MegaProcessor - Computerphile
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 พ.ค. 2017
- Walk around inside a working processor and see all the components operating. Jason Fitzpatrick shows us the Centre for Computer History's MegaProcessor .
MegaProcessor was built by James Newman and is the largest working model processor in the world.
Thanks once again to the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
There's nothing better a computer architecture student can ask to see! Amazing!
Same for Computer science :P
There is something better, the video series of the construction of an 8bit cpu by "Ben Eater", it explains everything in detail.
Actually there are alot of things who are better. For example Ben Eater as Lilu_Kuh98 mentioned.
On the screen with the clockspeed there is a board with a 32K memory chip between the clockspeed display and the Input/Output connector. This means you don't even see anything executing as you don't see the ram at all.
Nearest thing we've seen so far was the redstone constructions, but even they are inspired by James Newman anyway
It would be cool if there were a VR version of this.
2:50 = best overclocking guide
underclocking
@@xuNsh1ne hes joking
This reminds me of when I learned Computer Architecture playing around with Redstone in Minecraft!
Computers that you can see and look inside their inner workings are vital to truly understanding how these systems work.
I know it has been years, but I keep coming back to this for joy. Someone should make a visual emulator for this, so we can try and write codes for it!
Any university teaches computer science should have one like this. Marvelous...
Looks like a challenge Ben Eater should accept.
nope I like what ben eater did alot more.
Ben Eater's videos are excellent for explaining how all this kind of stuff works.
Yup, you can build a computer out of jellybean components nowadays, most of them are under a dollar. If you know what you're doing, it's not very expensive to do a lot of stuff. It's prettymuch advanced LEGO.
I've been watching Ben Eater's videos, and I have a few electronic components, but I have no idea where I can get these nice short straight wires. All I have is long flexible wires, the shortest of which is half a breadboard long. Even simple circuits quickly become messy with this wiring
Get yourself a wire cutter/stripper and an pair of needle-nose pliers. Then you can make your long wires as short as you need them.
(P.S., I am not being facetious; this is exactly how we did it in college.)
This thing is incredible. I wish I could have seen this while doing my CS degree. Learning all this by theory is fine, but seeing it physically would have been mind-blowing. Congratulations to James for building this amazing machine, which many would consider to be a work of fine art, as well as a great tool to help people understand the very fundamentals which drive the digital and information revolution.
After studying computer science for 5 years, I must say this is the coolest thing I've seen. Not practically useful, but extremely educational.
Awesome to see! Thank you for the tour.
It is crazy to think that this complex build has "only" 42.000 transistors and for example those new Nvidia pascal gpu's have over 15.000.000.000 transistors. Loads of respect to the people that develop these products! (and ofcourse the guys that worked on this mega processor project)
It's amazing to see! It's baffling to realize how much processing power we take for granted in our daily lives.
Just came across this. It's utterly insane, but SO informative. Tech is not a magic art... It's just mechanics. Brilliant.
Computerphile and Numberphile is probably the best thing that have ever existed on the internet.
This is truly impressive. Hey, if civilization crashes back to the iron ages, just preserve this room so we can rebuild society a little quicker!
It's going to be funny when you realize that computers are the reason for the future crash of human civilization into a dark age like youve never even imagined
@@Vicorcivius not they aren't, petrol is
@@monad_tcp yeah petrol powered calculator
@@monad_tcp muh climart change!
Me: overclocking my CPU to 4.2GHz
This guy: **uNDeRcL0CkInG**
2Hz
4.20 wHaT yOu SmOkInG
im using one core 2 quad q6600 in 4.7ghz
@@Tensho_C He said 19 KHz. XD
I can sit in that room for HOURS and still not get bored......Always wanted to do this all my life.....
This is absolutely brilliant.
The ultimate educational tool for explaining how CPUs work.
I love this! I'm a visual person and I have wanted to see this for a long time. I thought we were on the edge of this with tracer ram, but that went out of style pretty fast.
I've gotta see this in person!
