
How does a computer chip work? - pinkyand
http://www.quora.com/Computer-Science/How-does-a-computer-chip-work/answer/Subhasis-Das?share=1
======
ernestipark
The class 6.004 at MIT basically steps through these abstractions one week/lab
at a time. This was my favorite class in school. Each lab is a higher level of
abstraction and eventually you've built a basic processor. It gives you a very
clear picture of how "1s and 0s" can turn out to become what you see on your
computer screen.

OCW Link: [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-004-computation-structures-spring-2009/index.htm)

~~~
dmishe
Too bad there are no videos

~~~
usbreply
[http://video.mit.edu/search/?q=6.004+Computation+Structures](http://video.mit.edu/search/?q=6.004+Computation+Structures)

~~~
dmishe
Thanks

------
th3iedkid
why would someone have so much of patience/energy/motivation to write it all
over an answer to a question in Quora?

He/She has certainly done a wonderful job but just curios at alternatives and
reasons for choices they made..

Why not just refer to an article in the series of ... 'What every programmer
should know about ...'

~~~
sytelus
It's called gamification. You start counting points/upvotes etc and suddenly
everyone wants to collect more of that. Quora has two more twists: It allows
you to post to social networks so your friends know that you are helping
people with your knowledge (oh - I'm sorry - it just does that by default).
Quora also has ties to online versions of some known publications where they
post popular answers. So suddenly you are "published" bonafide writer in likes
of Business Insider, Info World etc. I know of people who perhaps spends ~2
hours a day writing beautiful answers to stupid questions like "why this actor
is so popular" complete with screenshots, trailer videos, dialog transcripts
and so on.

The same gamification strategy works on sites like StackOverflow, Reddit and
HN. The most successful ones have some twists like Quora, like StackOverflow
throws in bonus of putting your points in your resume. I once saw the top
points earners on StackOverflow was Jon Skit who had earned 700k+ points. I
looked at count of his answers, length of average answer and estimated that he
must have spent 4hr per day each working day for past 4+ year to get that many
points. This was on minimum side. If you convert this to hourly rate, it's
same as he donated about half a million to StackOverflow.

Now if you can upvote this answer, that would be great ;).

~~~
th3iedkid
>It's called gamification.

It doesn't look zero-sum, looks more of a win-win game than a win-lose game,
until we don't count the number of hours lost trying to assemble a long answer
etc...But time/money/energy seems priceless when you seem to love/like what
you do!So its poised to be a win-win for the source gets reputation/credits
and publisher gets visits too!

So from another perspective , it seems ones likes and dislikes can be used in
more ways than one!But guess transition from use to abuse occurs when
priorities change!

> I once saw the top points earners on StackOverflow was Jon Skit who had
> earned 700k+ points. I looked at count of his answers, length of average
> answer and estimated that he must have spent 4hr per day each working day
> for past 4+ year to get that many points.

That's interesting.Doesn't this defeat the very purpose of having reputation
points mentioned in CV?

> This was on minimum side. If you convert this to hourly rate, it's same as
> he donated about half a million to StackOverflow.

So that's how this so-called zero-sum-game looks but its more driven by
priorities than perspective.We don't know how many people were saved from
excess time and energy spent on understanding the same because of one persons
generosity.

>Now if you can upvote this answer, that would be great ;)

wish i could do it twice :)

------
dfox
It amazes me that in almost every single article of this kind, there is this
huge leap from binary adder to "computer as a bunch of labeled boxes", where
these boxes mostly describe the data-path and all the control and sequencing
is omitted. I think that most people after reading this kind of description
will still think that it is some kind of impenetrable black magic (I certainly
did for a long time). And it is not and somehow showing how one could build
state-machine sequencer out of register and some logic is not that hard nor
complex.

~~~
userbinator
This is one of those books that does that, it introduces a basic adding
machine and expands upon it:
[http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/](http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/)

------
derefr
The subheading of the question was never addressed—"how do we get all of that
information compacted onto that ever shrinking chip?"

That's always been the biggest mystery to me: what are chip manufacturers
doing differently with each of these "process nodes" that makes them able to
do photolithography at slightly smaller scales, but with the scale only
shrinking a little bit per five-year-interval?

Naively, I'd expect a process like photolithography to be mostly scale-
invariant (you can lens a mask down to whatever size you like) down to a size
where it hits a wall due to quantum effects. So when photolithography was
invented, why didn't chips suddenly jump from 100um to 100nm scale?

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
> why didn't chips suddenly jump from 100um to 100nm scale?

Another point is that Moore's Law is at least partially self fulfilling. If
you are a Chip Fabrication company you need to spend money to make new
technologies, the smaller you want things to be the more money you have to
spend. You could spend a comparatively huge amount of money and leap ahead of
all of the competition, but then you'd have to charge more than the
competition for your services. All of your customers are expecting things to
progress according to Moore's law, so they won't be prepared to spend the
extra money. I suppose ideally you want to be just ahead of the competition,
not way ahead. I hope that makes sense, I found that hard to articulate.

------
pacofvf
ohh I remember when I built my first Von Neuman machine with eeproms, gals,
flipflops and multiplexers, it was a 16 buttons "simon says" game, I used 6
protoboards and kilometers of copper wire.

