Hacker Read

vajrabum · 2020-09-15 02:36:13+00:00

Click on Nana2Tetris in the link above. You'll find out a good bit about it. Modern CPUs are enormously complicated. Machines from earlier eras tend to only be of only middling complexity.

jbay808 | karma 7260 | avg karma 3.72 · | 2020-06-05 18:59:17+00:00

What do you mean? That sounds just like a modern CPU to me! :)

wvenable | karma 19014 | avg karma 3.37 · | 2021-05-19 18:54:04+00:00

But it's not a modern system. At it's core is an 8Bit CPU.

blodkorv | karma 192 | avg karma 1.61 · | 2021-02-24 08:20:54+00:00

Despite its advanced and complicated design it was outpreformed pretty easily by more general purpose cpus that where not nessicarily much newer.

simondotau | karma 3968 | avg karma 2.04 · | 2021-04-27 14:31:09+00:00

You can tell it's a modern CPU because its name matches the [A-Z][0-9] pattern.

aceperry | karma 1294 | avg karma 1.5 · | 2015-04-06 23:12:02+00:00

This is seriously nice. We keep hearing about how much more powerful today's processors are compared to yesterday's stuff. Here is a project that demonstrates that power.

zozbot234 | karma 19616 | avg karma 2.16 · | 2023-02-20 05:25:50

These machines exist, they're common in industrial applications and also used by retro gamers. They're basically a i586-based PC in modern SoC form. Of course if you want to run literally anything that's more modern and not specific to old x86, current hardware is way better.

riceart | karma 336 | avg karma 2.29 · | 2023-05-19 00:58:07

Well the CPU and peripheral chips are historic.

danlugo92 | karma 482 | avg karma 0.7 · | 2020-12-15 00:56:15+00:00

Still running last-century processors though.

ldng | karma 1048 | avg karma 1.32 · | 2020-11-06 11:04:48+00:00

Hum, on the other hand patents up to Pentium 4 should have expired, right ? So, you might not be able to have "modern" CPU, depending on your definition of modern, but yet be abble to build specialized CPU with decent performance I suppose.

crgwbr | karma 636 | avg karma 2.83 · | 2020-05-11 19:43:52

One note: they had a 2.048 MHz CPU, not a 2000 MHz CPU. 2000 MHz only slightly below modern clock speeds.

wintercharm | karma 69 | avg karma 2.09 · | 2018-04-05 13:35:02

I remember those old Sun Blade processors. They were absolutely beastly, provided you had to know-how to extract parallel performance from them :D

apaprocki | karma 6224 | avg karma 4.91 · | 2018-01-19 21:18:27+00:00

Just a small nit: the CPUs are all still actively developed and produced. For how much longer is anyone's guess. You shouldn't think of them as "very old systems". I run modern code happily on 64 CPU 4.3ghz POWER8 machines :)

zokier | karma 17208 | avg karma 2.54 · | 2022-08-05 15:59:52

Desktops maybe. Vintage mobile CPUs often were quite anemic though.

nickpsecurity | karma 14152 | avg karma 1.39 · | 2018-01-14 02:58:05+00:00

"What would the TempleOS of CPUs look like, I wonder?"

In the old days, probably Burroughs B5000 for it being high-level with security and programming in large support built in before those were a thing. If about hackability, the LISP machines like Genera OS that you still can't quite imitate with modern stuff. If a correct CPU and you want it today, then I've been recommending people build on VAMP that was formally-verified for correctness in Verisoft project. Just make it multicore, 64-bit, and with microcode. Once that's done, use the AAMP7G techniques for verifying firmware and priveleged assembly on top of it. Additionally, microcode will make it easier to turn it into a higher-level CPU for cathedral-style CPU+OS combos such as Oberon, a LISP/Scheme machine, or Smalltalk machines. Heck, maybe even native support for Haskell runtime for House OS.

https://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Bur...

http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.217...

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/acl206/slides/hardin.pdf

http://www.projectoberon.com

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Ekaros | karma | avg karma · | 2022-08-06 04:05:57

I probably would draw line of old to somewhere Pentium 4. Very old maybe Pentium or 2. Anything Core and beyond is not that old. Slow for current waste of resources, but not really old.

dan-robertson | karma 9079 | avg karma 3.06 · | 2020-05-01 22:45:35+00:00

Pentiums weren’t that old. It would depend a lot on gpu rather than cpu.

rayiner | karma 121493 | avg karma 4.24 · | 2012-11-15 14:51:30+00:00

They aren't quite so primitive. The Atom is also a Pentium-class in-order core. It may be Pentium class, but it's also running at ~2 GHz.

worker767424 | karma 1138 | avg karma 2.47 · | 2021-12-01 14:01:50

Some of the modern Atom CPUs might fit the bill.

nwmcsween | karma 1122 | avg karma 1.12 · | 2016-05-25 13:58:39+00:00

Some of the UB is for 'unusual' CPU's that existed long ago.