On May 9th, bitluni, a prominent figure on YouTube well-versed in chip design, adept at drawing circuit diagrams, soldering circuit boards and chips, and programming, recently handcrafted a remarkably mini "supercomputer" equipped with up to 256 RISC-V architecture cores.
He previously created a "supercluster" consisting of 16 CH32V003 RISC-V microcontrollers connected via an 8-bit bus, each equipped with LED lights. This setup can be used for testing purposes as well as for an impressive visual display.
Recently, he has once again attempted to challenge the creation of a "megacluster," integrating up to 16 superclusters together, totaling 256 RISC-V microcontrollers.
Of course, this is not as simple as just stacking them together. It requires redesigning circuits and wiring, as well as addressing the issues of oversized single PCB circuit boards and high power consumption.
To achieve this, bitluni pairs two superclusters together, each mounted on eight long "cluster blades." Additionally, each blade contains two CH32V203 microcontrollers, serving as the connection channels between each supercluster and the 8-bit bus.
After the design was completed, he began manually installing the microcontrollers onto the circuit board, soldering the GPIO pins, conducting assembly tests, and finally placing them on the main circuit board.
After completion, bitluni tested it with LED lights and discovered a design flaw:
Forgot to install the internal clock source, causing the LED lights to be unable to synchronize their blinking. They quickly fell into chaos, each blinking on its own.
He used his advanced programming skills to resolve bus communication conflicts, enabling all microcontrollers to synchronize.
The end result is 256 RISC-V microcontrollers running at 48MHz, along with 17 RISC-V chips running at 144MHz, and a total of 640 GPIO pins, 256 ADC circuits, with a combined single-core frequency of 14.7GHz.
