Hardware Archive
Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you’re sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can’t quite remember… Biz Davis The PC-98 is exotic, and a little bit mysterious. Of course, thanks to the internet, abundant emulation options, detailed YouTube videos, and more, all the information is out there – but I still find that the PC-98 carries with it an air of mystery.
I also had another set of addressable lights on my desk. While decorating my office for Christmas, I decided to invest some time in connecting them to Home Assistant using the BJ_LED code as a template. It should have been straightforward, right? Well, yes, but also no. Will Cooke We all love a good reverse-engineering story, especially if it involves bricking Christmas lights.
We’re going to cover the Cortex A57 as implemented in the Nintendo Switch’s Nvidia Tegra X1. The Tegra X1 targets a wide range of applications including mobile devices and automobiles. It focuses on providing high GPU performance in a limited power envelope, making it perfect for a portable gaming console like the Switch. Tegra X1 consumes 117,6 mm2 on TSMC’s 20 nm (20 SoC) process and uses a quad core A57 cluster to provide the bulk of its CPU power. Each Cortex A57 core consumes just under 2 mm2 of area, and the quad core A57 cluster takes 13.16 mm2. Clamchowder at Chips and Cheese An old SoC still doing excellent work in the Switch.
This is a website dedicated to a project of mine, Sol-1. Sol-1 is a homebrew CPU and Minicomputer built from 74HC logic. Paulo Constantino Sol-1 has user and kernel priviledge mode, a maximum of 256 processes in parallel, paged virtual memory, serial ports, parallel ports, IDE interface, realtime clock, a DMA channel, and much more. There’s also an accompanying operating system called Solarium.
When I started taking apart the Fairphone 5, I didn’t really expect any surprises. Having dis- and reassembled the previous model several times, I had some experience with Fairphone’s approach to building a smartphone: Modularity paired with easy access to all major components. It’s a winning formula for a repairable smartphone they have iterated on several times now. So, what’s actually different this time around—apart from a new and shiny OLED screen and beefed up cameras? Manuel Haeussermann for iFixit Spoiler: it’s still a 10/10 for repairability, but with new niceties to make the process even more pleasant.
HP knows people have grown to hate printers. It even knows that people hate HP printers. But based on a new marketing campaign the company launched, HP is OK with that—so long as it can convince people that there are worse options out there. The marketing campaign hitting parts of Europe aims to present HP as real and empathetic. The tagline “Made to be less hated” seems to acknowledge people’s frustration with printers. But HP’s a top proponent of the exact sort of money-grabbing, disruptive practices that have turned people against printers. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica I need to print something maybe a few times a year, and I still hate dealing with my printer more than any other tech item in my house. Everything about them is bad, and no cutesy marketing campaign centrered on them being bad is going to change that.
This ambition to escape dependence on foreign technology rests on the shoulders of Huawei and SMIC. The successful launch of the Kirin 9000S injected new vigor into the semiconductor industry, with executives reporting that chip start-ups are seeing a surge in funding. But Huawei’s long-term ambitions are not limited to the markets in China’s orbit. The original nickname for the Kirin 9000S—Charlotte—is a symbol of these hopes. It was named not for an individual, but for the city in North Carolina. Other mobile semiconductors in development are also named internally for US cities, insiders say. Using American names, says one Huawei employee, reflects “our desire to one day reclaim our place in the global supply chain.” It’s amazing how without any official support and using cobbled-together outdated lithography machines, Huawei and SMIC have managed to make a reasonably competitive smartphone SoC. As I keep saying – Chinese chip makers have the full financial might of the Chinese state behind them, and they’ll stop at nothing to reduce their dependence on ASML, TSMC, Intel, AMD, and so on. And they’re making progress.
Chinese chip designer Loongson has finally launched its loong teased “next-generation” 3A6000-series processors based on the LoongArch microarchitecture. IPC tests showed the 3A6000 matching Intel’s Raptor Lake i5-14600K in IPC (instructions per clock), with both chips clocked at 2.5GHz. As well as the headlining x86 compatible processor came the announcement of numerous partner desktop, laptop, and all-in-one machines — plus a consumer-grade motherboard from Asus. It was also entertaining to see a recorded overclocking session, which took an LN2-cooled 3A6000 chip to the current maximum 3 GHz. Many of us are being dismissive now, but give it a few more generations and Chinese PC users won’t be depending on Intel or AMD anymore – and that’s pretty impressive.
