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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

In order to build a virtual video card, you have to understand the EE and CE and CS stuff to the point where you're able to do that. That's the point of the article, is that there are ways in which they are comparable. In one you're using minecraft as the UI to implement things. At Nvidia you'd use Cadence as the UI instead.

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This is not even comparable. Yes you can implement a simple graphics card or a RISC CPU in a video game. But that doesn’t mean you have the skill to build any practical modern graphics card or design a modern CISC CPU. You can learn about the basics of these things during a single semester at university and that’s likely what these “video gamers” did. It’s nothing impressive to recreate a RISC-V CPU in some game, only people who have no knowledge in this subject are somehow “impressed” by such things every time it’s brought up.

Building a slow CPU means you're much closer to being able to build a fast CPU than people who can't build any CPU. Companies that want to build fast CPUs should be preferentially hiring these people.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s a huge learning gap between this and a modern consumer CPU. Assembling together logic gates and understanding a simple RISC-V implementation is literally almost nothing when compared to the years you’d have to spend intensively learning just so you could get to the level of being able to design a Pentium 4 from scratch.

Now try teaching someone who's never touched a computer to build a Pentium 4.

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