📝 Personal Notes

Computer Engineering

This notebook largely collects tutorial material I wrote for myself while learning about how computers work (specifically computer processors) and how I can build them from the ground up. My special interest is not just in understanding the basics of CPUs but rather, I want to learn how to take any application and make a computer for it.

Hacking Together a Tiny Computer

The first ever book that I read on this topic was "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken which I used to build a simple Hack computer starting with only logic gates. I partly document this journy in my Computer Basics: NAND to Pong notes.

There is also a free course called "NAND to Tetris" with lots of free related material out there which has a very active community of enthusiasts building this computers with various fun twists and implementing various applications on it. This gives us a concrete yet basic understanding of all the core elements of a computer from logic gates up to the operating system.

The book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture" by Sarah L. and David Money Harris complements this learning program quite well, too. Personally, I think building a 6502 computer and designing your own PCB for it is a cool retro-tech project.

If you want to build an actual bread board computer, check out Ben Eater's videos and material!

Princeton's Computer Architecture Course

To go deeper and learn how to create modern processors, not toy chips, not decades old chips, but processors that one would find in today's computers, I then continued to work through Princeton's lectures on computer architecture which are also freely available online.

The course is heavily inspired by the book "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson.

The textbook "Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors" by John Paul Shen and Mikko H. Lipasti is also recommended during this course as well but I have yet to take a better look at it.

Onur Mutlu Lectures

Additionally, I find professor Mutlu's lectures on computers and computer architectures highly valuable. While I am writing this, I am not focused on them though. This is a mere note to my future self to go back to his work and try to integrate it with everything I will have learned.

Analog Computing

I have much to say about analog computing since I've had several phases of obsession regarding it. But more at a later time.

Exotic Computing

The same holds true for the various other computing approaches like photonic computing, quantum computing, reversible computing, and so on.