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Comment by ooterness | Hacker News Reader

I love this art/engineering project. The whole concept of extra-large unintegrated circuits is just so amusing.

The team behind this project sells kits for two classic ICs, the 741 op-amp [1] and the 555 timer [2]. Sadly, they've said the Monster6502 is too big and complex to make a practical kit.

[1] https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/tinykitlist/762 [2] https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/tinykitlist/652

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There's also the fact that they were recently acquired [1], unfortunately (IMO).

I've said it before: I would totally buy one of those just to hang on my wall. It's a truly awesome project, and I love blinkenlights!

[1] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2024/bantam-tools/

The Apple A8X, found in the iPad Air 2, contains about 3 billion transistors. (This is comparable to the number of transistors in modern desktop computer CPUs as well.) At the scale of the MOnSter 6502, that would take about 885,000 square feet (over 20 acres or 8 hectares) — an area about 940 ft (286 m) square.

I wonder how slow it would have to run and how many kilowatts it would use.

It takes about a full microsecond for a signal to go from one edge of the "wafer" to the other, so that constrains your cycle time considerably.

The Apple A8X is 10 years old.

The current iPhone processor (Apple A17) contains 19 billion transistors. So now we have 126 acres in a pocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17

Unintegrated or, perhaps… Dis-integrated?

The correct term is discrete circuit.

We used to have circuits, and when integrated on one piece of silicone, we called them "integrated circuits", while the old ones became "discrete circuits".

I have been kicking around the idea of doing this to something like a NES. Then selling them preassembled. But then I remember I can solder at all and it is decently expensive to do.

You don't have to solder yourself, some PCB providers can do it for you (indeed they buy components).

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