Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates (opens in new tab)

Good question! CORDIC and HAKMEM Item 149 are both hardware-friendly, but have different trade-offs:

CORDIC: - Iterative algorithm (needs multiple clock cycles) - Accuracy improves with more iterations - Generates both magnitude and phase - Typical hardware implementation: 12-16 iterations for decent precision

HAKMEM (Item 149): - Single-cycle computation (just two adds per step) - Uses the recurrence: x' = x - εy, y' = y + εx - Accuracy depends on word width and epsilon choice - Numerically stable in exact arithmetic if ε² < 2

CORDIC is more accurate, but takes as many iterations as you have bits of precision in your angle. Another demo called Warp in this contest used pipelined CORDIC to do atan2 on every pixel to create a tunnel, which is super impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mu3getxhU&t=780s

Tiny Tapeout's schtick is that for $150 you can get your chip design made at all. It's not a mass production run.

Remind me to participate in the next one!

What are the best modern tools to get started with in simulation for those who have never dabbled before?

Are there any open or at least standard FPGAs that the open source community flock to? Last time I looked into FPGAs, it was mostly closed architecture and proprietary tools

Do you know if there are any tutorials that use bounded model checking tools from the very get go? For verilog or VHDL.

   Having everybody connected leads to homogenization of culture in some ways

The internet may hypothetically homogenize culture relative to a society that does not have any kind of mass communication at all, but relative to the world it was actually introduced into, the internet has completely balkanised the culture. Prior to the internet, we had television, cinema, literature, radio, and newspapers, which were all centralised and controlled enough that they created a shared monoculture in nations. A signifant portion of a country's population would watch, read, and listen to the same media. The internet bucked that trend, allowing all kinds of new subcultures to pop up and to more easily cross national boundaries.

that doesnt seem like a good tradeoff...

Switching speed: should be good enough for audio in the kHz range, even for off-chip control.

Analog i/o pins: definitely limited, even if you purchase the highest option available (6).

It was used occasionally before chatGPT but it has exploded since then.

> There are many bad things about LLMs, but a benign shift in popular language usage isn't one of them.

Organic shifts in language are fine. What is not fine is Big Money (which most forms of AI are) manipulating society at large - and that's not just the AI companies' doing. Think of Tiktok leading people to say "unalive" instead of the various clear words before (e.g. kill, murder, executed, run over by car, mauled to death by animal).

I disagree. It's a sign of what is essentially cultural contamination by an LLM. There is something vaguely gross about it, like when people start repeating advertising slogans. It's a sign that someone spent enough money that they directly rewired our brains.

Ah that's what I get for self hosting. What browser?

https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms

I don't know. Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no? So a line exists somewhere and I think it's way before no RAM.

>Needlessly pedantic!

if you have pedantry, it's also not "no memory"