Hardware Archive
For years, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips for Windows PCs, and for years, those chips’ performance have failed to dislodge Intel’s or AMD’s chips to any significant degree. Its latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (and the closely related Microsoft SQ3) appears in just two consumer PCs, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with 5G and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s Gen 1. But that may be changing. Nearly three years ago, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was mainly working on server processors, but the company’s founders and many of its employees had also been involved in developing the A- and M-series Apple Silicon processors that have all enabled the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to achieve their enviable blend of performance and battery life. Today, Qualcomm is formally announcing the fruit of the Nuvia acquisition: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core, 4 nm chip that will compete directly with Intel’s Core processors and AMD Ryzen chips in PCs—and, less directly, Apple’s M2 and M3-series processors for Macs. We’ve heard a lot of these claims over the years, and to be honest, I’m a little tired of promises. Show me the goods. Apple did.
Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Nvidia is such a natural partner for Microsoft when it comes to ARM chips, I’m surprised it’s taking them this long to jump back into the ring after the failed Surface RT. AMD making ARM chips is fascinating and surprising, though, but I guess they don’t feel they can compete on performance-per-watt with x86.
TalosSpace has more details on the upcoming, recently announced OpenPOWER machines from Raptor. I asked Timothy Pearson at Raptor about the S1’s specs, and he said it’s a PCIe 5.0 DDR5 part running from the high 3GHz to low 4GHz clock range, with the exact frequency range to be determined. (OMI-based RAM not required!) The S1 is bi-endian, SMT-4 and will support at least two sockets with an 18-core option confirmed for certain and others to be evaluated. This compares very well with the Power10, which is also PCIe 5.0, also available as SMT-4 (though it has an SMT-8 option), and also clocks somewhere between 3.5GHz and 4GHz. S1 embeds its own BMC, the X1 (or variant), which is (like Arctic Tern) a Microwatt-based ISA 3.1 core in Lattice ECP5 and iCE40 FPGAs with 512MB of DDR3 RAM, similar to the existing ASpeed BMC on current systems. X1 will in turn replace the existing Lattice-based FPGA in Arctic Tern as “Antarctic Tern,” being a functional descendant of the same hardware, and should fill the same roles as a BMC upgrade for existing Raptor systems as well as the future BMC for the next generation systems and a platform in its own right. The X1 has “integrated 100% open root of trust” as you would expect for such a system-critical part. This all sounds like exactly the kind of things I wanted to hear, and these details make me sufficiently excited about the near future of Raptor’s OpenPOWER workstations. The only little bit of less pleasant news is that the machines won’t be available until late 2024, so we’ve got a little wait ahead of us.
Well, this is a pleasant surprise and a massive coincidence. Besides that BMC-focused press release, Raptor Computing Systems tweeted out that they are working on “next generation of high performance, fully owner controlled systems! Built using the open POWER ISA 3.1, these new machines will be direct upgrades for existing POWER9 systems.” Power ISA 3.1 aligns with new functionality IBM introduced in Power10. This is fantastic news, and it seems they’re sidestepping the IBM POWER10 binary blobs issue by relying on a different chip vendor altogether, Solid Silicon, who announced an OpenPOWER CPU that will be used in Raptor’s upcoming systems, the S1. It seems unlikely to me that the S1 will be an entirely new, unique processor, so perhaps it’s a slightly modified IBM POWER10 design without the binary blobs. I’m incredibly excited about this news, and can’t wait to hear what they’re planning.
It doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it’s developing a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear” chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to “commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.” For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone’s first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it’s the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out “will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance.” This is the biggest endorsement of RISC-V yet, and could catapult the platform to mainstream popularity pretty quickly. I do hope Qualcomm isn’t going to wrap their chip in a load of proprietary nonsense making them needlessly complex to support now and in the future, but I won’t be surprised if that hope turns out to be futile.
