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Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference
We’re introducing Ironwood, our seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) designed to power the age of generative AI inference.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 459 posts.
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Building the mouse Logitech won't make
Modifying the MX Ergo trackball mouse to fix its micro-USB charging, loud switches, and bloated software issues.
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TPU Deep Dive
I've been working with TPUs a lot recently and it's fun to see how they had such different design philosophies compared to GPUs.
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My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server
How I turned an old iPhone 8 into a solar-powered OCR server using Apple's Vision framework. Running 24/7 off-grid, processing thousands of images.
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Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users.
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Why it's so hard to build a jet engine
Civilization's toughest technical challenges are those that require extraordinary (and constantly improving) performance to be delivered at a low cost.
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BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive
2021 > PHEV BMW iBMUCP PHEV Post-Crash Recovery — When EU engineering becomes a synonym for “unrepairable” + “generating waste”. If you own a BMW PHEV — or if you’re an insurance company — every pothole, every curb impact, small or large incideng and even any rabbit jumping out of a bush represents a potential…
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Building my own solar power system
Well it happened. PG&E has dropped the facade of necessary rate increases because of system upgrades, and they have come out and said what…
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IO Devices and Latency
Take an interactive journey through the history of IO devices, and learn how IO device latency affects performance.
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Pixel 10 Phones
Learn more about the new Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10 Pro XL phones announced today at Made by Google.
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An interactive-speed Linux computer made of only 3 8-pin chips
Dmitry.GR: Interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips
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Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price
A few months ago, I upgraded my M4 Mac mini from 1 to 2 TB of internal storage, using a then-$269 DIY upgrade kit from ExpandMacMini. At the time, there was no option for upgrading the M4 Pro Mac mini, despite it also using a user-replaceable, socketed storage drive. But the folks at M4-SSD reached out and asked if…
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The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State
Thanks in part to your support, the right to repair is now law in Washington.Gov. Bob Ferguson signed two bills guaranteeing Washingtonians' right to access tools, parts, and information so they can fix personal electronics, appliances, and wheelchairs. This is the epitome of common-sense...
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Vanishing from Hyundai’s data network
Finding and disabling the cellular modem for BlueLink in the Kona EV
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TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term
I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.
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Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates
In addition to the VGA donut , I submitted two other entries in the Tiny Tapeout 8 demo competition , where you submit a "tiny" ASIC design (room for about 4000 logic gates) that outputs 2-bit RGB to a VGA port and 1-bit audio to a speaker. One was a an old school C64/Amiga intro type of thing, and the other was a…
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It's a DE9, not a DB9 (but we know what you mean)
You have been misusing the D-sub connector terminology, and we're guilty of it, too.
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iMac G4(K)
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
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Raspberry Pi 500+
A complete desktop PC built into a high-quality mechanical keyboard, with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD for high performance under heavy load.
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Branch Privilege Injection: Exploiting branch predictor race conditions
Branch Privilege Injection ( CVE-2024-45332 ) brings back the full might of branch target injection attacks (Spectre-BTI) on Intel. Intel’s hardware mitigations against these types of attacks have held their ground for almost 6 years. In our work, we demonstrate how these mitigations can be broken due to a race…
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But good sir, what is electricity?
A quick look at the physics of conductors, insulators, and electric charges.
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Learn electricity and electronics fundamentals without taking a formal course
A website supporting the books of author Simon Monk.
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Things you can do with diodes
Paying homage to the component we usually don't think about.
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I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework
A personal comparison of battery life between my MacBook M1 Pro and Framework 13
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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot
Introducing Figure 03
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Using eSIMs with devices that only have a physical SIM slot via a 9eSIM SIM car
Do you have a phone, tablet, or laptop (or, well, any device…) which will only take a physical SIM, but with which you’d like to use eSIMs?
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Things I would have told myself before building an autorouter
Important lessons from trying to build the world's fastest autorouter for about a year
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How big a solar battery do I need to store all my home's electricity?
I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London. On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer and we need to buy power in winter. So here's my question: How big a…
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How to Think About GPUs
We love TPUs at Google, but GPUs are great too. This chapter takes a deep dive into the world of GPUs – how each chip works, how they're networked together, and what that means for LLMs, especially compared to TPUs. While there are a multitude of GPU architectures from NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and others, here we will…