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homebrew 8008 project

why don't you just build an athlon 64 out of transistors diodes and wires from radio shack :D

just kidding, that's obviously near impossible. just try a pentium 3.
 
that's how they designed chips in the beginning. An 8088, and this is purely a guess, would take up say the entire floor of a garage. It would be cool to try something like that sometime ;)
 
The 8086 has 29,000 transistors. The i386DX has 275,000 transistors. The Pentium MMX has 3.1 million transistors. The Pentium 4 as of year 2000 had 42 million transistors.

Assume you need at least one square centimeter per real transistor, at least if you wire them together manually. The 8086 would take almost 3 m² (31 sq. ft). The Pentium 4 would take 4200 m², or roughly one acre. If you construct the CPU with more space, it will be larger.
 
In 1965, I made a single bit flip-flop on a breadboard. That was enough of TTL the hard way for me.

Of course, if you put in some feedback, make a great square wave generator.
 
carlsson said:
The 8086 has 29,000 transistors. The i386DX has 275,000 transistors. The Pentium MMX has 3.1 million transistors. The Pentium 4 as of year 2000 had 42 million transistors.

Assume you need at least one square centimeter per real transistor, at least if you wire them together manually. The 8086 would take almost 3 m² (31 sq. ft). The Pentium 4 would take 4200 m², or roughly one acre. If you construct the CPU with more space, it will be larger.
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wow.... 31 sq. feet for an 8086 or an 8088.... that would actually be very fun to make haha.

that would be so cool to make a gigantic room-sized 8088 by hand and then wire each of the 40 wires into the appropriate pin positions on an 8088 motherboard.

just think how cool you would be! somebody comes over for a visit.

visitor: "what is this gigantic thing? some sort of high-powered supercomputer??"
you: "no, it's an 8088. you wanna play Janitor Joe on it?"
visitor: ":eh:"


yeah... i think i'll just start making room in the basement right now!
 
Maybe 1x1 cm per transistor is optimistic if you wire it yourself. If you need 1.5x1.5 cm, the total theoretical size increases to 6.5 m², or 70 sq. ft.

The Wikipedia entry on the list of Intel microprocessors didn't mention how many transistors the 8080 consists of, but the 8008 had 3500 and the 8085, assembly language compatible with the 8080, had 6500. So, assuming 1.5 cm² per transistor, a remake of 8008 would only take 0.8 m² or 8.5 sq. ft.

Btw, does an integrated chip only consist of functional equivalents to transistors?
 
No WAY. There are little resistors and other components in there too. When a flip-flop is "flipping", there is a pico second or nano second (real short interval) where both transistors are conducting. Basically a direct short between the +5v supply and ground. That's where "despiking capacitors" come in. They provide a very short term source of extra energy local to the "short". These keep the power supply from being loaded down by all these shorts.

P.S. If there are some electronic engineers out there, correct me if this info is wayyyy out dated. I haven't studied TTL since the mid 70s.
 
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It would not be very much fun to make one of these after the first 800 transistors or so. I completed a project similar to the this. It was very fun until after I soldered the first 1000LEDs. In all, I soldered 19,008 LEDs which is 38,016 solder joints.

BUT, I still want to make a transistor or at least TTL based 8080. :) I will probably make a TTL 8080, and then just make little transistor blocks that replace the TTL components. This way it will be easier to view the schematic, AND the individual blocks can be tested on a TTL logic tester. Otherwise it would be the worst thing in the world to debug!

Here is the display. Its about 80x41. It took me about 100 hours to assemble. Every single LED has been tested.

060129-LED_Display_Front_2718.jpg


060129-LED_Display_Back_2716.jpg
 
I want to program pong for the Altair to go on the screen. My plan is to use some dual port SRAM for video ram. Just memory map the display...

I have designed the driver PCBs, I just haven't found the time to order them. I was talking about the project and Henry from gse-reactive told me I couldn't solder it in a year. So I got it done in 15 days. :) That was last January! Now he says he meant "finish" it... There are about 8,000 solder joints required for the drivers. I found that the most efficient duty cycle over time was 1/11. The display is organized as 1728x11 for refreshing.

Anyway, here are some pictures from the first work party. I was able to get help on about 2000 of the LEDs, but they weren't much help. They soldered 300 LEDs in the time I could do a little over 1500. :)

Why did I do this? Well, back in 1998 I found 50,000 LEDs on ebay for $300. We all know how dangerous ebay is!!! ;)

060108-1-RamWall_Rodger_John_2616.jpg


060108-2-RamWall_Rodger_John_Back_2617.jpg


060108-3-RamWall_John_2612.jpg


The first panel is done! :)

060108-4-RamWall_Mine_is_done_2618.jpg


Some of you will find this funny... I saved ALL the LED legs just to see how much 38,016 led legs weigh... Well?

060129-Weight_of_39584_Legs_2696.jpg


Awww, man...dat kicks azz! Keep on doin it...

--T
 
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I did NOT just see a projector hooked up via composite!!!!! Come on, couldn't you at least use S-Video!?

Anyways, I hope to see a video of this online! :p You should take this to VCF 10.0!
 
atari2600a said:
I did NOT just see a projector hooked up via composite!!!!! Come on, couldn't you at least use S-Video!?

Anyways, I hope to see a video of this online! :p You should take this to VCF 10.0!
Click to expand...

Its a .1" diameter cable used to connect a Chrysler 10 CD changer to the radio. About 25 feet long. :)

It kind of "softens" the video for large format viewing. ;) Everything is recorded on a first generation TIVO so I loose some anyway...

I have a 50 foot VGA cable for it, but my ATI card is acting up and won't display TV any more.

I found some .1" spaced 5x7 blocks on ebay for $.60 a piece, and some .2" spaced 8x8 blocks on ebay for $.63 a piece. In order to have a 320x240 pixel display (76,800 LEDs) I would need a little over 2194 5x7 blocks ($1320) or 1200 8x8 blocks ($756). Obviously the 8x8 is cheaper, but the 5x7 would have half the dot pitch. I've seen the original space invaders ported to the TRS-80. Aparently it was written for the 8080. An Altair running arcade space invaders on blinking leds... Its hard to want to finish this one! :)

I'm waiting to get a quote on RGB 8x8 blocks. Full color anyone? If you give a mouse a cookie...

I would never buy a flat panel LCD, yet somehow I'm able to justify this... :D
 
Yeah, but on composite, the chroma & luma signals overlap, causing defects! (ever notice that checkerboard effect on flat colors & that rainbow effect on detailed patterns?) You don't get this w/ S-Video, as the signals are sent over their own leads, leading to virtually perfect 480i! (...& then using VGA would result in crisp RGB 480p, but as the (I'm guessing MPEG2) compression would probably crap up the image, it wouldn't be that big of a deal...):p (Sorry, I get obsessive compulsive over things like this...)

If I recall correctly from an episode of How It's Made (Canadia's greatest show about manufacturing! :p), RGB LED jumbo screens are made up of smaller compositions (probably in the 30X30-ish range?), each with their own microcontroller?
 
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