I Built a BETTER CPU in Excel

[@InkboxSoftware]

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/Inkbox/ . You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription.

[@zealotoffire3833]

With clock you just had to do clock = 1 - clock, if it was 0 1-0 is 1, i it was 1 1-1 is 0

[@InkboxSoftware]

In Excel, 0-1 is -1, but I could do clock = ABS(Clock - 1)

[@zealotoffire3833]

@@InkboxSoftware you would never get into a state of 0-1

[@zealotoffire3833]

@@InkboxSoftware read my comment it says clock = 1 - clock

[@InkboxSoftware]

Woops, sorry read it backwards. Yeah that would be a good optimization.

[@TermiTech2011]

Interviewer : so how good are you with excel ? This mf : YES

[@stifskere7220]

doubt he ever needs a job where you need to use excel

[@TermiTech2011]

@stifskere7220 this mf works in AMD ryzen cpu factory lol

[@comfort-dose4547]

This mf: "tf you mean? Excel is my BITCH"

[@ccricers]

Software engineer students: Why am I getting job no offers? What is their standard? This KZbin video:

[@SB-qm5wg]

LOL "I wrote my own"

[@KvapuJanjalia]

Next video: "I built a CPU in Minecraft running on my RISC CPU in Excel"

[@brawldude2656]

Like it runs for 10k hours tp get 3+5 correct 😂😂

[@ShaheenGhiassy]

… then have it run Doom

[@eziitis8]

@@ShaheenGhiassy Run doom on everything. Always!

[@pacomatic9833]

Done with an x86 to RISC interpreter running Linux Mint.

[@Halo2Veteran]

Now make it run DOOM

[@blockshift758]

Calm down were getting there at some point

[@robertbothamley9755]

you beat me to it

[@Hulfok]

"Doom compiled to run in excel-spreadsheet" sounds interesting!

[@parthasarathyvenkatadri]

He is going to lose his mind 😂

[@the_merahm]

57 seconds ago?!?! ​@@parthasarathyvenkatadri

[@kala-telo]

Honestly as someone who spent last year studying different CPUs and ISAs, for me it looks more like old CISC rather than RISC. From my experience, it's normal for RISC to have lots of register (usually between 16 and 32), no direct stack or memory manipulation, only with load/store. Also RISC CPUs (again from my experience) literally always have fixed size instructions. So it looks more like MISC ISA. Still very cool and educational project though!

[@direct3d]

just to let you know, there are actually RISC architectures that have variable instruction lengths, like RISC-V, ARC and blackfin! it's not really a true requirement to label something as RISC or not, just a design choice that happens to work out well for a lot of RISC architectures nonetheless. but i agree, the lots of registers is very traditionally RISC

[@kala-telo]

@@direct3d I forgot about compressed extension, even though I've specifically deeply looked into RISC-V 😅 If that's what you meant. Still, in my opinion, compressed ISA has same size no matter what's instruction it is, while this Excel ISA, and CISC instructions can have differently sized instruction depending on argument size. Also I don't really know about strict definitions, my comments are based on how I felt rather than formal rules.

[@GRAYgauss]

@@direct3d Personally, it's an old intuition from building toy CPUs, but I practically categorize CISC and RISC based on fabrication cost & complexity. VLA greatly complicates control hardware, for example in branch prediction and cache management given it necessitates decoding to determine instruction bounds. It's my intuition that RISC generally simplifies the core pipeline as much as possible, and you see that reflected in chips costs. Looking up RISC-V's C extension, feeling the same as kala-telo, the manual itself says implementers can simply expand compressed instructions to full length form before execution - which is exactly what I would expect to keep hardware as simple as possible. (Also found some FOSS RISC impls with expansion logic) Having many registers to make up for the otherwise simplified core ISA makes perfect sense to me, it's less of a given spec and more of a natural requirement.

[@GRAYgauss]

Wholeheartedly agree with your intuition, but it's also just my gut.

