Hacker News with Generative AI: Computer Hardware

Why Adding a Full Hard Drive Can Make a Computer More Powerful (wired.com)
“Obviously” is a dangerous word, even in scenarios that seem simple. Suppose, for instance, you need to do an important computation. You get to choose between two computers that are almost identical, except that one has an extra hard drive full of precious family photos. It’s natural to assume that the two options are equally good—that an extra drive with no space remaining won’t aid your computation.
An Interview with Oxide's Bryan Cantrill (chipsandcheese.com)
Hello you fine internet folks! Today, we're here at Oxide Computer Company, and I have with me, Bryan.
Google calls Gemma 3 the most powerful AI model you can run on one GPU (theverge.com)
A little over a year after releasing two “open” Gemma AI models built from the same technology behind its Gemini AI, Google is updating the family with Gemma 3.
How 'inference' is driving competition to Nvidia's AI chip dominance (ft.com)
How ‘inference’ is driving competition to Nvidia’s AI chip dominance
3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023) (abortretry.fail)
In 1988, Silicon Graphics made a series of workstation computers that were based upon two pieces of technology: the MIPS CPU and the IRIS graphics system.
Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park (homeip.net)
The Homebrew Computer Club was a legendary early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California.
Progress on Intel and Nvidia GPUs on Raspberry Pi (jeffgeerling.com)
Nvidia GPUs have been running fine on Arm for a while now—I just upgraded the System76 Thelio Astra to an RTX 4080 Super and am testing it now.
Thoughts on Daylight Computer (jon.bo)
When I get to write or read on a screen that’s reflecting the sun back at me instead of needing to be shielded from it, I get a dose of this feeling that this is what all computing could feel like. I want so much more of this in my life.
AMD's game-changing Strix Halo, formerly Ryzen AI Max, poses for new die shots (tomshardware.com)
How to Run DeepSeek R1 Distilled Reasoning Models on RyzenAI and Radeon GPUs (guru3d.com)
AI Designed Computer Chips That the Human Mind Can't Understand (popularmechanics.com)
A new neural network process has designed wireless chips that can outperform existing ones.
DeepSeek's AI breakthrough bypasses industry-standard CUDA, uses PTX (tomshardware.com)
The Future of Microprocessors • Sophie Wilson • Goto 2024 [video] (youtube.com)
100x defect tolerance: How we solved the yield problem (cerebras.ai)
Conventional wisdom in semiconductor manufacturing has long held that bigger chips mean worse yields. Yet at Cerebras, we’ve successfully built and commercialized a chip 50x larger than the largest computer chips – and achieved comparable yields.
Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004) (dwheeler.com)
It's not often you find a classic, but I think I've found a new classic for software and computer hardware developers.
The Missing Nvidia GPU Glossary (modal.com)
We wrote this glossary to solve a problem we ran into working with GPUs here at Modal: the documentation is fragmented, making it difficult to connect concepts at different levels of the stack, like Streaming Multiprocessor Architecture, Compute Capability, and nvcc compiler flags.
FreeBSD Suspend/Resume (wordpress.com)
I have been using FreeBSD on the desktops/laptops since about 20 years now and I have described all that I configured in the FreeBSD Desktop series.
Dell will no longer make XPS computers (arstechnica.com)
Dell won't make Precision or Inspiron PCs anymore, either.
My favourite computer ergonomics hack (jacobvosmaer.nl)
In this post I will talk about my favourite computer ergonomics hack, a DIY device I call "The Beeper".
The DEC VT220 – Design excellence from 1984 [video] (youtube.com)
I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs (gitlab.io)
I dual-boot my desktop between Windows and Linux. Over the past few years, Linux would often crash when I tried to sleep my computer with high RAM usage. Upon waking it would show a black screen with moving cursor, or enter a "vegetative" state with no image on-screen, only responding to magic SysRq or a hard reset. I traced this behavior to an amdgpu driver power/memory management bug, which took over a year to brainstorm and implement solutions for.
Are PC hardware companies driving technology into restricted closed ecosystems? (scottrlarson.com)
I am a Computer Hardware professional. I started working with computer technology in the early eighties. I have seen the evolution of technology starting with closed platforms like the game console era and then the move toward open platforms like the Home Computer Golden Age. In the last 5 or 10 years, I have witnessed technology changes that are slowly moving away from open hardware designs towards hardware that is locked down and can’t be modified by the user.
The RAM Myth (purplesyringa.moe)
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory.
The Power Mac 4400 (512pixels.net)
In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s.
Fujitsu 144-core Arm chip: 2nm and 5nm chiplet, 3D-stacked CPU cores over memory (tomshardware.com)
The Pentium FDIV bug, reverse-engineered (oldbytes.space)
Valve dev fixes 3D lighting, exposes flawed graphics card math (pcgamer.com)
My new POWER Indigo 2 (thejpster.org.uk)
On Mastodon, I recently came across a post by Kestral, with a link to their website:
DIMM vs. Udimm vs. Rdimm vs. Sodimm vs. Cudimm: What's the Difference? (corsair.com)
It’s fair to say that there’s plenty of jargon around computer memory.
Apple drops soldered storage for 2024 Mac Mini (theregister.com)
Apple's Mac Mini product line has been around for a while, and the latest model was launched this month, replete with M4 or M4 Pro chips. It is significantly smaller than its predecessors with Thunderbolt, HDMI, and Ethernet ports on the back and a pair of USB-C ports and a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the front.