An engineer has shared his experience of designing a CPU from scratch, over two weeks, “with no prior experience.” During this brief period,Adam Majmudarclaims to have learned the fundamentals ofchip architecture, absorbed the finer points ofchip fabrication, and prepared his first full chip layout usingEDA tools. The next step in his “speed-running the chip stack” to-do list is designing a GPU from scratch. When finished this project is destined for production viaMatthew Venn’sTinyTapeout 6.
We’ve reported on enthusiastDIY CPU designspreviously, as well asDIY GPU projects. However, some of those feats have eaten through years of spare time for the people involved. Majmudar must be on vacation and spending all his surplus time on this “speed run” project to have gotten as far as he has “from scratch.”
I’ve spent the past ~2 weeks trying to make a chip from scratch with no prior experience. It’s been an incredible source of learning so far.Progress tracker in thread (coolest stuff at the end)👇 pic.twitter.com/tKuYg7GgdIApril 11, 2024
The fledgling chip designer, who describes himself as one of the founding engineers at a web3 development company, outlines the steps he has made so far in his quest. You can click and read through all the steps leading up to the current GPU focus via the embedded Tweet, above. We’ve also bullet-pointed the speed run steps which have been completed to date, below.
As we mentioned in the intro, the significant step that Majmudar now faces is designing a GPU from scratch. He knows this will be a difficult task and admits that, after initial investigations, it isharder than expected. The fledgling chip designer explains that there simply aren’t the learning resources online for building a GPU. “Because GPU companies are all trying to keep their secrets from each other, most of the GPU architecture data is all proprietary and closed source,” the engineer finds.
Despite this hurdle, Majmudar says the big GPU-makers’ secrecy has made this part of the project “way more fun for me.” Interestingly, Anthropic’s Claude Opus AI tools have been useful during this GPU designing stage. “I’ve been proposing my ideas for how each unit must work to Claude, and then somehow it will guide me toward the right implementation approaches which I can then go and confirm with open-source repos,” explained the engineer. However, he observed that “if I search some of the things publicly, nothing shows up which is a testament to how well hidden the implementation details are.”
After taking just two weeks or so to get through three out of five legs of his speed run, the above concerns expressed regarding GPUs might make readers worry that Majmudar may have hit a speed bump, a snag, or even a brick wall. That doesn’t seem to be the case, as he optimistically predicts that his GPU design will be shipping “in the next few days,” and a cut-down version sent to be taped out.
It may be well worth keeping an eye open for this engineer’s next updates. However, we know it can take quite some time between submitting work to projects like TinyTapeout and the production run. The maker of theRickroll ASIC, for example, said there were nine months between submitting his design and receiving the silicon. Please note thatTT06closes just eight days from now.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
