Old and homebrew CPUs
Slashdot recently had an item about Intel’s release of schematics for its 4004 microprocessor. From the article:
“Intel is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004, their very first microprocessor, by releasing the chip’s schematics, maskworks, and users manual. This historic revelation was championed by Tim McNerney, who designed the Intel Museum’s newest interactive exhibit. Opening on November 15th, the exhibit will feature a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004.”
The redrawn and verified engineerind data as well as an animated 4004 simulator written in Java are available at the unofficial 4004 website.
However, to designing and fabriacting a central processing unit is not reserved to ingenious Intel- AMD- or whatever else chipmanufacturer-enginners anymore. Everyone can start and create CPUs. Well not everyone. You probably have to have a soft spot for electronics and computers and you need quite a lot of free time. Some “geekness” probably also helps.
The coolest homebrewed CPU that I know off is the Magic-1 Homebrew CPU:
“Magic-1 is a homebuilt minicomputer. It has a custom CPU made out of more than 200 74 Series TTL chips. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but there’s also a full ANSI C compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), and a rudimentary homebrew operating system.”
On the Magic-1’s website many pictures and the complete schmeatics are available. And somebody actually rebuilt the Magic-1: “WooHoo! – Magic-1 is no longer a one-of-a-kind machine.”
Other home-built CPUs:
- The 4Bit homemade CPU – very simple but very very cool.
- Another Home-Built TTL Computer Processor with 16 instructions operatable via a serial port.
- A more sophisticated model is the D16/M Minicomputer which is able to directly address 64K words and which has 73 instructions with 8 adressing modes at it’s disposal.
- A very cool homemade CPU is the MyCPU [german] computer. There even exists a construction manual and you can buy the construction kit [german].
- Very popular although old is also the Sipmlex-III “all-TTL machine”.
- And of course the Mark 1 FORTH Computer. The website also provides a long list of links to further Homebrew CPU websites.
Who knows. Maybe I will find time to build one myself.
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