition, has no reactive component so there's no reactive power considerer.
The 0.1% mentioned might be the light that the project produces.
Assuming you're not in an endless vacuum, the light will also become heat.
I think it's fair to separate it from the direct heat generation because if you look at second order effects like that, pretty much all of the energy ends up being radiated away as infrared in space.
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.
Nice point! Would it be the same for sound that doesn't escape a room?
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.
My gaming laptop is surely 90% noise and heat (so heat?), but my m1 macbook… is less heat.. but still heat? From reading this thread everything will become heat, which sorta confuses me, but yeh i guess bitluni was nit talking about efficiency but more thermodynamically?!
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.
The Volkswagen 1.6D is probably the most reliable engine ever made. Only two failure modes - overheat or shitty fuel for the span of decades to break the fuel pump.
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!
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.
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.