[@direct3d]

@@GRAYgauss yup, love the way you explained this also! deeply agree on your point with simplifying the pipeline -> cost reduction, i totally see what you're getting at. and yup with the RISC-V extension, it makes perfect sense to me as well, it's fun to think about how much thought was put into such a piece of the ISA anyway. i think ARM goes a bit crazy with the extensions as well, to the point that i've questioned whether it also shall still fall under the RISC umbrella. haha. (and since i haven't said so already, amazing video and awesome creation inkbox!!)

[@dzxtricks]

Its like jumping from 16nm to 4nm, such generational leap to have 15x faster CPU! Nice job

[@AndrewLobley]

As someone who has designed a microprocessor with a Super-RISC instruction set, while it's easier to design, when programming in assembly you regret your decisions sorely.

[@InkboxSoftware]

I'm glad I found someone who understands me

[@Sirvierl0ffel]

@@InkboxSoftware did you thing about writing your own compiler?

[@malayrojak]

​@@InkboxSoftwareI didn't understand (because of ignorance, NOT your inability to explain or teach), and I'm not glad about this 😂

[@bronkolie]

I've noticed several youtubers making very simple computers tend to still have ALU flags. This is actually not even necessary! You can perform simple comparison operations instead. For example, in RISC-V you have branch instructions for equals, not equals, etc., and you have an ALU operation to set a register to the boolean value of a less than comparison. You can actually make things like overflow checking using these simple instructions. Keep in mind that there is actually only one opcode for ALU and one for branching, all the rest is done via a few extra bits. There are even a bunch of convenience pseudoinstructions like SEQZ or BEQZ (to check if a register is zero for example), so that it still feels as if you have all the comparison operators

[@douglasboyle6544]

As a an older person who grew up in the 8 and 16 bit PC era I am absolutely amazed at this.

[@Maxjoker98]

I have an interesting ultra-reduced instruction set, the MCPU instruction set! I've built in in LogiSim, Digital, and recently in Minecraft. Fundamentally, it has only 2 instruction types, and 3 fundamental instructions: (conditional) move(MOV/CMOV) and shift/load immediate value(IMM). It's basically a simple TTA-like design, in the sense that the program counter is just like every other register on the bus, so is the current RAM address, the ALU, and the immediate register. It requires no general-purpose registers(but has space for up to 3 in it's instruction set). One cool feature of my design is that this 8-bit fixed-size instruction set works with any bus-width, even with the same program, by using the IMM instruction to shift in a larger immediate value 7 bits at a time. It's convenient to program as well, the assembler still feels familiar and not like a turing tarpit! The complete instruction set is so simple, it fits in the remainder of this comment: If the highest bit is set, the instruction is an IMM instruction. Remaining bytes are loaded into SRG_IMM register on first instruction, or shifted in on successive instructions. Otherwise, if the second highest bit is set, the instruction is a conditional move(CMOV) and only runs if the ALU flag output is set, if not set it's a regular move(MOV) and always runs. Remaining bits are a 3-bit source and a 3-bit target. Sources: PC, ADDR, RAM, IMM, ALU, I, J, K. Targets: PC, ADDR, RAM, ALU_A, ALU_B, I, J, K. I,J,K are optional general-purpose registers. ALU_A and ALU_B are ALU registers(can only be read as ALU result). IMM is the last decoded immediate value, RAM reads/writes at address provided by ADDR. (It's so simple, I actually can decode/encode/run instructions in my head :P) I would really like any feedback, I have little experience and no formal training :P

[@DoDoBoy-nh1jt]

I dont know much about this stuff, but what i know is... HOW DID U LEARN THIS??? This shi is so unbelivable cool, i had to read ur comment a few times until i got it. I want to see it so mad. Pretty cool.

