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Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

There is certainly nothing easy about it. I have quite some experience with low-level and embedded devices, but hardware has progressed to the point where a Cortex M3 is quickly becoming the jellybean baseline throwaway uC, and have you seen the datasheet of one of these things?

The amount of stuff they do is incredible, and everything is interconnected in unexpected and intricate ways.

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I haven't messed around with x86 enough to know whether it is actually somehow easier than the ARM stuff, but I certainly agree with you that CPUs are damn complicated.

I loaded up the datasheet for the M3's when typing up this reply. 384 pages. Contrast that with the TI 74181 ALU datasheet from the days of old: 18 pages, most of which are just detailed diagrams of the distances between the pinouts. The logic diagrams fit on a single page. You can build a simple CPU using one of these machines in a few hours in your basement.

Hardware is only going to get more complicated. At what point does it become so complicated that no one person can reasonably understand how a computer works "under the hood", even from an abstract level?

Maybe then there could be an easy to use (for a human) virtual machine at some level in between...

Is that not the role of the operating system?

An ALU is only a part of a CPU while a M3 is a full blown CPU so you can't compare the two.

still you have the exact specification maybe with bugs.

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