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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.

2026
39

How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?

A startup called Taalas , recently released an ASIC chip running Llama 3.1 8B (3/6 bit quant) at an inference rate of 17,000 tokens per seconds. That's like writing around 30 A4 sized pages in one second. They claim it's 10x cheaper in ownership cost than GPU based inference systems and is 10x less electricity hog…

44

The Hackintosh Reborn

Almost a decade ago, I released a hackintosh guide on running macOS 10.14 through a VM with an x86 host. A "Hackintosh" is the feat of running macOS on non-Apple hardware, and has a history dating back to the late 1980s. At the time KVM and PCI

47

It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value) is the most important attribute. Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's…

50

My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii

So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…

60

I'm a USB-C Maximalist

My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets. It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my…