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter. According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.” Stuffed after a delicious Thanksgiving meal, I decided to take it apart after the guests had left. It’s a simple single-function device, so I didn’t expect much, but maybe there’s some things to be learned? Turns out there’s a lot to learn, and it’s also incredibly interesting. The note at the end about the legality of this device is also interesting.
Frore Systems is a startup with $116 million in funding, and I’ve shown you its first product before: the AirJet Mini is a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs just nine grams and is thinner than two US quarters stacked together. Each nominally consumes one watt and can remove 4.25 additional watts of heat. Here’s the question: what would happen if Frore used those AirJets to cool a laptop that normally doesn’t have a fan at all? What the company discovered — and I saw firsthand — is that Apple’s M2 chip can run faster, for longer, with Frore’s tech on board. Without it, a 15-inch M2 MacBook Air was like a runner that can’t sprint indefinitely without running out of breath. But with three AirJet Minis, the same laptop got a permanent second wind. Frore’s AirJet coolers have been featured on YouTube channels like LTT as well, and there’s no doubt in my mind these will be the future of laptop cooling, especially in the thinner segment of the laptop market. At least in thin laptops, AirJets are better in virtually every way than fans, and provide far superior cooling compared to fanless designs without adding bulk or noise. The only thing that sucks as an enthusiast is that you can’t really modify an existing laptop yourself. Either this company gets gobbled up by an OEM, or their products will make their way in almost every thin laptop.
Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot of supercomputer throughput, but more supercomputer throughput doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll solve technological problems faster. A detailed look at China’s new supercomputer. The conclusion quoted above is very well supported by the data and research concerning this new supercomputer, and the article is a great read.
A wider bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is asking the Biden administration about its plans to respond to China’s rising use of RISC-V chip design technology after Reuters last month reported on growing concerns about it in both houses of Congress. Now, a broader group of 18 lawmakers that includes five Democrats is asking the Biden administration for how it plans to prevent China “from achieving dominance in … RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of U.S. national and economic security,” according to a letter the group sent to Raimondo and seen by Reuters. A rather shortsighted take, and without even looking I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these lawmakers have chip factories or whatever in their districts.
There’s an alternative universe where we decided to teach the kernel about every piece of hardware it should run on. Fortunately (or, well, unfortunately) we’ve seen that in the ARM world. Most device-specific simply never reaches mainline, and most users are stuck running ancient kernels as a result. Imagine every x86 device vendor shipping their own kernel optimised for their hardware, and now imagine how well that works out given the quality of their firmware. Does that really seem better to you? It’s understandable why ACPI has a poor reputation. But it’s also hard to figure out what would work better in the real world. We could have built something similar on top of Open Firmware instead but the distinction wouldn’t be terribly meaningful – we’d just have Forth instead of the ACPI bytecode language. Longing for a non-ACPI world without presenting something that’s better and actually stands a reasonable chance of adoption doesn’t make the world a better place. Matthew Garrett with the usual paragraphs of wisdom.
This project allows old x86 computers using a classic BIOS to boot from modern NVMe storage attached via PCI(e). It’s a heavily modified version of iPXE (which usually allows for booting from the network), but instead of the network, this code uses a port of the SeaBIOS NVMe implementation to talk to a local NVMe drive. What a useful idea.
Tom’s Hardware reports: MyDrivers has published a review of Loongson’s 3A6000 quad-core CPU, confirming that the chip’s IPC improvements are real. Benchmarks reveal that the 3A6000 enjoys an impressive 60% performance uplift in single-core performance and an even more impressive 2x performance multiplier in multi-core performance over its 3A5000 predecessor. With these improvements, the 3A6000 features performance comparable to a Core i3-10100F, with the IPC performance of a Zen 3 chip. Of course, both Intel’s Comet Lake 10th Gen architecture and AMD’s Zen 3 architecture are now coming up on three years old. They’re nowhere near the top of our list of the best CPUs for gaming or other purposes. But it still represents a step in the right direction. Chinese chipmakers are improving quite fast, but unless they can somehow get access to the latest machinery from the Dutch company ASML, which makes virtually all of the machines capable of producing the chips with the smallest nanometers and is the linchpin in the entire semiconductor industry, they won’t be able to overtake or even match what TSMC and Intel are doing. That being said, I love weird processors, and I’d love to get my hands on one of these to play around with.
