Making a CPU from Boolean Gates from Scratch

Have you looked at the current announcement of Apple’s transition from intel processors to ARM processors? Maybe you began reading up on things like instruction sets, RISC and CISC processors. You will quickly hit upon a lot of complicated terminology.

So how about going all the way back to basics, and look at what a CPU looks like if you strip it down to its bare bones. What are the most essential parts, and what is just cool stuff added to make it run faster?

Turns out that there is a treasure trove of web pages explaining simple CPU designs and really teaching you everything from scratch. I don’t really have to recreate what they have written, but instead give an overview of all the cool stuff out there.

Simple CPU Design

simplecpudesign.com is an amazing website. Could maybe do more with the layout, but in terms of content, this contains so many cool things it can make a geek go crazy.

Mike, author of this site goes through a whole bunch of ways of making a CPU designed like this:

Mike at simplecpudesign.com made this simple 8-bit CPU. Show how data from memory is fed into arithmetic logic unit (ALU), instruction register, accumulator etc.

You can make this on breadboard yourself if you want. Let me give some comments to the diagram of how to read it.

What are the Colored Lines?