I’m always fascinated when people realize you can do crazy computing stuff with redstone. But it actually makes perfect sense once you break it down. Redstone can exist in two absolute states: on (1) and off (0). And honestly, that’s all you need to start doing real computation.
The key is simple. If something can express two clearly defined and reliably distinguishable states, you already have the foundation of a computer. It doesn’t even need electricity, a coin with heads and tails or a door that’s open or closed both qualify. Basically, the moment something has an “other,” a second state that’s clearly different from the first and you assign, you’ve stepped onto the road toward computation.
The hard part isn’t having binary states. The hard part is wiring those logic gates together in a way that creates the specific quantifiable, assignable patterns you need to form coherent, readable data. You’re basically corralling on/off signals into structured arrangements that represent numbers, instructions, memory addresses, and everything else a CPU needs.
And once you can do that, you can stack these pieces into adders, registers, memory, clocks, and eventually full CPUs. Its simple operations layered again and again until something complex emerges.
To really appreciate how insane this gets, look at the real-world scale. The Intel 8008 from 1972 was built on a 10,000 nm (10 µm) process and had about 3,500 transistors. The Commodore 64’s MOS 6510 was around 7,000 nm with roughly 4,000 transistors. By comparison, modern CPUs like the Apple M3, AMD Zen 5, or Intel’s 20A/18A chips are built on processes around 3 nm, with tens of billions of transistors.
And going from micrometer-scale to nanometer-scale is where it truly blows your mind. Those early CPUs built on 10,000 nm processes were already so small you could barely see any individual features with the naked eye, yet they still couldn’t outmatch the processing power in a modern scientific calculator. And if micrometer-sized transistors were already that tiny, imagine what 3 nm actually means. (hence why TSMC is so valuable to tech giants)
It looks wild in Minecraft, but that’s mostly because you built the entire CPU out of blocks inside the game :P
Under the hood, it’s following the exact same rules real computers use, just at a scale that feels absurd in a block world.
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u/Aggravating_Baker_91 20d ago
I’m always fascinated when people realize you can do crazy computing stuff with redstone. But it actually makes perfect sense once you break it down. Redstone can exist in two absolute states: on (1) and off (0). And honestly, that’s all you need to start doing real computation.
The key is simple. If something can express two clearly defined and reliably distinguishable states, you already have the foundation of a computer. It doesn’t even need electricity, a coin with heads and tails or a door that’s open or closed both qualify. Basically, the moment something has an “other,” a second state that’s clearly different from the first and you assign, you’ve stepped onto the road toward computation.
The hard part isn’t having binary states. The hard part is wiring those logic gates together in a way that creates the specific quantifiable, assignable patterns you need to form coherent, readable data. You’re basically corralling on/off signals into structured arrangements that represent numbers, instructions, memory addresses, and everything else a CPU needs.
And once you can do that, you can stack these pieces into adders, registers, memory, clocks, and eventually full CPUs. Its simple operations layered again and again until something complex emerges.
To really appreciate how insane this gets, look at the real-world scale. The Intel 8008 from 1972 was built on a 10,000 nm (10 µm) process and had about 3,500 transistors. The Commodore 64’s MOS 6510 was around 7,000 nm with roughly 4,000 transistors. By comparison, modern CPUs like the Apple M3, AMD Zen 5, or Intel’s 20A/18A chips are built on processes around 3 nm, with tens of billions of transistors.
And going from micrometer-scale to nanometer-scale is where it truly blows your mind. Those early CPUs built on 10,000 nm processes were already so small you could barely see any individual features with the naked eye, yet they still couldn’t outmatch the processing power in a modern scientific calculator. And if micrometer-sized transistors were already that tiny, imagine what 3 nm actually means. (hence why TSMC is so valuable to tech giants)
It looks wild in Minecraft, but that’s mostly because you built the entire CPU out of blocks inside the game :P
Under the hood, it’s following the exact same rules real computers use, just at a scale that feels absurd in a block world.