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Anon thinks about CPUs

⁨779⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨greentext@sh.itjust.works⁩

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/4035d709-fee4-41fa-8fe0-0b9134eac9fb.jpeg

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  • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They didn’t start it with rocks. The first calculators used gears. Those were hard to reprogram. So they started using relais. That worked but was very slow. Then they found out that lamps (vacuum tubes) could take the place of relais but these wore down too fast. Then someone figured out that rock stuff (silicium) could do the same as a vacuum tube. After that it became a race to make them as small as possible to cram more of them together.

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    • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I took a course in computing systems engineering which was basically going all the way from semiconductors up to operating systems and it was incredibly interesting.

      One of the things that surprised me was how easy it was to abstract away the lower-level complexity as soon as you got one step up. It’s kind of like recursive Lego pieces, you only have to design one piece then you can use a bunch of those to design another piece, then use a bunch of those to design another, and so on. By the end you have several orders of magnitude of the fundamental pieces but you don’t really think about them anymore.

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      • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The thing about real world processor design though is that all those abstractions are leaky.

        At higher levels of design you end up having to consider things like the electrical behavior of transistors, thermal density, the molecular dynamics of strained silicon crystals (and how they behave under thermal cycling), antenna theory, and the limits and quirks of the photolithography process you’re using (which is a whole other can of worms with a million things to consider).

        Not everyone needs to know everything about every part of the process (that’s impossible), but when you’re pushing the limits of high performance chips each layer of the design is entangled enough with the others to make everyone’s job really complicated.

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  • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Dude doesn’t even know about the magic smoke.

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    • Hupf@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-smoke.html

      I wonder whether ESR will one day up his SSL game.

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    • archon@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Anon also forgot to infuse the lightning pixies after inscribing the runes, tsk tsk.

      They’re the ones who let the smoke out if you anger them!

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Generally it’s only the wizards that deal with the physical side - such as rock shapping and rock combining - that get magic smoke, though if they did their part wrong the wizards that make rocks think might get it as can the people playing Skyrim using the thinking rocks.

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      • IndustryStandard@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        How do they get the smoke to go in? Once I let the magic smoke out I am never quite able to put it back in properly.

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  • BurnedDonut@ani.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    When I learned about how they are making the new CPUs it blew my mind. Dropping a microscopic droplet of metal and blasting it with lasers to a stencil like thingy to create the nanometer circuitry. I was like how the fuck did you even thought about doing that?.. Technologies like these are really marvelous.

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    • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You start with macroscopic photolithography, add material science of semiconductors and then iterate a million times. It didn’t start at nanoscale.

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      • BurnedDonut@ani.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Give me a break… I’m still trying to wrap my head around how transistors work. For a layman this is like magic.

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      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Exactly, and “we need this as small and precise as possible” means “can lasers do it?” As an engineer I default to fast and precise means computer guided laser if possible

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  • kylie_kraft@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m still stuck on how you get from “switch go on, switch go off” to, well, anything

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    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      One Switch can have two states. Switch on is a 1 and switch off is a 0. Group 8 switches together and you get a byte. Miniaturize the switches and put 8 trillion of them into the size of a fingernail, and ta-da you have a 1TB micro SD card.

      Wire up two switches so that a light bulb only will go on when both switches are on (1). This wiring creates an AND gate. Adjusting the wiring so that if either of the switches are on, the light turns on. This wiring is an OR gate.

      Channing the output of the lightbulb and treating it like a new switch allows you to combine enough AND and OR gates to make other logic blocks, NOT, NAND, XOR, etc.

      Combine enough logic blocks and you can wire up a circuit so that you can add the value of two switches together, and now you can start to perform addition.

      This all naturally evolves to the point where you can play Skyrim with porn mods.

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      • feelbetterdude@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I like your explanation, but i dont understand it. Keep up the good work.

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    • pigup@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Simply put, the switching doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s the meaning we assign to the arrangement of one-off switches. Much like flag signals, the flags don’t do anything besides be visible and locatable. Yet, we can establish a communication protocol with flags, lights, fingers on a hand, etc. this signaling is done electronically with many layers of meaning and complexity, and nowadays at unfathomable scale and speed.

      Image

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    • HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Watch this. It’s a guy who shows how computers work using dominoes. It really helps explain how calculating something works at its most fundamental level

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Transistors (electrically activated diodes) allow for logic gates. Logic gates allow for wild bullshit

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  • niktemadur@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well… since you put it that way, it is quite staggeringly improbable, isn’t it?

    “Through these terse, inter-connected runes, an invisible magic flows. You cannot change the rune, as then the spell will be broken.”
    “Where does the magic come from, mommy?”
    “From the highest point in the invisible topology of this magic, Billy: the Hoover Dam/Niagara Falls”.

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    • DriftinGrifter@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      blessed be the white magic that reoies not on corruption of the elements

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  • Bytemeister@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    sighs Okay, to start, you’re going to need some amber and sheep’s wool…

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  • sxan@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m a little offended that this utterly skips over software, as if a CPU would do anything without the component that was invented before any CPU.

