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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,806 posts.

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4591

Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)

A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac . It’s a very basic motherboard which doesn’t appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn’t pass up on the deal, especially with the…

4595

Glitching a microcontroller to unlock the bootloader

Back in the summer I was lucky enough to finagle my boss into letting me take Dmitry Nedospasov ( @nedos )’s hardware hacking training . In it I cut my teeth on using an FPGA to interface with target hardware. After implementing a UART we implemented a module that could parse part of Apple’s OneWire, used to negotiate…

4604

ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…

4607

Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

I bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark! It's actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient. It basically just has an ARM CPU, a decent NVIDIA GPU (with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5070), 128 GB of unified memory, and a 4 TB SSD.

4619

BliKVM PCIe puts a computer in your computer

This is the BliKVM PCIe, a full computer on a PCI Express card. This is an IP KVM (Internet Protocol Keyboard-Video-Mouse) that can be put inside another computer or server. Most server motherboards already have remote 'lights-out' management functionality built in. Most frequently this is referred to as IPMI…