Understanding: Computer Processors

Discussion in 'Computer Science & Culture' started by EM_Pulse, Jan 11, 2004.

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  1. EM_Pulse Registered Member

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    Hello, I am a BND ICT student and I would like to build my own computer processor, obviously I'm not talking about building something to rival a P4 but just something that can do small mathmatical calcuations.. a calculator. I would like to do this so I can better understand how computers began and the reason they work as this is part of my computer studies. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to start this kind of project. I do have some electrical experience with small circuits through an Electronics GCSE so I do know the basic components and this means I just need someone to guide me in the right direction of understanding how the logic of the processor works and implimenting it physically/electronicly.

    If this is inappropriate to this forum, could you please direct me to one where I may find help?

    Thankyou for reading and I await your response eagerly.
     
    Last edited: Jan 12, 2004
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  3. Mr. Chips Banned Banned

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    You don't need anything electronic. My first computer was a kit I built almost 40 years ago. It was all plastic. You slid tabs and cards into various notches to program a computation then read the result directly. Guess you would call this an analogue computer. I think it was a Hasbro product. You might try searching on the web for "basic computer kit" or something like that.

    I've just finished ordering all of the parts to build myself a P4 system. It wont be the extreme edition of the CPU as I find that prohibitively expensive but it will be quite state of the art. BTW, I guess as far as most bench marks go, the Athlon 64 bit processor is beating out even the EE P4.
     
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  5. EM_Pulse Registered Member

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    Mr. Chips,
    I searched for what you recommended but found no relevent results. But, I would like to build an electrical processor, just something to let me see even the most basic of principles in the CPU.

    From doing this I would like to gain an understanding in:

    • To see how the electrical pulses go through the processor
    • To see how the processor calculates them
    • To understand, at a very basic level, opcodes (for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) if possible with this type of project.

    I realise the above can be read about from quite a few books but I want to understand it, not just know 'it works because this book said so.' I'm getting very interested in hardware engineering as I am becomming more adept as a programmer, eventually I'd like to understand the major concepts of how the most common processors work so that I could write ASM for them.

    Thankyou for replying, Mr. Chips, and if anyone has a relevent response (information, links, etc) please reply.
     
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  7. river-wind Valued Senior Member

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    If you have a Radio Shack near you, you can get something called a bread board. It is a plastic board with a bunch of holes that you can stick wires into. You can, using the breadboard and some books they also sell at radio shack, develop some simple logic gates, and from there, a simple electronic computer.
    www.radioshack.com

    any other electronics hobby store should carry the same parts.
     
  8. river-wind Valued Senior Member

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    as for the most common processor functions, most of the information is available online; the two most common methods are CISC (complex insturction Set Computer), and RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer). No modern processor is truely RISC or CISC< but somewhere in between. the Pentium is more of a CISC chip, the Athelon is more RISC than the Pentium, the Itainium is more RISC than both of them, the Opteron is more RISC than that, and the PowerPC is more RISC than all of them. There are thousands of different processors, from MIPS to Alpha to the Pentium...
    http://www.anandtech.com/ has a bunch of good CPU-hardware based articles, as does www.arstechnica.com. you'll have to search through their old articles to find the stuff you're looking for.
     
  9. EM_Pulse Registered Member

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    Thankyou river-wind, I've had a quick look over the sites you suggested but didn't find anything basic enough for what I want to do.. perhaps there is nothing so basic it actually explains what happens? I will keep looking but I've now started on developing the processor myself as there seems to be no (public) presidence for this.
     
  10. AntonK Technomage Registered Senior Member

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    You'll want to buy whats called an FPGA. They are field programmable gate arrays. They allow you to reconfigure them via HDL (hardware description languages) such as Verilog or VHDL. Our computer architecture class (CDA 4150 for anyone interested) project to design a dual issue, super scalar, 5 stage pipeline, derivative of the MIPS R3000. Lots of fun. Newer FPGAs and kits have enough space on them to store the CPU, memory controller and other stuff sometimes. Check out http://www.xilinx.com and http://www.xess.com for kits.

    -AntonK
     
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