Computers need more blinking lights.
It was crazy when it was running. You could visually debug a bus, if you wanted to.
(I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)
A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
FOUND IT! https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-...
Steve Ciarcia, CIARCIA’S CIRCUIT CELLAR
BYTE Octover 1988, A Supercomputer Part 1. Steve begins a supercomputer project by looking at multiprocessing basics.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 283 in the magazine, page 315 in the PDF)
BYTE November 1988, A Supercomputer Part 2. Steve continues the supercomputer project with a look at the Mandelbrot set.
https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1988-11_OCR/page/n465/mo... (page 399 in the magazine, page 466 in the PDF)
BYTE December 1988, A Supercomputer Part 3. This final part looks at hardware nuts and bolts and also at the driver program.
https://archive.org/details/1982-10-byte-magazine-october-1-... (page 327 in the magazine and PDF)
Might be different if it was something truly useful or novel vs a nerd snipe.
Very impressive that he pulled it off in a relatively short amount of time.
And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.
A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.
I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.
[1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...
And yeah, that's wild.
?
In fact they are converting 100% of it, they are just also collecting and moving additional heat in the process.
The 0.1% mentioned might be the light that the project produces.
The same way every diesel engine is just oil stove with side effect of rotary motion. If the engine was in the back of the car you could totally put a pot on it and braise something.
What you may be thinking of is efficiency when the output is intended to be something other than heat. In those cases, efficiency is lost because a significant proportion of the input energy is converted to heat.
But if heat output is what you’re interested in, I’m happy to report that 100% is a perfectly achievable, in fact hard to avoid, number!