Fresh hacks every day
This is a microscopic photograph of an 8085 processor die. [Ken Shirriff] uses the image in his explanation of how the ALU works. It is only capable of five basic operations: ADD, OR, XOR, AND, and SHIFT-RIGHT. [Ken] mentions that the lack of SHIFT-LEFT is made up for by adding the number to itself which has the effect of … Read the rest
Personally we find this Ball-Grid Array chip-swap rather horrifying. But if you want to beef up the processor on your 701 Eee PC this is what you’ll need to go through. Not only did [Red Fathom] upgrade to a 1.6 GHz chip, but he managed to get the computer to boot up with the new hardware in place.
BGAs … Read the rest
You’re going to want to do some stretching before undertaking a soldering project like this one. We’re betting that the physical toll of assembling this 4-bit discrete processor project is starting to drive [SV3ORA] just a bit crazy. This small piece of electronic real estate is playing host to 62 transistors so far, and he’s not done yet.
It’s one … Read the rest
Put on that abstract thinking cap, get out the pen and paper, and spend some time figuring out how this one-bit processor works. [Strawdog] came up with the concept one day during his commute to work (don’t worry, he takes the train… much safer than [Dave Jones'] frightening drive-time podcasts). He sketched it out on paper to make sure … Read the rest
If you ever wondered how the Arduino came into being, check out [IEEE Spectrum's] article entitled “The Making of Arduino.” From it’s humble origins in Northern Italy, the Arduino, as shown by a large number of projects featured at [HAD], has become the go-to processor for DIY processing power. It’s cost (around $30) and ease-of-use are some of … Read the rest
Looks like some hardware enthusiasts have worked out a method to enable debug mode within AMD processors. The original site isn’t loading for us, but the text has been mirrored in this comment. Getting the chip into debug mode requires access passwords on four control registers. We’ve read through the writeup and it means very little to us but … Read the rest
Take a few minutes out of your day, grab your scissors, and learn how a simple processor works. [Saito Yutaka] put together an exercise to teach processor operations with paper. After downloading the PDF you can cut out the Address and Data pointer as well as two-bit data tokens for each. The processor has three instruction sets; Increment register … Read the rest
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