Help me understand what goes on in a CPU.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Thanks, Chemist. So much good stuff I have to work with in there.

So after making your minecraft ADD building you can make a DEC building, SUB building, STA building and warehouse(memory).

Hah. Cool.

I wouldn't have bothered with Minecraft if not for the RedLogic mod. The add/sub design I built is not really a building; it's more like a slab.

Spoiler: Show

It's 2 tall, 24 deep (26 counting input and output rails) and 2*(n+1) wide. Where n is number of bits. This is a ripple-adder, not CLA. Technically, the adder is only 16 deep. The other 8 tiles in the slab perform a 2's compliment with logic that converts negative results into a 5-bit signed format.

That was built before I discovered the RedLogic "Bundled" gates. With the Bundled AND and Bundled XOR gates, you only need 2 of each to make a 16 bit full adder. However, you have to bit shift the carries, which becomes the dominating part of the architecture in size.

I made an INC/DEC "slab" and a bit shifter, already

So all that thought I put into coupling the adder and subtractor was for naught. Cool.

I'm a teensy bit disappointed that it's a decoupling of all the things. It would be cooler if it was one of those cases where all of the things simplified down into a relatively tiny set of gates.


Wooo! I knew you guys would be kicking this process along. Thank you.


EDIT: Oh yeah. In Minecraft, the minimum possible time for a single gate operation is 50 ms. The notion of graphics processing is just not going to happen when 20 Hz is the clock speed of each gate. It's several orders of magnitude away from anything like that.