CPU, memory, OS and Tetris, all running on the gates. Zoom in and watch the signals flow.

172 points•rossant•3 days ago•99 comments•

99 comments

carodgers1 day ago
If you have not tried panning the camera and zooming in to one of the chips, you are missing out.

Bravo to the author. This is inspiring work.

carodgersabout 7 hours ago
EDIT: Can no longer edit my own comment. Lots of folks, on closer inspection, are finding errors in the board behavior. Shame on me for not validating the output before praising the author.
andaiabout 18 hours ago
The Google Earth of computers. I'm amazed my computer can even run this. (Ten year old ThinkPad with integrated GPU.) In the browser no less!

Bravo indeed!

(Also, based on the CSS, the author appears to be GPT.)

TedDoesntTalk1 day ago
Thank you. I did not know we could do that. Now I understand how Kevin Flynn (TRON) felt.
monocasa1 day ago
I was about to say that's a whole lot of gates for not a lot of computer, but then saw that rom and ram are also an array of nand gates.
bmitc1 day ago
It's likely based on or inspired by Nand2Tetris.
aabajian1 day ago
I think the takeaway is that we have to think bigger, much bigger, now that AI coding is essentially "solved". Anyone can "write" an ARM simulator now, so that can't be the pinnacle of engineering. I'm thinking about buildings that couldn't be built (reasonably) by one person.

I'll give an example of what I'm working on. There's a model for segmenting organs from CT scans. There's another model for calculating radial diameters of blood vessels from CT scans. You can combine the two and approximate how much blood flow each organ gets based on its segmented volume and the sum total radial diameter of vessels feeding it. You can then render all of that in an app that shows perfusion to that organ.

The idea is to combine these models to extract every ounce of usable information from a CT scan that might be useful for procedural planning (I'm an interventional radiologist). While each algorithm would take weeks/months to implement, Opus 5.5 can do them in minutes to hours and then stitch them together. The results thus far have been better than anything I've seen.

bmitc1 day ago
How do you know what Opus 5.5 is doing? How do you know it's correct?

Just earlier today, I had Opus 5.5 try and read an X-ray. It struggled to give any real information.

Stitching algorithms together is also not hard.

aabajian1 day ago
It's a tool to help with catheter choice, C-arm angle, and contrast injection rate. These are things I think about in every case anyhow, might as well add some data to drive my decisions. If the results don't match reality, I can always fall-back on my personal defaults.
ggm1 day ago
He has an exterior model in ground truth: you take a pig, you anaesthetise it and isolate an organ, and you measure flow rate in a live subject.

When the model is shown to be within tolerance of what you can measure in the accepted standard methods right now, you can move over with confidence.

hex4def61 day ago
As a EE by trade, AI coding has been life changing. I can read code, but since it's not my day job, trying to get a meaningful understanding of multiple codebases is frankly weeks of time.

I no longer have to beg and plead the SW team to implement driver fixes or feature ads; I can freakin' do it myself.

Likewise, being able to explore e.g, a new vision algo piped directly into the software stack allows for setting up a demo in an afternoon.

I try to stay very cautious, and thoughtful prompting / checkpointing / getting it to first search for similar PRs as a guide have helped make sure it stays 'boring' and doesn't break architecture.

So far, I haven't been bitten... :)

musicaleabout 22 hours ago
> As a EE by trade, AI coding has been life changing

Waiting for

   As a SWE by trade, AI hardware design has been life-changing...

   As a former engineer (now Uber driver) by trade, AI hardware and software design have been life-changing...
> So far, I haven't been bitten... :)
fancyfredbotabout 14 hours ago
It looks gorgeous, and you can zoom in to an individual gate level and see lines switch from high to low

The problem is the rendering is wrong. Gates which are connected to two distinct inputs according to the text description which pops up when you click on it are rendered as having both inputs connected to the same wire. It's a bit of a shame.

carodgersabout 9 hours ago
Yeah, seems the longer I look the more problems I find. Circuits on the PCB terminate at nonsensical points or overlap where they shouldn't. I'm disappointed. I'm also disappointed in myself because I knew this was LLM generated and did not pause to validate before I gave praise to the author.
jamesgill1 day ago
You could also do this out of NOR gates. The Apollo Guidance Computer was famously built almost entirely from NOR gates.

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