Somone built their own CPU and rendered a cube with it, and I’m incredibly impressed

I think very few people in the world have the technical know-how and the expertise to build their own CPU entirely from scratch by themselves, but they are out there. And if you want proof, I’ve got the perfect example for you. This incredible tinkerer managed to build their own CPU, and to prove that it wasn’t just smoke and mirrors, they got it to display a spinning 3D cube.

This home-made CPU can render a cube in real time

As spotted by Hackaday, James Sharman performed this amazing endeavor. He’s by no means a stranger to making his own hardware; his entire YouTube channel shows his progress in creating a VGA, an IO, and a CPU, all from scratch. And I do have to confess that I’ve had to skip a few of the previous homebrew CPU videos (only 106 of them) to show you the final product above. Still, if you’re a braver person than I and want to dive into the nitty-gritty of someone making their own 8-bit CPU, you can check out their entire video playlist.

Anyway, back to this cube. The video is amazing; the DIY CPU looks more like a nuclear reactor control panel than an 8-bit processor. James uses it to display a rotating cube in real-time, at 30FPS, with lighting effects, for twenty seconds. After that, he goes into all the math he had to perform to get the cube running, which is fascinating in its own right. James does an amazing job of walking you through the process if you have ever wondered what kind of math was involved in drawing 3D graphics. I wonder if he would get on well with that one guy who made a CPU in Excel.