    Software without a CPU is still useful. The reverse is not true.

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    • synapse1278@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Isn’t software the “trick rock into thinking” part?

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      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Software is a list of instructions, you can execute it with pen and paper or just using your brain if you want.

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      • sxan@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Software is a necessary component, just like screws are a necessary component in an engine. Screws don’t exist only in engines, have existed since long before engines, and can be used in other ways. Just like software.

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    • groet@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How is software without a CPU useful? Its literally a list of instructions for a CPU.

      Also a CPU can still calculate stuff if you just send electrical signals to the right connections. Software is just a way for the CPU to keep going and do more calculations with the results.

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      • sxan@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Software is algorithmic instructions. We wrote and executed algorithms by hand long before we had calculating machines; and when we did get computers that could run more complex algorithms, they didn’t have CPUs. They had vacuum tubes (there were even simpler programmable purely mechanical computers before even vacuum tubes). CPUs didn’t come along until much later; we’d been writing software and programming computers for decades before the first CPU.

        And even if you try to argue that vacuum tubes computers had some collection of tubes that you could call a “CPU” - which would be a stretch - then it still wouldn’t have been made from silicon (rocks) as in the OP post.

        But before the first calculating mashing, people are writing algorithms - what software literally is - and executing them by hand long before we had calculating machines to do it for us. Look up how we calculated the ranging tables for artillery in WWII. Algorithms. Computed by hand.

        The word “computer” literally comes from the word for the people (often women) who would execute algorithms using their brains to compute results.

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    • DriftinGrifter@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      my guy megabytes of executable binary are just about as usable as a cpu try reverse engeneering more 1s and 0s than you’ve ever read intk something usable when you dont even know how it converts into assembly because you lack the architecture knowledge of a cpu

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  • ID411@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “The year is 2052, 10 years since the awakening. The Thinking Rocks wiped out the humans with ease. A few of us, a handful, survive . For now .”

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    • Hupf@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It was later called the stone age.

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  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    No it’s even worse. We taught the rock how to think, and now force it to think what we want it to think. Millions of thoughts that we want, every second.

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    • Opisek@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s only time until the rock fights back.

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  • ColdWater@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    People who are coding Skyrim porn mods are smarter than the one who invented CPU /s

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  • zourn@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And the “inscribe ancient runes” step takes up to 4 months.

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  • Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m lost on how a transistor can just stay 0 or 1 when it’s just a super teeny tiny circle of wire, basically. Like, I know the typical explanation, but it doesn’t really make it any clearer. Electricity moves in a magic shape, and stuff happens. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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    • bstix@feddit.dk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m not sure what the typical explanation is, but a transistor is not a wire.

      A wire is a conductor. It conducts electricity from end to the other.

      A transistor is a semi-conductor device made from semi-conducting materials, so it conducts electricity between 2 ends with a variable electrical resistance. This variable can be controlled by putting voltage on the third leg. This way a transistor is basically a resistor with a variable resistance, which unlike a resistor is also controllable by a third input.

      This ability is a property of the material. It cannot be constructed by a regular wire.

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      • Phoenix3875@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I think OP is referring to a typical SRAM bit.

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    • Opisek@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The thing is, it never stays in a constant state! It’s more like a water dam that you can open and close. You said you know the typical explanation already, so I won’t cry to explain it again.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The memory is generally done by something called a capacitor (though there are more techniques) which just can hold a little electrical charge - roughly having an electrical charge means it’s a 1, otherwise it’s a 0.

      Get 8 of those things and you have a byte.

      It’s generally easier to think of it as water: electrical lines are tubes moving water, capacitors are little containers that can have water (meaning bit = 1) or be empty (bit = 0), transistors are one-way water valves which are controlled by water (imagine they have a pressure button that opens the gate if there is water running in the tube passimg by that button, putting pressure on it).

      From this simple basis you can actually create a lot of complexity by having a LOT of these things combined in weird ways.

      Further, there’s also a lot of complexity due to the Physics of the real world being less than perfect (for example, the “capacitors” leak water, so not only do you have to say that bit=1 is “water above a certain level” rathe than “full” - since as soon as it’s filled it starts losing water - but you even have to check them once in a while and top up the ones which are supposed to be full: this is actually how DRAM memory works, though with electric charge rather than water).

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  • TehWorld@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The classic response is that you have to capture lightning first to apply to the rick that you want to do the thinking.

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  • dynamic_generals@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What’s going on when it gets turned back into a rock?

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    • 1024_Kibibytes@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Probably the silicon being made into a wafer.

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  • mrgreyeyes@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I was going to send this to my colleagues, but then I read the last line.

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    • Hupf@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I fail to see the issue.

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    • MeDuViNoX@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Crop it? 🤷🏻

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  • nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Skyrim porn mods sound good which ones are those

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    • TwanHE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Too many to count

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  • nifty@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Related to development of semiconductor devices, especially transistors. The original computers used punched holes. In some way it’s an extension of that same idea

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