[@Maxjoker98]

@@DoDoBoy-nh1jt If you just want to see it, there is my open-source web-based assembler and emulator(can't post link here). But you can definitely learn all this for yourself, after all I'm self-taught as well! :P In general, learning enough about logic gates to be able to understand how a computer works(or build one in Excel or Minecraft) isn't that complicated. You need some basic understanding of programming(what is code, how does it run?), logic gates(how can you combine multiple binary inputs into binary outputs?), and CPU architecture(what parts of a CPU are required to execute any program?). If you have any more specific questions, let me know! In general, just try some things in a logic simulator, possibly fail, and repeat ;P I also have some videos about my specific CPU on my channel, including a video where I design a simple CPU in LogiSim(the video is called "LogiSim Hello-world CPU design!").

[@DoDoBoy-nh1jt]

@@Maxjoker98 can u send me the link pls, i want to try this out. Why cant u send the link? Is it cuz the KZbin algorythm is gonna delete it?

[@ALG397]

@@Maxjoker98 I visited your KZbin channel and I did not find an educational explanation like the one on this channel. Can you send me the link?

[@Maxjoker98]

@@ALG397 Oh, and I've also got a video where I design and build a simple CPU in LogiSim that is somewhat similar to the MCPU instruction set. It has no audio narration, but I explained what I did in text on the right side. The original recording was about an hour, but the video is speed up 2x(30min), but contains otherwise no editing. It contains some mistakes and debugging, but the basic design is fine and very similar. Technically my architecture can be considered TTA-like(transport-triggered architecture), but it's very much not VLIW, and suports only a single source and target(untypical for TTAs) at a time, and the IMM instruction also doesn't fit the TTA description. MCPU architecture is not my first iteration on a design like this, I've played around with LogiSim and Digital a lot to figure out what architecture features I want/need. I've also played with Minecraft redstone a bit, discovering that basically a stacking height of 2 is always enough, because you can "cross" wires in 2 high, which is somewhat like the WireWorld cellular automata(which has a really cool CPU design for it! My favorite in any CA! Look up WireWorld Computer!), which I also played around with earlier, which lead me to realize that I could build an instruction set that could work on any word width, and that could be created in layers that only need to be connected to the previous/next layer(important for building compactly in Minecraft; This basically means the data path is completely 2D in Minecraft), but also means this is probably easier to implement serially(important for WireWorld) or in other creative ways like shaders etc.

[@impster]

This is sick af! Love your dedication and enthusiasm!

[@tobyk-b6303]

Dude, this is fucking sick, like, you just casually dropping that not only can code in assembly but in a modified assembly at that? you crazy dog that's some good work!

[@TheRenegade...]

What do you mean by modified assembly? It's not like there's one true form of assembly because every architecture has its own assembly language. Also, it's effectively impossible to create a CPU architecture without understanding how its instructions work and therefore how to use its assembly language

[@tobyk-b6303]

​@@TheRenegade... My dog I apologise I was less than sober when I watched this video and as an amateur programmer at best all I know is assembly is hard and he said something about "and so I wrote my own parts of an assembly language" or something along those lines and I was impressed if not just misunderstanding what he meant, anyway I take your point I just know doing really custom memory control and stuff is hard so I applaud what he did

[@samuelwaller4924]

I love that you used flipjump as an example of a OISC instead of subleq

[@nx_]

what the heck that's mindblowing, as someone who barely started getting into risc and how cpus works.

[@CHEpachilo]

after completing the Nand game, aka building from nand gates processor with 2 general purpose registers, program counter, ALU and programming some basic stuff for it I'm absolutely sure that anything less than 6502 is a pure masochism. It is pain to program for, it is absolutely not hard to design 6502 clone even on logic gates level, so reducing instruction set is really not a great idea here.

[@parthasarathym1777]

Build llvm backend. There you go. Now you can even run c++.

[@Chaomlin]

0:17 "basically the excel equivalent of a computer from the 1950s" Well, it got us to the moon, didnt it?

