An engineer who builds GPU 'from scratch' in two weeks finds out that the process is ridiculously hard
The GPU design will get a physical form via the Tiny Tapeout project
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A self-taught hardware engineer who builds a GPU from scratch found out that the process is much more complex and incredibly hard. Notably, he went on to create a complete CPU after investing his time learning the fundamentals of central processing architecture.
Well, designing a basic CPU is possible if one has the right tools, abundant knowledge, and patience. Although, the CPU might not match the standards of processors currently available in the market.
But surely, one can make it. What about GPUs, though? Both aren’t similar after all despite sharing a lot of common aspects.
A self-taught hardware engineer builds GPU from scratch but says it was way harder than he expected
Well, a self-taught hardware engineer tried building a GPU from scratch. Encouraged by the success of building a CPU, the self-taught hardware engineer tried his luck with GPU this time around.
Despite sharing a lot of commonalities, GPUs are way different in how they manage threads as well as memory usage. He went on to realize that building a GPU from scratch wasn’t child’s play. Rather, it was incredibly tougher than he expected.
Tom’s Hardware which first reported this news adds that Twitter/X user @MajumdarAdam who is a hardware engineer has been sharing his progress building a GPU from scratch.
The tweet embedded below shows the flow of work the engineer did throughout his journey to build a GPU from scratch. Since it was a start-from-scratch project, he had to acquire lots of knowledge before taking the first step.
Tom’s Hardware earlier shared the engineer’s concern about GPUs being a relatively tough field of study. All because of the dominance of proprietary tech. Sadly, his predictions came true. He felt that building a GPU from scratch with no prior experience was more hard than he expected.
Hard work paid off as he completed building the GPU by fixing several issues with the help of others
The publication explains that Majumdar wasn’t aiming for a ‘graphics’ CPU. In fact, he was building a GPGPU. PC Gamer further explains GPGPU in simple words. It says a general-purpose parallel computing system includes a triangle setup, TMUs, ROPs, or any number of fixed function circuits that are usually in graphics cards’ chips.
Ultimately, the engineer’s hard work paid off, as the GPU design he built worked post resolving several issues with the help of others. His basic GPU design was able to run a small number of instructions and could perform some matrix calculations in software simulation.
Let’s not forget that Majumdar’s CPU and GPU design will be given a physical form via the Tiny Tapeout project. If you are interested and want to know more about his homemade GPU design, you can head to his Twitter handle or go through the dedicated Tiny-GPU GitHub page.
Notably, the GPU isn’t available to the public, so if you looking for one to aid your video editing capabilities, check this guide. Those looking for CPUs can jump to this page. We have listed some of the top CPU-related roundups in there.
