That's insane. When he zoomed in to machine level and then out to show different functional units, I felt like I was looking at "the real world" from The Matrix.
In the three body problem, a computer is created out of 30 million uneducated soldiers that stand in a 6x6km square communicating mostly through flags. 3 soldiers form AND or OR gates. A memory bus is run by cavalry.
I am only half way through the book, so this might not be THE alien computer from the book, but still fitting.
