companies like Intel, where, eventually, was birthed the first microprocessor . Their progeny been building ever smaller and more power...
companies like Intel, where, eventually, was birthed the first microprocessor. Their progeny been building ever smaller and more powerful microprocessors since.
But one side effect is that, to most people, microprocessors have essentially become magic. Which is fair enough, because in many ways they are magical . Perhaps because who have an electrical engineering degree, they have this quaint, old-fashioned notion that people should understand that technology is not magic, it’s just clever engineering full of compromises and trade-offs, with real quirks and restrictions.
For one thing, it would make people less susceptible to accepting the unsubstantiated promises of “big data” and “machine learning” and the like. Which in many contexts are very real and extremely useful things, of course—but there seems to me to be a worrying trend to treat them as magical secret sauce that can be sprinkled on anything to make its algorithms smarter and more insightful.
Now they give you with only a little further ado, a venture after mine own engineering heart, one whose clones should be in every university in the world. Needless to say it is instead an obscure passion project in the midst of entirely unfunded development by a single British boffin, in the exceedingly magnificent tradition of such.
With the ado finally complete, they give to you at last: the Mega-processor!
A quote from the project’s home page:
What? — The Mega-processor is a micro-processor built large. Very large.
How? — Like all modern processors the Mega-processor is built from transistors. It’s just that instead of using teeny-weeny ones integrated on a silicon chip it uses discrete individual ones like those below. Thousands of them. And loads of LEDs.
Why? – short answer: Because I want to.
Why? — long answer: Computers are quite opaque, looking at them it’s impossible to see how they work. What I would like to do is get inside and see what’s going on. Trouble is we can’t shrink down small enough to walk inside a silicon chip. But we can go the other way; we can build the thing big enough that we can walk inside it. Not only that we can also put LEDs on everything so we can actually SEE the data moving and the logic happening. It’s going to be great.