[@thomasrosebrough9062]

Interesting that your "better" CPU is technically wayyy less powerful, but its much cleaner and faster, making it more effective. Goes to show how "better" in the regular CPU market is also more complex than just "has bigger registers".

[@jyothishkumar3098]

That's similar to the square-cube law in aeronautical engineering.

[@torrentails]

8:43 You could have the top address space point to block 0, leaving the lower 128 for the swap memory. Might make it easier to program without having to think about adding 128 every time you want to access memory

[@InkboxSoftware]

After programming the machine for a bit, I do think that's probably the smarter way to do it

[@johnrickard8512]

I've used Excel 2000 to simulate circuits before in my Digital Design class, so I will give a like without knowing the content of this video 🙃

[@cabobsstopmotion4983]

This is incredible. I'm in a computer architecture class in university so I can actually follow along!

[@sbee7158]

I'm so proud of you for taking terrific effort to explain clearly and include people who aren't experts on the conversation. Your presentation, diction, and visual animations/demonstrations have uncomplicated ways of presenting, making it easier to stay focused on what you are focused on as the speaker. It's invaluable that you continue to use full terms (or acronyms you've already introduced) where possible, to keep the viewer anchored. The only thing I would consider doing differently is providing a legend or a brief pop-up glossary and pause when you refer to an acronym, just one or two breaths long). This will help the viewer stay oriented in paying attention, rather than flipping away from your video to do a quick Google search or accessing brain power in the human memory, which means stopping the flow of your video and explication. I hope this helps you make even more accessible videos.

[@Jake12rg]

3:26 when I heard this I knew it was brilliant

[@mendonisstudios]

Well done. I did something similar in Amiga Basic some many years ago simulating the 8085 intel. But your project is quite good! But now you gave me an idea for a hardware implementation of the RISK processor. Hmmm.. Anyway I enjoyed your video very much. Keep up the great work!!! Looking forward to see your next project

[@urooj09]

Flashback to computer architecture class in college 😭😭

[@willphillips2522]

YOOO THE RETURN

[@tedtheblue]

Inkbox in 2050: today we’re going to run excel in excel

[@revenevan11]

I'm fascinated by this! I'd love to see a compiler made to turn something higher level like C into your ASM that's compatible with your excel CPU. I don't have much idea of how difficult that must be, though.

[@maxrockatansky3896]

What an exciting time we live in when we can soon experience Doom ported to excel.

[@_maorkatz_1887]

Babe wake up, Inkbox just uploaded a new Excel video

[@KeithGamz21]

i love these videos that you make,keep up the great work ❤😂😊

[@elcucumber2847]

lovely video, very impressive!! thank you for the captions :)

[@guigui0246]

At 2:45 I'm pretty sure BLT and BGT are inverted (> is gt and < is lt but you put > lt and < gt)

[@InkboxSoftware]

Woops I did

[@jmholmes83]

Can’t tell if you were serious about reducing it to a single cell, but I’m here for it!

[@hypercoder-gaming]

Next vid be like: I simulated a universe inside of my Excel supercomputer

[@noonerlly1849]

This is crazy of you but keep it up man

[@TibbeSnel]

I saw the original video and didn't understand anything, I learned logisim and now it's so super simple!

[@scott5146]

Wow, I thought I was the only one that ever attempted anything like this (was bored at work for a while!). Mine wasn't as polished as yours, but it was loosely based on an early ARM CPU, so had 16 registers and instructions that allowed you to use any registers as the source and destinations.

[@thzockt]

this is excactly what I currently studdy in school

[@mr.Celsius]

waiting for this man to create and entire pc in exel, that can play doom

[@SeanStClair-cr9jl]

Gahh! I love this project!! Any plans to write a compiler to your new assembly?

[@InkboxSoftware]

That was in the video...

[@tediustimmy]

Can you imagine explaining to people the contortions you'd have to go through to make the register 64 bits? No one would believe you!