HowToFAQ SAME! I have too also!!!!!!
It's now an exhibition in a computer museum somewhere in the UK, so you definitely can
yes. me too.
It's in the The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge!
I stumbled across the website for this project a couple of years ago when it wasn't finished and it was (in) the guy's living room. Really glad to see it finished. :)
this is an invaluable tool for Electronics Engineering majors emphasizing on IC design. Using this to grasp the concepts on silicon level programming and layouts would make things so much easier to see in person in real time.
This is literally one of the coolest things I've ever seen!!!! What an freaking awesome learning tool.
It's more of a Macroprocessor...
Micro - 10^(-6)
Mega - 10^(6)
They upscaled the microprocessor times a trillion.
Actually in this case micro comes from micrometer. They started to use this term around the time they were able to do transistors for which the most appropriate unit of measurement was the micrometer.
+OoJxShadow Perhaps we should be calling our current processors "nanoprocessors", given they're being manufactured with features in the 10-20nm range?
Nah they did macro processing in ww2 they used tubes for that machine.This ting is much more capable and a lot smaller.
lol
Absolutely brilliant! I saw that exhibit at the Centre for Computing History earlier this year and it went over my head. This video helped explain so much!
That should be part of all schools, giving that visual aspect of how things work is really great.
I love this kind of stuff, should visit it sometime when I'm able to. Others might find Ben Eater 's work on TH-cam interesting on making an 8 bit computer on a breadboard with full narration and explanation of the different parts.
Funny how the guy who created this basically has the same Surname as John von Neumann, just the english version
I was thinking the same thing!
That prompts me to wonder if the MegaProcessor is based on von Neumann architecture or Harvard architecture.
Just like Garry Newman, creator of GMod.
Even more funny (specifically ironic) is how it potentially uses the Harvard architecture instead of the Von Neumann architecture. I'm guessing that's the case, as I didn't see any program code on/in the memory/display
he's a time traveler, he went forward in time to make the megaprocessor based on current technology, then went back in time to make that future possible. makes sense, right?
When I first watched a video of this in action last year I was impressed... everytime I see a video of the Megaprocessor in action I am still impressed.
having designed a MIPS processor in VHDL helps me appreciate how insane this is. It's beautiful.
James Newman: I built the largest megaprocessor!
Minecraft redstone engineers: Are you challenging us?
ikr!
Building a computer in minecraft, project red ftw!
Now build one from relays. Oh man. The clack.
I'd love to hear that, they just better keep that clock speed realllllly low otherwise they finna break.
Pneumatics
There is one called Harry Porter's relay computer
Make no mistake, people base utility of computers on a very limited span of things because of the general publics lack of knowledge of computer language and reliance on a graphical user interface, that machine, it can a great deal of things. If we lost access to most of our current computer tech and had to use a couple of these machines for a week, trust me there's literally thousands of things that cpu can do. All computers can be useful. An intel 4004 is still an amazing machine. The principal fact that we even have integrated circuits is mind boggling and we should be very thankful everyday that we have these devices and never take them for granted. They have brought me such joy, they are so interesting.
Really cool. Reminds me of building a microprocessor on a breadboard out of logic chips in college. Showing it with discrete transistors shows the entirety of computer engineering from start to finish.
I read about it on IEEE Spectrum...
done by only one man...
kinda insane...
oh, and it draws quite a bit of power, basically all from the LEDs too...
what is a "TON" of power? A single LED uses like 3V*0.02A=0.06W. No idea how many LEDs they are using but let's say 20000. That would be 1.2kW - that is still less than your average bathroom heater
Edit: internet research tells me it is actually using 10000 LEDs and "only" uses 500W.
sorry for having bad memory, I just found it's only 500W too...
the other statistics are interesting too...
I want a physical Clock Speed slider on my computer
Botong Lin Yes
Well you still wouldnt be able to single step it since if the frequency is set too low the RAM will dump since its not SRAM like it is shown in this video.
