Yet another Hacker News

NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates

30 points rossant 1 day ago 18 comments

guiambros 1 day ago | parent

This is pretty sad. Seeing this a couple of years ago would be mind blowing. An impressive technical feat by someone with grit and resilience to painstakingly build this from scratch.

Today? Meh.

LarsDu88 1 hour ago | parent

I had the exact same thought. I vibecoded a MOS6502 emulator a few months back in Rust. My Rust skill is weak, and I learned absolutely nothing about the 6502 or CPU design. Had I done it manually, there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help making the whole exercise less appealing overall.

socializer 14 minutes ago | parent

> there's also no way to prove I created it without LLM help

You don't need to prove it, that was never a requirement. You can simply say it. The only complication is that there's a fair number of people who, for some reason, really want to pass LLM output as their own. They are present on HN too. But here's another ancient trick to overcome that: reputation. Either the reputation you already have, or reputation you build over time. If you have a reputation as an honest person with genuine interest in software, you really don't have to worry, and you will have audience for your work.

Retr0id 17 minutes ago | parent

Yup. I got excited for a bit, until I loaded the page and saw it was slop. I still would be impressed if someone actually took the time to learn about and implement it for themselves.

HarHarVeryFunny 6 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, and it seems they didn't even physically build it (which is most of the point of these retro projects), else where are the photos? So this is an emulation of a vibe coded processor. Couldn't they at least have added a three.js animation of bits flying around or something?!

wang_li 1 hour ago | parent

A nand gate takes 2 transistors. So 554,000 transistors if this were manufactured in a physical device.

By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.

matja 1 hour ago | parent

Most of the gate budget here is on SRAM used for system memory and video memory, so not exactly comparable to a i386 which had neither on-die.

ohazi 1 hour ago | parent

4 transistors for a two-input NAND gate in CMOS.

jhallenworld 25 minutes ago | parent

1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.

HarHarVeryFunny 30 minutes ago | parent

ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors.

monocasa 1 hour ago | parent

I was about to say that's a whole lot of gates for not a lot of computer, but then saw that rom and ram are also an array of nand gates.

Nurysso 16 minutes ago | parent

OHH my god this is soo awesome, I wonder how people build such things.

Retr0id 15 minutes ago | parent

They opened their AI agent and typed "make me a 16-bit computer built from NAND gates" and hit enter.

phoghed 7 minutes ago | parent

Go ahead and paste that into your coding harness of choice and see if you get this out.

Retr0id 6 minutes ago | parent

It'd take a few extra sentences to get the details, but I'm confident enough that it would work that I'd rather save my tokens for something more personally interesting.

socializer 6 minutes ago | parent

Yes, the secret ingredient of these kinds of AI projects is being rich and spending an obscene amount of money on it.

btilly 1 minute ago | parent

It has long been known that you can build any gate from NAND gates.

So you can take an existing model of a computer, turn everything that isn't a NAND into a collection of NAND gates, then run software for the original computer.

welcome_dragon 6 minutes ago | parent

I mean if this was someone taking Nand2Tetris several steps further it would be impressive.

  claude "create a NAND gate-based computer, giving it a crappy web page"