It took three years to build at a cost over £40,000, and now Cambridge’s megaprocessor is being put on display for the public.
Designed by city resident James Newman, the processor is an enormous version of the sort of chip you find in your smartphone or tablet. James has now donated the device to the Centre for Computing History , where it will be used to educate young visitors about programming.
“I didn’t plan on ending up here,” said James, when asked why he undertook such a gargantuan task. “I started by wanting to learn about transistors. Things got out of hand!”
A software engineer by trade, he started the project in his spare time, but ended up taking a sabbatical in order to get it finished.
“Computers are quite opaque. Looking at them, it’s impossible to see how they work,” said James.
“What I wanted to do was get inside and see what’s going on. Trouble is we can’t shrink down small enough to walk inside a silicon chip. But we can go the other way; we can build the thing big enough that we can walk inside it. Not only that we can also put LEDs on everything so we can actually see the data moving and the logic happening.”
Indeed, the megaprocessor features over 10,000 LEDs, and is quite a spectacular sight once up and running. It is currently running a giant version of Tetris.
“We are overwhelmed by James’ generosity in donating this machine to the Centre,” said centre director Jason Fitzpatrick.
“The megaprocessor is a world first. It’s that important. We know it will attract visitors from across the globe as it offers so much in demonstrating how a computer really works.
“We have already been approached by the world’s largest computer museum, Heinz Nixdorff museum, in Germany and hope to work with staff there in the future to develop ways of sharing this hugely valuable learning resource.
“The megaprocessor injects an incredible wow factor into our foyer area, even if it does take up most of that space!”
Head of Learning at the centre, Anjali Das, added: “The megaprocessor, with all its modules visible at such a large scale, can be used as a perfect tool to explain how computers work. This explanation can be limited to visually describing how data flows from one module to the other at an elementary level to suit primary school children. Or, we can talk about the processor in more detail at machine level for more advanced students. Our learning team is in the process of putting together a scheme of work that will make the megaprocessor accessible to children of all ages.”