Use Redstone repeater then
@@ShiroCh_ID please respond to NASA they need you
@@dac518 they need minecraft players?
This was absolutely amazing, I now need to make a trip here to see this in person
What is its Wattage rating compared to a microprocessor?
"Yes"
All of it
Yeah pretty much
1kilo watt
Next door guy: Mom, I wanna make a new school project
Mom: Not again!
I've seen this kind of thing about 1,5 year ago done on a much smaller scale by Martin Brandstätter (you can search him on youtube). He has built an ALU, 16 bytes of RAM and a decoder for it using only discrete components, but he has never took it this far. It's amazing to see that someone else has done it, and in a very esthetic and educational way.
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen, this is amazing!
I can't believe no one has programmed DOOM for it
Doom requires 66 MHz and 8 MB of RAM, this has 100 kHz and 256 bytes of RAM.
But you are welcome to solder a few more megabytes of memory and they will attach it :-)
That would be crazy, the megacomputer would have to be mega-er. But I have no doubt in the future megacomputers will grow!!
For doom your would need a whole stadium of these.
Hm... going off his "twice the size of the united kingdom" = 1 gig comment, 8 mb of ram would be roughly 1500 square miles?
So about Rhode island, but I don't think anyone's using that for anything important...
Some people on youtube actually have for their own processors. You need to implement your own instruction set into any C compiler. Then you can compile Linux for it and start to play ZORG. Doom is way too much for this machine.
Sounds easy but needs about 2 man-years to do. But once linux runs its easy really.
"Microprocessor" - fills an entire room.
In the old times this would have been built with tubes and would have filled a whole warehouse! And it would have taken a whole power plant to heat up the tubes....
+Eviltech and it wouldn't have been called a "microprocessor", right?
Oh man, think of how many EDVACs you can fit in your pocket!
probably was coded with paper strips with holes punched in rows also..
Microprocessor _model_
yep. that's why they named this microprocessor functional model a "MegaProcessor"
This is the coolest thing I've ever seen on this scale.
Seeing the rtl in a macro scale is just beautiful ... wow
Since the "Main Memory" is also the screen and does not appear to actually hold any instruction data I'm guessing this is actually a Harvard Architecture machine with the program instructions running on a separate ROM memory bank?
There's no "working" memory on the screen either. Near the single-step controls, there's a board with "32K RAM" written next to it...
This takes away so much from this machine. This is the reason i like the breadbord computer from ben eater so much more.
Bpendragon Presents
Since every processor is build with the Harvard architecture and this is only a scaled up processor, it has to be like this with the Data memory - as you said - as screen.
The main memory isn't the memory in that case, it looks like VRAM if you could call it that.
I'd expect a fair bit of garbage pixels around the edges. Sure, maybe they read board state from the display blocks, but they need to store which tile they are moving, and its X,Y position. I doubt this small processor has enough registers for that, as something like that without touching memory would be tricky even on x86, which has a real crapton of registers.
"this computer is magnitudes more advanced than anything you could ever dream of putting together."
Alone? Yes that's to much work. With my money? I definitely don't have the money for that!
I know that this is a ton of work. And i honestly don't wanna do the debugging to get this thing running. I mean this has a world record for a reason. The thing about this i don't like is the extra memory. Why is this a tetris machine? why. This is supposed to teach programmers how the machine works. so you can follow the instructions and micro instructions. Why on earth are they hiding the main memory? The memory display looks nice, but that is not what programmers want to see. or at least not what i wanna see. I'm pissed about this because i really really love the idea and think this is wasted potential. You don't rage about something when you are not invested about it.
Please make a video about microcode. I did it at uni, its one level below machine code. each machine instruction i.e MOV EAX, [SP] is actually a sequence of microcode.
