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Is the x86 Architecture Sustainable?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Magic Leap: When Reality Hits the Fan
Largely A Summary With Some New Information I have covered a lot of material and even then only glossed at the surface of what I have learned about Magic Leap (ML). By combining the information ava…
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The Begining of the End for ANT+ Wireless
First off, no, your ANT+ devices aren’t goin...
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Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
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A Tektronix TDS 684B Oscilloscope Uses CCD Analog Memory
I have a Tektronix TDS 684B oscilloscope that I bought cheaply at an auction. It has 4 channels, 1 GHz of BW and a sample rate of 5 Gsps. Those are respectable numbers even by today’s standards. It’s also the main reason why I have it: compared to modern oscilloscopes, the other features aren’t nearly as impressive…
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On CPU backdoors - Trusting hardware
So, you're a decent paranoid person, running only open source software on your box: Linux, GNU, etc. You have the feeling you could, if you ...
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Silicon die analysis: inside an op amp with interesting “butterfly” transistors
Some integrated circuits have very interesting dies under a microscope, like the chip below with designs that look kind of like butterflies....
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Fixing analog audio on the $2.58 HDMI-to-VGA adapter
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
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IRIX 3dfx Voodoo driver and glide2x IRIX port
At the moment only SST1 (Voodoo1) is supported on IP32 (O2). Only tested on IRIX 6.5.30 with RM7000C CPU. -driver sources (SST1 and CVG support on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/tdfx_irix -glide2x IRIX port (SST1 on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/glide_irix -hinv wrapper with 3dfx support…
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B2fJ – A Java Virtual Machine to run on the 8-bit home computers of the 80s
Back to the Future Java (b2fJ) aims at bringing the power of Java to 8-bit home computers of the ’80s. This project provides a toolchain to cross-compile Java programs under Windows.
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Dick Smith’s Wizzard-ry 8 (Bit)
Homemade clone of the Dick Smith Wizzard/VTech CreatiVision game console.
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Adventures in Wearable Electronics – Making a Light-up Dress
Samuel Clay is a grad student in the schools of design and of engineering at Harvard. He founded NewsBlur , a personal RSS news reader, and Turn Touch , beautiful control for the smart home.
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Rust on Espressif chips Q1 2022
Scott Mabin's blog
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A look at IBM S/360 core memory: In the 1960s, 128 kilobytes weighed 610 pounds
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...
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Sony News Portable Workstation NWS-1250 (2020)
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
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The Apple-1's unusual MOS clock driver chip
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its disp...
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8-bit 64K 1802 computer with front panel and serial port in an Altoids tin
Once upon a time, microcomputers were simple and easy to understand. So simple in fact that a kid like me, with no computer experience whatsoever, could actually understand them, build them, program them, and put them to work in his very own projects!
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UDP transmitter implemented with PIO and DMA on the RP2040
The objective for this project was to implement a UDP transmitter for use on the RP2040 that would consume zero CPU time. The system described on this webpage is implemented with 3 PIO state machines, 12 DMA channels, and 1 PWM channel. It generates an NLP, performs packet checksum calculations, and performs packet…
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Apple Vision Pro – Why It May Be Lousy for Watching Movies on a Plane
Introduction Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) primarily covered the hardware. Over the next several articles, I plan to discuss the applications Apple (and others) sug…
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Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
So, there you are, the proud parents of a beautiful new baby, and you can hardly contain your excitement as you unwrap that new 35mm camera kit you bought to document your child’s early years. Although you’ve had a point-and-shoot camera for a while, you wanted to step up to a “real” camera for the kind of quality…
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How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development
How Boom Supersonic uses software to accelerate hardware development
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iPhone 15 Pro facts and estimates
A couple of things I learned and one reasonable guess.
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Instructions per cycle: AMD Zen 2 versus Intel
The performance of a processor is determined by several factors. For example, processors with a higher frequency tend to do more work per unit of time. Physics makes it difficult to produce processors that have higher frequency. Modern processors can execute many instructions per cycle. Thus a 3.4GHz processor has 3.4…
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The Parallel Port
A few days ago, on a certain orange website, I came across an article about an improvised parallel printer capture device . This contains the line:
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How to Write Safe Verilog: Become a PL Troll
Troll? That's how people write Verilog 1 . At my old company, we had a team of formal methods PhD's who wrote a linter that typechecked our code, based on our naming convention. For our chip (which was small for a CPU), building a model (compiling) took about five minutes, running a single short test took ten to…