Home Made GPU Escalated Quickly: A Half-Year Journey of Hardware Development
Home made GPU escalated quickly [video]
I spent half a year wrestling with this nemesis project to build a custom GPU from scratch. This video documents the intense journey of developing the hardware, finally reaching a point where I am confident it can scale. Join me as I explore the capabilities of this homemade creation in the next part.
This project is my nemesis. It already took half a year of my life to get to a point where I can confidently say it will scale from here.
- PowerElectronix
Very cool project.
A great advice one gets at around minute 9 is to place footprints for anything you consider remotely possible or that you'd like to test. You can always leave them unpopulated and the tradeoff between area lost and time lost is usually worth the area, especially in the first iterations of a pcb.
- rbanffy
I love the absolute insanity of this design. And the Thinking Machines vibe.
Computers need more blinking lights.
- JKCalhoun
So much in there: so much hand-soldering of SMD, the way he made an SMD resistor bridge to bodge his MOSI/MISO mixup, using the Bambu 3D printer as a test harness (with pogo-pin attachment) to test his "blades"…
(I thought he was going to end up with R2-D2; the way the design was going…)
- rwmj
This is great. It somewhat reminded me of Steve Ciarcia's build of a Mandelbrot-generating supercomputer from around 1990. That was also made from microcontrollers (Intel 8052 in that case).
- jmyeet
I don't even know how you learn to do something like this. I was curious about the CPU. I found the specs for the WCH570 [1]. Intel released the 486dx4/100 in1994 (for $650). It's not really the same thing but a 100MHz (kind of) 32 bit CPU (that does have an FPU) is about as close as you can find to this (which has no FPU but it does have USB2.0 and 2.4GHz wireless, which is well beyond what Intel CPUs could do at the time).
And this thing is 10-13 cents ~30 years later.
A better comparison would be the ARM CPUs you can get fairly cheaply today (eg the Broadcom BCM2712 in the RPi5) but they're way more capable than the CPUs of 30 years ago. The BCM2712 for example is a 64 bit quad core 2.4GHz CPU.
I guess I'm just amazed at how far hardware has come because I'm old enough to remember just how amazing the 486 was at the time.
[1]: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/02/10-cents-wch-ch570-c...