System76, the leading US-based Linux computer and keyboard manufacturer, made several new changes to their desktop line in order to optimize AI workloads and other fields reliant on heavy component use. The main focus: An airflow optimization that prevents throttling, putting their desktops at the top of performance charts. A new starter desktop, Thelio Spark, will also debut as a productivity desktop for everyday users. System76 seems to have redesigned the thermal solution on the machines, and judging by the various photos I’ve seen on Mastodon, they look good. System76 also sells the cases for the Thelio separately – they’re slightly different, though – and the company is sending me that case for review, and I’m curious to finally take a closer look. The Thelio Spark, the new kid in town, brings the Thelio line to a more affordable audience, with more affordable specifications. Of course, you’re always going to be paying a prebuilt tax, as well as the custom case tax, but if you want to ensure a plug-and-play Linux experience that isn’t just parts in a random case you can get anywhere else, there aren’t a lot of other options in the market.
Cold War–era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. But then there was Yugoslavia’s Galaksija, a very inspired bid to put a computer into the hands of regular comrades. The Galaksija is a Z80-based, 8-bit DIY machine, cleverly designed so that its bill of materials meshed exactly with what a Yugoslavian was able to import from Western Europe. During its brief heyday, thousands were built, leading to commercially assembled Galaksijas finding their way into homes and schools across the country. And now you can try this scrappy machine for yourself. There’s a huge world of computing to discover in former USSR countries, former USSR satellite states, and other countries that delicately straddled the west and east such as former Yugoslavia, many of which most people in the west have never heard of. While many of them may not have been competitive with what the Americans and Europeans were building, that doesn’t mean they’re not interesting or that there’s nothing to learn from the approaches the engineers took.
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900, as well as the Type-R codec, which renders the R700 capable of performing real-time SP recordings with Sony’s last evolution of ATRAC1. I bet the market for hacking the best music format of all time is small these days, but this is still incredibly cool.
Lenovo is forecasting that the vast majority of its devices will be repairable by 2025 – as will the repair parts themselves – but it is not intending to specify where customers should have their kit fixed. “On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment.” He added: “More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, by the customer or by the channel and we are enabling this with a design for serviceability kind of approach.” That’s excellent news, and I hope it’s a promise they’ll keep. The right to repair movement is scoring win after win lately, and it seems the tide has really turned on this one. It’s not just nerds anymore – regular people, common media, and even larger companies are beating the drum now.
The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of “design”. Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly “owing” their hardware. It’s a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220. I don’t agree with the author, but he’s also not wrong. Luckily, things do seem to be improving somewhat, thanks to Framework being a decent success. Other OEMs are starting to make some noise about repairability, as are lawmakers around the world. We might be getting a new X220.
Today, we’re delighted to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi 5, coming at the end of October. Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling (plus your local taxes), virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded, delivering a no-compromises user experience. Raspberry Pi 5 comes with new features, it’s over twice as fast as its predecessor, and it’s the first Raspberry Pi computer to feature silicon designed in-house here in Cambridge, UK. While I personally think there are more interesting alternatives to the Pi, there’s no doubt the Pi is the most compatible and most popular of these small board computers, and a big upgrade like this is definitely welcome – assuming they can actually stock these at fair prices at the end of October, when the fifth iteration of the Pi actually launches.
Philips Hue products are about to get a whole lot worse – even the ones you already own. Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can’t access your stuff. But that’s just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it’s getting worse. It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage “cloud” “integration” involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you. This should be illegal.
Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro’s “system on a chip” (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones. The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei’s own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate’s development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer look at the main chip. I could design my own processor cores too if had the means of a genocidal, totalitarian superpower.
