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For an 8-bit CPU you could maybe do it. For a 64 bit cpu, the lookup table for addition alone would be massive. (You can of course do addition in smaller increments, like adding one digit at a time and keeping track of the carry, but then you just have a normal full adder).

The biggest issue is that this CPU would be conceptually simple, but very difficult to make fast. Memory is slow, and accessing a 64k lookup table uses more transistors than just doing the addition



Just build 4 of them and chain them together to get 64-bits.

(Beyond just being a joke, it is often how things like this get scaled. 1-Bit Adders become 2-Bits with a Carry Line between, then 3-bits with another Carry Line, and so forth, ad infinitum and beyond. The real joke is the complexity involved in however you "just" chain them together.)


Again, I'm no expert here but find this stuff fascinating. Could the simplicity possibly allow some radically different CPU design that makes the lookups alone nearly instantaneous? I could imagine some types of optical/photonic physical 3D hash table structures - even ones where the same physical structure could support a large number of read operations in parallel if pre-arranged by a compiler to not physically interfere. I imagine a cpu with only one instruction could be physically miniscule, and therefore pack a lot of cores in a small space.

Hypothetically, if it were orders of magnitude faster than a normal CPU, one could still perform rapid computation on larger numbers as needed while keeping the cpu physically 8 bit- yet be able to revert to even higher performance when less precision is needed.


If you're interested in One Instruction Computers, check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-instruction_set_computer


Thanks! I half expected to be told one instruction computers were impossible.




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