Man builds wall-filling processor

A man from Cambridge has completed the first three modules of a processor that grows so large that it takes up an entire wall. The man wants to provide insight into the operation of a processor by making it extremely large.

The man, James Newman, started building the processor last year, which, when finished, should take up an area of ​​14 by 2 meters. The ‘megaprocessor’ consists of several modules, each occupying a large frame and forming part of the processor.

In February he managed to complete the State & Status module including the status register, followed by the aluminum one in May. On Sunday he managed to get the general purpose registers ready. Now he still has to work on the modules with special purpose registers, the decoding section, the input-output, ram and rom, all on a large scale. Newman actually hoped to be able to complete his project by the end of 2014, but the new deadline has been set at ‘Summer 2015’.

The technician’s motivation is that he wants to show how computers work exactly. “The problem is, we can’t shrink to walk around in it, but we can conversely make that thing big enough,” he writes. In addition, he wants to use LEDs to make visible how the data moves in the megaprocessor.

The processor will consist of approximately 14,000 transistors, less than Intel’s 8086, which in 1976 managed to cram 29,000 transistors into an area of ​​33mm². The 16-bit megaprocessor, with an 8-bit wide external bus, also gets a ram and prom amount of 256 bytes. A 500W power supply is required for the drive, but especially the 3500 LEDs would require a lot of energy.