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The thing that got me into CS was building a CPU in Minecraft redstone, which is surprisingly good at being a logic simulator. You only got (back in my day) NOT (the torch) and OR gates (wiring next to each other), and everything was built out of them. Signal repeaters had delay, the gates had delay, so you naturally had to build a clock to synchronise it all. The main benefit that I enjoyed was that you could see the signals physically propagating from one end of your cpu to the other in real time (clock cycles were in the range of 1-4 seconds), flowing from the instructing fetching, decoding, dispatch, logic, writing to back memory, etc. Seeing signals slowly crawl from one end to the other naturally introduced you to pipelining (it even happens naturally if you increase the clock without thinking about what will actually happen: the next instruction starts decoding before the previous one is done, more parts of your cpu start lighting up at once, and oops now you have a pipelined cpu). Even the scales match; many learners are surprised that the actual ALU is the tiny thing in the corner that you can barely see, and all the giant stacks of rows you actually saw is memory and cache. Even in minecraft, most of your CPU is not logic :) Also really taught me how asics are much faster: you could build a tiny compact multiplier that multiplied hundreds of times faster than your giant cpu running a multiplication algorithm. Looks like they community I learnt from is still around actually https://openredstone.org/, even if all the old forum posts seems to be gone now. There were some geniuses on that place building computers with multi-tier caches, full pipelining, out-of-order (albeit primitive) execution, SIMD-capable CPUs, all in redstone. |
https://mordritch.com/mc_rss/
Make sure to press the "Play" button at the top for the simulator to actually run.