What's the best free alternative to Eagle?
There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's a highly capable EDA suite.
I wish more people would use it so more footprints would be available, although making them from a datasheet is trivial. And fun...
I dont wish bad luck on the good folk who make eagle but long live free software.
Biggest problem with KiCad's UI is that while it's UI is actually highly consistent when it comes to drawing itself, it's GUI is a mess (things that are only on toolbar or only in main menu, no correlation between icons in menu and on toolbars, crucial functions buried in random non-related dialog boxes, behavior and feature set changing depending on graphics backend etc.).
But in comparison with various other EDA packages (including Eagle) I find the overall experience mostly consistent and logical. In comparison with one very expensive EDA package at least snap to grid works in a way that is actually usable and all KiCad windows use same GUI toolkit.
And also, as long as you use only two layers, which given how cheap are 4-layer boards from china is pretty significant limitation, especially for project of this kind.
This: http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/break-points/44311... shows a TTL era computer board, which seems to cram in about 300 packages in 15x15 inches.
Assuming each package is at most 500 gate (medium-scale integration) with 5 transistors/gate, that's 2,500 transistors per package.
So in 225 square inches we'd get 300*2500 = 750,000 transistors.
The Core i7 "only" has 731 million, which converts to 975 of those giant boards. But each such board is just 0.15 square meters, and in 100x50 meters we can fit more than 33,000 of them, for billions of transistors.
Of course, the max clock would not be very impressive at this scale. :)