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I built cpu in an computer architecture class and it was one of the most useful things I have ever done, in terms of information learned. It was of course extremely limited (4 bit, so only 16 instructions, 16 type of instructions, 64 bytes of ram, only output was 4 leds for the single register, etc) but a great experience.

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In my university (HU Berlin) this is part of the normal computer science curriculum in the 2nd or 3rd semester.

And I fully agree, this is really interesting and you get a much deeper understanding of a computer's internals.

What topics did you guys cover (in class)?

we started at the transistor level, building AND/OR gates. Then XOR/NAND etc, then a simple ALU (using real nand/and/or etc chips) then a simple register, etc all the way up, each step getting an integrated chip to replace what we had built with smaller components in the previous step.

For anyone whose interested in this sort of thing I highly recommend The Elements of Computing Systems (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/).

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