Save for the occasional deal, GPU prices are so high these days that they might even get you wondering if you couldn't just roll your own. As it happens, renowned hardware hacker Matthias Balwierz (more commonly known as Bitluni) elected to do precisely that, enlisting the help of a total sum of 8,192 RISC-V microcontrollers (MCUs) for this enterprise.
He originally planned to create a display of some sort, but after careful consideration regarding costs and difficulty, he elected to solder an RGB LED directly to each microcontroller chip, effectively turning his GPU into a GPU-and-monitor combo, if we're getting technical. Going for a 1920x1080 resolution would require over two million chips, so Balwierz aimed for a final-project resolution of 320x200 with 64,000 chips — familiar figures to anyone who played games in the DOS days.
