If Processors were made of Vacuum tubes

What if Microprocessors were made of Vacuum tubes instead of Transistors.
In this video, sizes of various microprocessors from 1971-2019 are imagined to be made of vacuum tubes and their sizes are compared.
The processors compared are:
1. intel 4004
2. Motorola 6809
3. intel 80386 (i386)
4. intel pentium (P5)
5. AMD k8
6. intel core i7 (first gen)
7. intel core i9 7980xe
8. AMD epyc rome
Transistors count source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transis...
* Sizes and measurements throughout the video are approximate values. It is imagined that the same number of vacuum tubes as transistors are placed adjacently to make processors, which is unrealistic. It was just a fun experiment! I haven't thought about the feasibility of doing it in real life. It's not meant to be accurate in any way. Don't take it too seriously!!

[@archiebaldthefat755]

I would love to see a computer run with these tubes, it would be awesome.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

This doesn't explain why you could not have small tubes. So a tube has a cathode. I know many people just take it as a given, but anytime I think of tubes I come back to the cathode. It needs to be hot and coated with a special material. Nothing else in the tube is allowed to get hot or get dirty by that coating in order not to become a cathode itself. So you need to keep a distance ( heat radiation ) . Also the negative cathode attracts positive ions which accelerate onto it and sputter the coating away. So we need very good vacuum to keep this at a minimum. So for a realistic comparison I still feel that we need a central cathode, and use electron optics to extract the electrons and not the coating atoms / ions. Then we use electron lenses or linear paul trap to distribute the free electrons. It is a bit unfortunately that we now cannot use cathode levels for our logic gates, but I feel that we have enough leverage due to multiple grids, and deflection plates. I say that we probably need a stack of circuits each with one cathode and with a mean electric field over the stack to push the electron and thus the digital information forward. A transformer brings the 1s and 0s then back to the original potential. I would even like a spectro meter to give each voltage level a small energy band of electrons, but cathodes only spread below 1 V and to make tubes fast we need 20 V on the anode. It may be possible to stagger each 20 V circuit and give it a different slice of the 1 V spectrum. Lower energy variance means more sensitive tube and thus faster switching.

[@ReviveHF]

Soviet era computers are pretty much like these(For example MiG-25P's avionics) until they can get their hands on microprocessors in the late 1970s.

[@archiebaldthefat755]

i wonder if the speed could be fast enough

[@ilyvm2892]

Cool

[@psyphy]

Thanks man. ❤

[@kaspervendler1726]

Does my vaccumtubed EPYC processor get delivered with a free nucklear powerplant to power it?

[@psyphy]

Probably!😜

[@colemin2]

But can anything replace the transistor? Doubt it.

[@scalsc]

Can anything replace the vacuum tube? Doubt it.

[@colemin2]

@@scalsc I probably would've thought that had I lived in the time of vacuum tubes.

[@ArmiaKhairy]

Seeing that the modern transistor in these chips can be few hundred atoms size, ~probably~