Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]

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• Hacker News
• @3:10 “you need to consider 99.9% of the power is converted to heat” uhm that would be quite an efficient heater you designed there!
  by thenthenthen
• I’m curious about what you’re thinking of, but for both electric heaters and computers, essentially 100% of the input energy is converted to heat one way or another.

  What you may be thinking of is efficiency when the output is intended to be something other than heat. In those cases, efficiency is lost because a significant proportion of the input energy is converted to heat.

  But if heat output is what you’re interested in, I’m happy to report that 100% is a perfectly achievable, in fact hard to avoid, number!

  by antonvs
• Every computer is just space heater with side effect of computations.

  The same way every diesel engine is just oil stove with side effect of rotary motion. If the engine was in the back of the car you could totally put a pot on it and braise something.

  by ReptileMan
• Isn't that lower than a purely resistive heater?
  by mjg59
• ? that is just any computer
  by nicman23
• Not really? The best heaters are heat pumps which can under typical operation reach 300-500% efficiency (COP). Technically they aren't converting the electricity into heat, but for arguments sake here about heaters we only care about electricity consumed to heat generated.
  by zipy124
• One could argue that it is 100% as every Watt that enters through the socket (not counting reactive energy) is going to become heat at some point in the very near future, including the air moved by fans, the photons emitted by the screen, etc etc.
  by PowerElectronix
• I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at the time).

  And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.

  A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.

  I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.

  [1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...

  by jmyeet
• That we can fit a more computing power in an adapter cable than it took to take us to the moon is what gets me.
  by fragmede
• Im curious what FLOPS and per CPU bandwidth this has. It might be okay at running compute intensive shaders!
  by randyrand
• 0 FLOPS those MCUs only support IMBC instructions. No hardware floating point, at least it has integer multiplication/division. My estimate is maybe 1-8Gflop total using software float. If you avoid float and design around fixed point, might do some interesting stuff.
  by Karliss
• The determination to pull through a project of this scale is mind blowing and the joy is contagious.
  by quietfox
• Yeah I don’t think I could ever commit to a project like this and of this scale.

  Might be different if it was something truly useful or novel vs a nerd snipe.

  Very impressive that he pulled it off in a relatively short amount of time.

  by roger_
• For me it's the skill. So many things you have to be good at to build this. Really impressive and slightly jealous.
  by lnenad
• Great project for kids interested in EECS. I wonder if a miniature version can we done at a fraction of the cost as a cool high school project.
  by sonabinu
• This is great. It somewhat reminded me of Steve Ciarcia's build of a Mandelbrot-generating supercomputer from around 1990. That was also made from microcontrollers (Intel 8052 in that case).
  by rwmj
• Do you have a link? As far as I can tell you're referring to a BYTE magazine article, but I can only find vague references to it, not anything specific enough that would allow me to locate it.
  by palmotea
• So much in there: so much hand-soldering of SMD, the way he made an SMD resistor bridge to bodge his MOSI/MISO mixup, using the Bambu 3D printer as a test harness (with pogo-pin attachment) to test his "blades"…

  (I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)

  by JKCalhoun
• The automated programming fixture/conversion was pretty sweet, im not gonna lie about that.
  by superxpro12
• Very cool project.

  A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.

  by PowerElectronix
• I love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe.

  Computers need more blinking lights.

  by rbanffy
• My fav job was an internship with a EW company that made these massive rackmount radar systems. My boss, the lead engineer, loved blue LED status lights. So the massive boards we made had hundreds on them. There were thousands total in the rack. GPIOs, busses, fpga signal outputs, all got an individual LED and mosfet.

  It was crazy when it was running. You could visually debug a bus, if you wanted to.

  by birdsongs