The current trend in tech is that smaller is better.

Companies like AMD and NVIDIA sink piles of money into their efforts to make processors as small as possible.

However, one man has decided to buck this trend by taking the tiny components hidden inside your computer and making them a bit more…, shall we say ‘visible’.

James Newman started his project , the Megaprocessor back in 2014 in Cambridge, UK. It involves soldering thousands of tiny (but still visible) transistors together.

Why? Well, as Newman puts it, “Because I want to.”

In truth, Newman wants to be able to show people how a computer actually works.

Throughout the project – now in its second year – Newman has soldered a total of 15 300 transistors together to form the processor and another 27 000 to make up the RAM. By Newman’s estimates the 16-bit processor runs at a clock speed of 20kHz with a total of 256 Bytes of RAM.

Though those numbers sound small compared to the 4GHz processors and 32GB’s of RAM we often see in computers these days, the Megaprocessor will have an estimated weight of half a ton. The total size of the processor will come in at about 18m², so it plainly beats most other components in sheer size and scale.

As of 1st May, Newman had fully assembled all seven of the frames which will hold the RAM, the input/output controller, and the processor proper. Newman had also managed to get the Input & Decoding, Special Purpose Registers, ALU and General Purpose Registers running together.

So, as cool as this project is, it isn’t cheap. At the last update in March, Newman estimated that he spent a total of £40 000 (approximately R903 000) which if you are wondering could buy you 136 Intel Core i7 6700K processors, and they wouldn’t take up the entire living room.

We’ve reached out to Newman to find out when he expects the project to be completed. So far he’s missed his completion target of Easter 2015, Summer 2015, and Christmas 2015 but with a project this crazy, involving the proper and careful, soldering of 42 300 transistors, we aren’t inclined to rush him.

We thoroughly recommend spending some time looking through Newman’s site if only to realise how little (or indeed how much) you know about the inner workings of a computer.

[Source – Megaprocessor] [Image – CC BY/2.0 Mirko Waltermann]