Going slightly off topic, I was interested to learn from this blog about Tiny Tapeout, the service they've used to order their custom chip design. The concept for anyone as unfamiliar with it as me is that lots of people pay a few hundred dollars each to get a small part of a chip being made, and once it's made they receive the chip ready to use with their section everyone else's, too, with a way to choose which bit gets run.
I know basically nothing about chip design, and I'm wondering if anyone could tell me: is this only useful for education purposes, for example learning how to make a chip that creates a donut on a screen, or are there people using Tiny Tapeout for useful projects, too?
For each of their chip runs, they publish a list of the different people's projects that got included - https://tinytapeout.com/runs/ - but it's not easy to spot which ones might be more than somebody just learning how to play with chip design.
Essentially, if someone were to pick this up as a hobby, what is the most interesting thing they could make using this?
I got a tile on TinyTapeout9 (I think) and participated in a workshop for it at the Hackaday Supercon last November.
I had a lot of fun. I had a bit of knowledge from my university digital logic class, but really enjoyed learning how the layers are put down and how they make transistors. If you have an opportunity to do it, I strongly recommend it.
There are some very cool things you can do, but you’re limited by the tile size, the inputs provided and it’s worth noting that you get one chip on a module. It’s probably the 2nd step in getting started making a custom ASIC if you wanted to get into that. (The first being learning how to design with logic gates)
bitlui made a VGA Rickroll with it a while ago. [1]
My tile spells out “Aaron” (my first name) on the output to the seven segment display.
I think there is enough room to make a simple microprocessor. Fun if you’ve not ever done something like it.
So, to answer your question - yes it could be useful if you had a very specific thing you wanted to do that made sense in silicon. You could buy extra tiles and get space. That said, it’s mostly educational. But worth it if you have an interest.
So great to see this excellent explanation. Have been a fan of donut.c since it first came out. Also I'm way better at golfing js than c so it kinda feels like you wrote this just for me :)
The thing about donut.c is that its source code is shaped like a donut, that’s a huge part of its charm.
While altering it to use shifts and adds is a fun exercise, since its source code is no longer shaped like the donut it renders, I would argue that a large part of its charm has disappeared and it’s no longer a donut.c
It’s trivial to reformat the source code into a donut shape.
Sometimes it's those trivial changes which add a lot of the overall charm.
Non-trivial, IMHO - automating it sounds non trivial, and doing by hand is quite non-trivial, right? We gotta go make hand edits line by line?
Considering the language, C and the size of the file, I would not argue it is not trivial. The key feature of donut.c is how small the file actually is.
For something larger or in other languages, or having text strings, certainly not trivial.
I've been deeply curious about the sort of speedup you get from doing what was in software, on hardware:
I know the chips hasn't been delivered yet, but, the statements at the beginning re: we can expect a new frame every N nanoseconds, give me hope there's a rough heuristic for what speedup we'd expect in this particular case.
Do we have a rough* understanding of what the speedup will be?
* Within 2 OOMs
New pixel. Not new frame.
When are you going to post part 3 of your Hacker Challenge?
It's been fifteen years and we're still waiting. Thanks.
lmao! that was so cringe I unlisted it from the main index. who is "we"?
part 3 is to find the secp256k1 private key for satoshi's bitcoins