Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 391 posts.

Hardware & Electronics
305

NEC’s Forgotten FPUs

NEC had a cross license agreement with Intel dating back to April of 1976 that allowed each company to make/sell products based on each others patents. This was particularly important in the 1970’s as having a viable ‘second source’ for your designs was considered critical for it to be viable in the market. This was…

317

Conway's Game of Life on FPGA

When learning a new programming language, I like having a well defined yet non-trivial problem to solve. Conway’s Game of Life (GoL) fits this definition. It has enough depth to uncover various tradeoffs. So naturally, when I picked up Chisel hardware description language (HDL), I wanted to build Game of Life in FPGA…

321

Implant.ARM.iLOBleed.a

HP servers provide a management module called iLO (a.k.a. Integrated Lights-Out), which turns on as soon as the power cable is connected, loading a full-blown proprietary operating system. This module has full access to all the firmware, hardware, software, and operating system installed on the server. In addition to…

324

Tesla Project Dojo Overview

A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly…

327

Where’s the Apple M2?

DPReview just published Apple still hasn't made a truly “Pro” M1 Mac – so what’s the holdup? Following on the good performance and awesome power efficiency of the Apple M1 , there’s a hungry background rumble in Mac-land along the lines of “Since the M1 is an entry-level chip, the next CPU is gonna blow everyone’s…