[@veorEL]

This we really needed, after last week's global political events. Suggestion: The stack will still function as a stack even if it is upside down. The logic can be done TOP DOWN and then the representation BOTTOM UP. Putting it off to the side on column Z, the representation could be R_13 = Z_28 R_14 = Z_27 ... etc. Great JOB!

[@dsagman]

wow. seems ideal for you to implement a forth compiler.

[@Mark.Brindle]

Love Forth. I have implemented a full Forth on many CPUs from 6502, Z80, 65000 family through to .Net IL, which is actually stack based. It’s such a simple language, usually each word in the dictionary can be implemented in just a few lines of assembly. In the 80s, there were CPUs that ran Forth natively. I thought of Forth when he added the stack operands.

[@pwntmatch]

sometime in the 1950s : " we are going to simulate a CPU in excel " "a what? " "what? "

[@pygmee6412]

Awsome! I really need to implement this in PowerPoint, but adding a screen absolutely destroys the performance. I'm currently rewriting a subset of PowerPoint in Rust to hopefully run this king of slides blazingly fast.

[@xavier4313]

Just curious where even the heck you guys find information is there any book that explains how computer works bit by bit if there is please suggest

[@InkboxSoftware]

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, by David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy

[@ericnotar]

That is so good! Love it. I want to reproduce an old Basic lnguage for palm device with compiler and that gives me some ideas. I was amazed to see what excel can do. Thanks for thst

[@jurel-enlatado1]

Actual insanity, good job.

[@AK-vx4dy]

Try to undervolatage, maybe will run wirh faster clock 🤣 Clean job, congratulations.

[@Petch85]

maybe try the sieve of Eratosthenes and find some prime numbers. Seems like a good job for a home made CPU.

[@Foxsvod]

This made headlines!! Your in the news bro. Make sure to smile!!

[@DavidK-u7i]

imagine you make a CPU in excel more powerful that your actual CPU.

[@promaster424]

One day this computer would be able to run execel in itself, or at least doom

[@PCPSolutions]

Outstanding work!

[@darqed]

He did it again

[@dominic-shum]

4:30 can be further simplified to D6 + C2, but I know this example is a toy problem demonstrating how to get rid of the If function.

[@premiunm]

Plot twist: He becomes a professional solderer and makes the CPU a real object instead of just a spreadsheet

[@AK-vx4dy]

@1:46 You almost reinvented 6502 or '90 PIC microcontroller

[@nimrag659]

i think it would be an interesting project to try and write a C compiler for the language

[@PatrickWard4]

Absolutely brilliant.

[@appakling]

babe wake up, there's a new Inkbox video

[@EyemachineStudios]

Now make a GPU in excel

[@Apexeon]

I love how over the top this is 😍😍😍 Also this was very soothing to listen to. Can you... Make more 🥹

[@AdamFahn]

I have not got a clue what he did, but I can tell he did it in a smart way and it was good.

[@Lgame0143]

“Hey dude, nice computer, what are your specs?” “64 gb ram, 2TB SSD, RTX 4070 plus and the best part: *Excel CPU* “

[@PaulMcGuinness]

Takes me back to co-authoring a commercial voice mail system (supporing up to 3000 telephone users) in DOS 6.0 on a 486 SX25 using A86 assembler.... as a TSR (Memory resident program)... in only 64kb of ram (used XMS memory switching for transient data) - The very last still customer using it only switched it off in 2022 😲 (I may open-source it one day... if anyone could find an old Rhetorex card!)

[@caiomelo756]

I NEED TO SEE SOMEONE BUILDING AN OS FOR THIS THING RN

[@Lampe2020]

1:26 The swap instruction is sexy XD

[@monarchofrymden]

You know what you have to do now. DOOM. Bad Apple. In the Excel computer.

[@niceEli]

You should make a LLVM compiler for it

[@im.papajek]

Somehow, it ended up on my main page; I don’t understand anything, but I watched the whole thing, and it was fun.