I’ve recently been working on putting together a CI system for postmarketOS that will allow us to do proper automated integration testing. That is to say – when someone opens a merge request that modifies our initramfs (for example), we should be able to click a button and some minutes later know that this change doesn’t break any of our important usecases. QEMU absolutely can (and will) get us most of the way there, but at some point we need to just run the same software that we’re running on end user devices. Furthermore, QEMU can’t tell us anything about changes in the kernel that might affect our devices, and manually testing during kernel upgrades, frankly, sucks. So we need a fancy board farm, this is one of those things where folks with the right technical background could build something over the course of a week. But for someone like me it’s full of trial and error and hidden complexity… It’s easy enough to do this with one device – just hack something together, but to be successful we need something reliable and adaptable, that we can adjust to fit our needs in the future, and the wide range of devices we support. Now this is an article you won’t come across very often, as the number of people setting up something like this who can actually talk openly about it – someone doing this for a closed company probably can’t – is probably quite small. A great read.
In 2021, at the height of cryptocurrency mining, Nvidia released the Nvidia CMP 170HX. Designed as a compute-only card to accelerate Ethereum’s memory-hard Ethash Proof-of-Work mining algorithm with its 1500 GB/s HBM2e memory bus, Nvidia implemented the hardware using the GA100 silicon from their Ampere architecture. Thus, the CMP 170HX is essentially a variant of the all-mighty Nvidia A100, Nvidia’s top-performing datacenter GPU at that time. Naturally, the existence of the CMP 170HX raised many questions, including its potential in applications beyond mining. Today, following the discontinuation of Ethash, these $5000 GPUs from closed mining farms are sold on second-hand markets for $400-$500 in China. It’s time to answer these questions. This article contains a basic performance overview, a hardware teardown, a watercooling installation guide, and a repair log. I’m glad smart people are at least trying to turn otherwise useless hardware designed for one of the most brazenly useless applications in human history into something potentially useful.
Arm has traditionally targeted the low end of the power and performance curve, but just as Intel has been looking to expand into the low power market, ARM is looking to expand into higher power and performance segments. The Cortex X series is at the forefront of this effort. Here, we’ll be looking at the Cortex X2 as implemented in the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. This SoC features a single X2 core, alongside four Cortex A510 and three Cortex A710 cores. The Cortex X2 in this SoC typically runs at 2.8 GHz, although lscpu indicates its clock speed can range from 787.2 MHz to 3.187 GHz. An in-depth look at this performance ARM core.
While Qualcomm has become wildly successful in the Arm SoC market for Android smartphones, their efforts to parlay that into success in other markets has eluded them so far. The company has produced several generations of chips for Windows-on-Arm laptops, and while each has incrementally improved on matters, it’s not been enough to dislodge a highly dominant Intel. And while the lack of success of Windows-on-Arm is far from solely being Qualcomm’s fault – there’s a lot to be said for the OS and software – silicon has certainly played a part. To make serious inroads on the market, it’s not enough to produce incrementally better chips – Qualcomm needs to make a major leap in performance. Now, after nearly three years of hard work, Qualcomm is getting ready to do just that. This morning, the company is previewing their upcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoC, their next-generation Arm SoC designed for Windows devices. Based on a brand-new Arm CPU core design from their Nuvia subsidiary dubbed “Oryon”, the Snapdragon X Elite is to be the tip of the iceberg for a new generation of Qualcom SoC designs. Not only is it the heart and soul of Qualcomm’s most important Windows-on-Arm SoC to date, but it will eventually be in smartphones and a whole lot more. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now let’s focus on the Snapdragon X Elite SoC and the Oryon cores underpinning it. Some more in-depth information about Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite, this time from AnandTech.
The device looks like a conventional computer monitor but opens up like a clam. The screen itself is a common flat panel liquid crystal display or LCD, a nearly translucent screen that is typically lit from behind by powered lights. For Eazeye, the backing lights are replaced with a bright white carbon fiber panel that can tip backwards up to 45 degrees. The panel bounces ambient light from the monitor’s surroundings through the LCD screen, which, under the right lighting conditions, provides enough illumination for the screen to be used like normal. I can see this working quite well in certain environments, like offices and well-lit rooms. It sure is a very interesting idea, and I like the design, too.