There is not much to say about microcode other than it being a more RISC-like (probably) instruction set below modern x86 and it's highly optimized for the processor design. (I can imagine things like the x86 decoder outputting different parts of the needed microcode sequence into different pipelines to maximize throughput - a level of parallelism that would be impossible to achieve normally), other than that it's quite hard to get a lot of info about it as big companies such as Intel or AMD don't make that info public :P
You can however do some interesting magic with microcode, such as "DIV and IDIV" not actually having a hardware divider, simulating 256 bit vector things on 128 bit vector units (Ryzen does this from what I know) and even fancier things like loading new microcode - haven't done any research on this but just saying what I've heard, you write a memory pointer to a register and BAM, suddenly new microcode is loaded :P (basically microcode loads it, does all the decrypting and checking and sets up the CPU internally)
+Nemes Also sometimes a microprocessor has undocumented instructions. So it's kinda like Easter eggs in a video game.
full on amazing. Congratulations to all involved in it's construction
That machine is magnificent! Thank you for showing it to us.
Simply incredible. Did 1 person make this or was it a team project?
If I remember correctly this is made by one person.
Niels van Schooten Yep, one person
one person
hikari work of love man, work of love
It must have cost tens of thousands of dollars just for all the hardware.
Im so glad the led's and circuitry are red
So happy to see the megaprocessor on computerphile! what an amazing creation
That truly is a thing of beauty and one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Brilliant.
This is mega cool.... Every computer science education institution should have one of these...
that power bill though :/
...then again, when i look at the server room running 24/7 it wouldn't make that much of a difference ´:D
LED's aren't that power hungry, some can run with only a couple milliamps. Edit: Looked it up and it's only drawing about 500W.
just put a magnet on the electric meter and make it run backwards. energy supplier will be giving you refunds
Yeah,I don't think my government funded university could afford the electricity bill... I guess they could rent it to film crews tho, looks great in camet
Any chance of getting a follow up video on how this thing is programmed, and where the programs are stored? It doesn't look like any code is being loaded into memory.
This is an absolutely phenomenal video... great timing too as i'm studying CPUs now!
This is fascinating!! Best thing for a Computer Architecture demonstration!
Am I the only one who wants to play with PowderToy now?
4:55 ugggh pain in my heart
I saw this the other day and it is awesome. Hidden away on the edge of Cambridge, UK. The museum is awesome, too!
I think this is one of the more beautiful things I have ever seen.
If the memory is being used to show a game of Tetris, where the hell is the code to run Tetris coming from????
probably a electronics component that is nearly as small as your normal ram, in your pc or whatever, cramped in next or behind that screen.... probably it works without that but my point of view not that educative and worth the prize it gained. i'm not happy with that design, there is an series by "Ben Eater" who builds a 8 bit processor and uses some electronic components to replace these parts that would eat up a bunch of space and money but explains how they work before. its amazing how this guy can explain it!
Maybe, they're just mapping a small segment of memory (the video memory) to the LEDs panel and the rest remains hidden.
You would have to hand code the memory locations so that you can put the piece in the correct location.
that's data memory, there must be a separate instruction memory
It's a discrete chip of 32kB.
It's cool that James' last name is Newman, even though it's spelled differently(Neumann) ;) He should change his middle name to 'von' :)
One of the best things I ever saw recently. This channel is awesome.
I'm glad he addressed if it was an implementation of a historic processor or not. I was wondering exactly that.
Twice the size of the UK? Even if every pixel only represents 1 bit, that's 8 x 2^30 pixels.
Square root of that is 92,681.
Assuming the LEDs are about 2cm apart, each side of the screen would only be 1.85km long.
So it seems it would be the size of a village, or am I missing something?
The way he's probably working is that the cabinet holds 256 bytes of memory and it's nearly 2m tall. 1 gig would be 4 million times bigger
+st0rmforce What mrneglect said makes sense to me.
What if you have 1 TB?
"It's an early nineties processor"
It's just a matter of time before someone ports DOOM to it.
@@Empika it's 16bit though, they can always add more ram
This thing is fascinating, I'd love to see it in person. Really great job!
That is an amazing learning tool! Kudos to the people who worked on this project, what better way to visualize how a CPU actually functions? Must of taken a lot of work to engineer, wire and get this beast working!