However almost every “circle” you can see in printed media (and most purely digital ones) are not, in fact, circles. Why is this? Since roughly the mid 80s all “high quality” print jobs have been done either in PostScript or, nowadays almost exclusively, in PDF. They use the same basic drawing model, which does not have a primitive for circles (or circle arcs). The only primitives they have are straight line segments, rectangles and Bézier curves. None of these can be used to express a circle accurately. You can only do an approximation of a circle but it is always slightly eccentric. The only way to create a proper circle is to have a raster image like the one above. Shouldn’t be that big of a deal, right? I’m sure nobody is using PDF for anything that would require the kind of precision needed for a perfect circle, like CAD drawings for laser cutters and similar machinery. Right? Again one might ask whether this has any practical impact. For this case, again, probably not. But did you know that one of the cases PDF is being considered (and, based on Internet rumors, is already being used) is as an interchange format for CAD drawings? Now it suddenly starts mattering. If you have any component where getting a really accurate circle shape is vital (like pistons and their holes), suddenly all your components are slightly misshaped. Which would not be fun. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Pineapple ONE is a functioning (macro) processor, that is based on an open-source architecture RISC-V. This architecture is becoming very popular these days, and it is well, open-source, so we chose to build a cpu only out of discrete, off-the-shelf components. You heard it right, there is no FPGA nor any microcontroller, there are just logic gates and memories. Our goal is to prove that designing a “modern” CPU isn’t that hard, so we have released our schematics and made it open source as well. You can check out our GitHub repository for more information. If there would be enough interest, maybe we could make a DIY kit, so anybody interested with soldering skills would be able to make their own Pineapple ONE! Don’t think you can run Crysis on this though – it runs at 500 kHz, has a 512 kB program memory and 512 kB of RAM, and a black and white graphics card with 200×150 pixels. It’s no speed demon, but who cares – this is quite the feat.
2 years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin (GG) by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. GG addresses this problem by using techniques like scan doubling (for CGA) and increasing the vertical refresh rate (for MDA) then outputing to a relatively newer but still old VGA port. As neat as this project is, it does have a few limitations that the author tried to address: it doesn’t have modern outputs, which is becoming problematic with monitor makers no longer adding VGA ports, and it can’t display on two outputs at once. This article details his solutions.
In the recent past I have discussed the Book 8088 and the Hand 386, which are newly made vintage computing systems. I concluded that those products, although not uninteresting were rather flawed. The Book 8088 was by far the more disappointing of the two devices. I have also been made aware of a project which tries to fulfill a similar niche, the NuXT motherboard. The NuXT is an 8088-based motherboard you can buy brand new and can really fill that IBM PC-clone hole in your vintage collection. While I do not own one of these, I have read and seen enough about it to give my thoughts on whether this product would be right for you. The NuXT 2.0 looks like an incredible motherboard for fans of the original IBM PC and its clones – especially with the prices of working original machines going through the roof as supply dwindles and demand skyrockets.
As best I can tell, there is no broad consensus on how large a kilobyte is. Some say that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes while others say it’s 1024 bytes. Others are ambiguous. This also means that the industry does not agree on the size of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on. Not entirely new information to most of us, I would presume, but in my head canon a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, even though that technically doesn’t make any sense from a metric perspective. To make matters worse, as soon as we get into the gigabytes and terabytes, I tend to back to thinking in terms of thousands again since it just makes more sense. The kibibytes and cohorts are a way to properly distance the base 2 system from the base 10 one, but I’ve never heard anyone in day-to-day speech make that distinctions outside of really nerdy circles.
ARM had a slow start on its way to move beyond microcontrollers and enter the high performance market. ARM Ltd made the Cortex A9, their first out-of-order core, in 2007. Throughout the 2010s, they gradually made bigger, higher power, and higher performance cores. Pushing performance boundaries isn’t easy, but today, ARM’s cores can be a viable alternative to Intel and AMD’s offerings in the server market. RISC-V started much later, but has seen faster growth. Berkerly’s BOOM core had grown into a sizeable out-of-order design by 2016. Now, SiFive’s P870 looks a lot like ARM’s Cortex X series in terms of reordering capacity, core width, and execution units. It might not be a match for ARM’s best, since the load/store queues look a bit small and vector execution throughput is a bit weak. But from looking at P870, SiFive’s ambitions are clear. They want a chunk of ARM’s pie. RISC-V is getting better and better at a rapid pace. The software side of the story still has a long way to go, but that, too, is getting better. Exciting.
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far. Exactly what it says on the tin.
