Comment on Bootstrapping Your Own CPU
realitista@lemmus.org 5 days ago
It may be possible to design but near impossible to fab without having access to all the technologies in the fab pipeline. These are things you aren’t likely to be able to quickly recreate. Hence why Russia and China, despite working on CPU’s for a long time are still behind Hong Kong.
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 5 days ago
I’m not trying to create the new Core i7 here, just something that can run as well as a raspberry pi. My imagination that a nation/company need to start small and aim small, before exploring other more complex architecture.
realitista@lemmus.org 5 days ago
Well that’s about the level that Russia is at after working at it for 50 years.
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 5 days ago
holy shit
realitista@lemmus.org 5 days ago
As a matter of fact when looking at their own in country manufactured lithography, they are hoping to make a fab that can hit 350nm by 2030. That’s the equivalent of a pentium II from 30 years ago. The raspberry pi 5 is a 16nm chip.
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 5 days ago
If you are truly starting from scratch, shooting for Raspberry Pi performance isn’t starting small, thats a huge goal. It’s a complex chip built on a fairly modern process node (28 nm for the 4B) using the second-best-established architecture.
The reasonable goal to shoot for would be an 8086-like chip, then perhaps something like a K3-II or early Pentium, then slowly work your way up from there.
tengkuizdihar@programming.dev 5 days ago
yeah, comment above really gave me a picture that 16nm is really small