[@RalphDratman]

One of the selling points for RISC CPUs is that they are designed to be programmed by compilers, not assemblers --- so convenience to the programmer is unnecessary. If your CPU were aimed at the real world, part of your design job would be to write a simple compiler for it, later to be made into a sophisticated optimizing compiler for production.

[@ImreNagyM]

Now its time to build a JVM on top of this CPU and we are golden... speed... might not be ideal... we can just get another excel file to help out and if you wish; you can use co-processors to accelerate some of the tasks, like old Amiga and Atari (and many other) devices did so that the raw power of the CPU is not wasted on fundamental operational tasks but only on "business logic" good work :)

[@ytech3882]

Man I feel stupid but entertained watching you

[@ZhuDaoLong]

I understand like half but this is cool

[@nightfox6738]

Is the flip/jump machine actually turing complete? I'd love to see that used to implement some simple algorithms / maybe a logical proof if that's possible. Is there such a proof for turing completeness? Edit: btw I love this kind of stuff. I personally wrote a simple cpu in logisim and wrote a recursive factorial program in its machine code. You've earned my sub.

[@samuelwaller4924]

It's on the esolang wiki. There's actually been a lot of effort put into it, it's pretty cool

[@aqqalularsen3322]

hell yeah, we love risc

[@CrushedAsian255]

This is so cool, clever use of smaller footprint! Coming from discord server

[@Apollo1428]

you think your computer was just like watching you do this and went "hey.. there's something familiar about this"

[@LukasCarrein]

you should try remaking the mos 6502 for some extra power

[@nauthic3p0]

That your ranges are unnamed is just … I … … it‘s hard to deal with this, you know?

[@norude]

every nine month, the excel CPU gets 10 time faster

[@gaharmun]

I thought about doing something like this in excel as well a while ago... but im more of a hardware guy and so i never startet doing it... great idea and video btw...

[@MarquisDeSang]

Can't you do it in Libre Office instead?

[@juliusfucik4011]

Haha good luck. I use LibreOffice all the time, but stability is not very good for big things 😢

[@koalaman9369]

im trying to make my own cpu in excel but i cant get the clock to work w/ the previous video's method

[@minhkhoi1009]

my method is manual calculation in excel

[@Typocat]

yay another electronic in excel

[@champion_ofcloud-var]

i have no clue what a risc cpu is, im only here because inkbox uploaded it

[@anon_y_mousse]

Is there a way to do something like the Linux shebang with Windows cmd.exe ? Or would you have to wrap it in a batch file? It just seems kind of annoying to have to manually call the Python interpreter to execute a program instead of just calling the program directly and having the shell figure it out. And in case anyone doesn't already know, yeah there are builds of various Linux shells that can be used on Windows, including a full set from either MingW or CygWin, but I'm wondering about solutions that don't use third-party tools.

[@TheShorterboy]

the minimum usable instruction set is 1 it's a "branch on negtive compare" or some weird thing someone built it in an FPGA

[@trig-w4n]

2:44 good’ay mate

[@AzazeoAinamart]

Peak KZbin content

[@DrewWalton]

Hint: MOV is Turing-complete. All you gotta do is move.

[@TannerJ07]

I like how you made it faster, but the programs take longer

[@samir3216-bs1lv]

Great job inkbox,now you know how to advertise

[@soryabuscompany]

Tennis for NES, very cool

[@mido-gq3xe]

I think will be cool if you load some sort of program in to equal ic, like micro 8-bit processor

[@Garfield_Minecraft]

Only BGE.. This dialect of assembly is so cursed

[@Mugen88888]

Brilliant! You truly are a genius.

[@JustPyroYT]

Thats soooo cool! :D

[@Triangle1234]

why tf did those 11 people have the audacity to downvote such a video?!??? like what did this guy ever do to you? or do you just hate excel? do you just hate cpus? what's wrong!!

[@urooj09]

Google sheet lovers 😬