Your desktop has two, four, or even eight cores, however when’s the last time you’ve seen a multicore homebrew computer? [Jack] did just that, building the DUO Mega, a 16 core computer out of a handful of ATMega microcontrollers.
From [Jack]’s description, there are 15 ‘worker’ cores, each with their own 16MHz crystal as well as connection to an 8-bit data bus. When the device is turned on, the single ‘manager’ core – likewise an ATMega328 – polls all the workers as well as tons a program written in a customized bytecode onto each core. The cores themselves have gain access to to a shared pool of RAM (32k), a bit of Flash, a VGA out port, as well as an Ethernet controller connected to the the master core.
Since [Jack]’s DUO Mega computer has several cores, it excels at multitasking. In the video below, you can see the computer moving between a calculator app, a strange Tetris-like game, as well as a notepad app. The 16 cores in the DUO Mega likewise makes challenging calculations a great deal faster; he can produce Mandelbrot patterns quicker than any type of 8-bit microcontroller can alone, as well as likewise produces prime numbers at a great click.