Nice.
Yeah but can it run Crysis
Asking the real questions.
If you are willing to wait long enouth for each drawn frame.
port it
Maybe if you let it print the screen, from a disk, one block of pixels at a time, onto paper.
1 frame per year
Takes me back to when I did GCSE IT back in the 80s. What an incredible bit of kit. Love it!
this is absolutely FANTASTIC along side CrashCourse Computer Science's recent videos
Who is watching this in 2019 from the TH-cam recommendations? Why youtube?
@@droopy_eyes Same here
Let's be honest, there are worse things to wake n bake to.
"microprocessor"
your students hopefully fully appreciate this effort.. i can't imagine any better to understand how computers work
That is a nice demonstration for students. It's always easier to understand a process when it is visualized.
Fun fact: they had to build additional power plant just to provide enough power to light all of those leds up.
Install Linux on it already.
You mean NetBSD
True, even NetBSD seems to need 4 MB of RAM. Apparently their claims to run on a toaster are wildly overstated ;)
+Penny Lane Well, there is one modified toaster that sends a tweet each time it toasts something...
And does it run NetBSD?
Well, you can't exactly install software on a CPU. You need other components, like a hard disk, RAM, etc.
Amazing is an understatement. Very well done
This is absolutely marvelous. Would be such a wonderful tool for teaching computer science.
100% serviceable. Try refurbishing CPU's.
Now make one entirely out of magnets.
You'd be literally be switching the transistors with relays. Note that there are many ways to implement logic, whether it be trapdoors or water pipes.
You can even do it with dominoes. If you can make logic gates, you can make a computer.
ColCoal do it with pneumatic valve if you dare!
No. DOMINOS.
That's incredible.... respect to the guy who built that.
Fantastic piece of work.
someone build my minecraft projekt in reallife xD
wow did you build a processor? how long did this take
this takes a very long time. but i´m playing only now and then so its not finished...
i got some finished mini-stuff... siccor stone paper, a 4 bit calculator and 4 wins game.
the problem with minecraft is the big delay times. They don´t allow for fast taktrates so i will use a other programm in the future ^^
***** i dont understand you, why is this sad?
Factorio combinators are also limited, they run at 60 times a second (which, while better than Minecraft's 20 ticks per second or 10 redstone ticks per second, is still terrible for a computer.)
Also, the fact they are laid out in 2D makes the resulting circuits more messy.
But I guess they did update the combinators a week ago in 0.15, I haven't played much with them but now they have proper boolean logic and operations like modulo in the arithmetic combinators.
just because he didn't design it and just built it after someone elses design, doesn't mean he can't be proud of it.
I used to learn logical operations and stuff like this through redstone tutorials for minecraft too, and I was super proud to finally understand how (basically) a simple computing unit works.. I was just a teenie, too and my aim was just to understand and not reinvent microprocessing engineering.. So I can fully understand why he claims it "his project" and I see nothing wrong with that, we're not all genius veterans here :)
should upgrade to the new model that came out last november, the MAGAProcessor
Well they are in UK .. so it would be a MUKGA processor
matsv201 Yeah, but they're also in England, so MEGA is just fine.
We have the best processors, don't we folks?
Truly amazing, never seen something so didactic like that before.
This is absolutely incredible!
How . . . I have no words. Thank you.
Best Computerphile video ever!
What an amazing, beautiful machine!
When I read the title I thought it was a super fast processor, but very big.
Did not expect this though, amazing!!!!!!!!!!!
Work of art.
An absolutely amazing machine
every technology & science museum should have one of these!
Fantastic overview ! Good idea using the Tetris game and game console.
So cool. Thanks David Bamber!
wow! I need to look into this processor more. superb research project!
Please do more on this. This is amazing.
Beautiful and amazing!
I live round the corner from this place! The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK. They also have working ancient PCs on display with stuff like BASIC on them. I locked one into an infinite loop calculating pi.