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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

For those who read the comments first: The article is about semiconductor fabrication, not computer architecture.

Yeah, I was expecting the geek equivalent of "How to Draw an Owl in Two Simple Steps" meme. Step 1: Start with some NAND gates. Step 2: Now make the rest of the fucking CPU.

Random reference: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/28/29/d42829227cd7526d75af...

I immediately thought of this as well. Step 12 cracked me up!

12) Take a chromium-etched photo-lithographic quartz mask with your desired circuit pattern and shine a laser beam through it to project the circuit pattern onto the wafer.

"Your desired circuit pattern" might as well be "draw the rest of the fucking owl."

This course is pretty much what you described, but incredibly good pedagogy. https://www.nand2tetris.org/

There’s a lovely game called Turing Complete on Steam that will take you from a nand gate through making a simple game in your own assembly that run on the processor you built. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

Also MHRD https://steamcommunity.com/app/576030/

And https://nandgame.com/

It's actually funny that that meme is now not viable anymore, due to the proliferation of text-to-image generators.

That's the hardest part of "making a CPU" anyway, if you define CPU specifically as a microprocessor, because people have built working hobby CPUs with all kinds of more easily approachable tech, like relays, vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, and logic gate ICs. Basically anything that can act as one of the universal logic gates (NAND, XOR) will work as a CPU building block.

_Minecraft and Dwarf fortress have entered the chat_

Even crabs: https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/04/12/186779/computer-...

I followed the instructions carefully and ended up with a bunch of RAM because I used the wrong "chromium-etched photo-lithographic quartz mask" or whatever. The guy on ebay said it was an i7. Took ages.

For those who want to know how to build a CPU on a breadboard, I recommend the book “But How Do It Know?” and the Scott CPU architecture.

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