What’s your goal? Rebuilding an Intel class modern CPU or just making a crude one?
Transistors give you logic gates and opamps, from which you can build computation and memory, add a clock to apply input from a certain address (the PC) to a set of logic gates (the instruction set) that can read and store and you have a very crude (and very inefficient) programmable CPU in no time (compared to something even remotely like a 8080 or even a 6502)
A good approach to get more knowledgeable is going bottom-up from transistors and top-down from FPGA (and suffer Verilog/VHDL), attempting to experiment and design your own instruction set while trying to understand the physics and logic, progressively bridging the gap in between in both directions.
Transistors give you logic gates and opamps, from which you can build computation and memory, add a clock to apply input from a certain address (the PC) to a set of logic gates (the instruction set) that can read and store and you have a very crude (and very inefficient) programmable CPU in no time (compared to something even remotely like a 8080 or even a 6502)
A good approach to get more knowledgeable is going bottom-up from transistors and top-down from FPGA (and suffer Verilog/VHDL), attempting to experiment and design your own instruction set while trying to understand the physics and logic, progressively bridging the gap in between in both directions.