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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.

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1951

Why Does My Remote Control Need to Know My Location?

Here's an interesting user-hostile pattern which could easily be avoided if programmers and business-people thought like regular humans. I have a Pioneer / Onkyo sound system. It's pretty nice and comes with a (not too crappy) Android app to let me remote control it. One day, the app updated itself. The changelog was…

1953

The Modos Paper Monitor

At Modos, our mission is to help you live a healthy life by creating technology that respects your time, attention, and well-being. Today, we'd like to introduce the Modos Paper Monitor: an open-hardware standalone portable monitor made for reading and writing, especially for people who need to stare at the display…

1955

Oxide at Home: Propolis Says Hello

So Oxide is making some cool stuff huh? Big metal boxes with lots of computer in them. Servers as they should be! Too bad I can’t afford to buy one for myself… but wait, they’re open-sourcing the software they’re writing to do it. Mom said we can have Oxide at Home!

1960

Towards a More Open Secure Element Chip

“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…

1963

Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V

A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate ) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.

1966

The Age of Nvidia

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1969

Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning

Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…

1976

Building my childhood dream PC

In 1993, I was 14 and already passionate about computers [1] . That year my mother managed to buy a PC for the household. That was quite an effort for a single mother. My brother Aurelien and I spent every waking hour on this machine, staying up all night on weekends.

1978

Why Intel will never let owners control the ME

The Intel Management Engine is an auxillary microprocessor embedded into modern Intel x86 CPUs or chipsets. 1 It runs an Intel-signed proprietary binary blob. Due to code signing restrictions enforced by the hardware, it cannot be modified or replaced by the user. (AMD x86 CPUs have a similar auxillary microprocessor…