NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates

(somethingbig.ai)

23 points | by rossant 1 day ago

4 comments

  • Nurysso 2 minutes ago
    OHH my god this is soo awesome, I wonder how people build such things.
    • Retr0id 1 minute ago
      They opened their AI agent and typed "make me a 16-bit computer built from NAND gates" and hit enter.
  • monocasa 53 minutes ago
    I was about to say that's a whole lot of gates for not a lot of computer, but then saw that rom and ram are also an array of nand gates.
  • wang_li 55 minutes ago
    A nand gate takes 2 transistors. So 554,000 transistors if this were manufactured in a physical device.

    By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.

    • matja 50 minutes ago
      Most of the gate budget here is on SRAM used for system memory and video memory, so not exactly comparable to a i386 which had neither on-die.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 15 minutes ago
      ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors.
    • ohazi 46 minutes ago
      4 transistors for a two-input NAND gate in CMOS.
      • jhallenworld 11 minutes ago
        1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.
  • guiambros 1 day ago
    This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.

    Today? Meh.

    • LarsDu88 51 minutes ago
      I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.
    • Retr0id 2 minutes ago
      Yup. I got excited for a bit, until I loaded the page and saw it was slop. I still would be impressed if someone actually took the time to learn about and implement it for themselves.