Although we can already buy commercial transceiver solutions that allow us to use PCIe devices like GPUs outside of a PC, these use an encapsulating protocol like Thunderbolt rather than straight PCIe. The appeal of [Sylvain Munaut]’s project is thus that it dodges all that and tries to use plain PCIe with off-the-shelf QSFP transceivers. […]
Nothing ever made is truly perfect and indeed, CPU architectures like x86, RISC-V, ARM, and PowerPC all have their own upsides and downsides. Today, I aim to make an architecture that learns from all these mistakes and improves architecture design for everyone. I’ve consulted with many people opinionated on the matter, both from a software […]
As a clear sign of how desperate these RAMpocalypse times are becoming, we have [PortalRunner] over on YouTube contemplating how to run modern-day software on a PC that has no sticks of that most precious PC-related commodity that is not printer ink. What fallbacks do we have when purchasing some sticks of DDR5 is inconceivable […]
Recently [ETA Prime] felt a bit underwhelmed by the raw performance of his MacBook Neo when it came to running for extended periods under full load, such as when gaming. Thus the obvious solution is to mildly over-engineer a cooling solution that takes care of issues like thermal throttling. The Apple MacBook Neo with its […]
One of the most common ways of comparing the processing power of some microcontroller or older smartphone in a fantastical way was to say that they had more processing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer. While this sounds impressive on the surface, the AGC was the first integrated circuit computer ever built and is predictably […]
Sometimes you really need to know what the weather is doing, but you don’t want to look at your phone. For times like those, this neat weather display from [Jordan] might come in handy with its throwback retro vibe. The build is based around the ESP32-2432S028—also known as the CYD, or Cheap Yellow Display, for the […]
The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good […]
If you’re at all familiar with digital computing, you’ll know that computers represent everything in binary values of one and zero. Except that’s not technically the only way to do computing! You can use any numerical system you like if you build your hardware to suit, as [Jeroen Brinkman’s] ternary adder demonstrates. As you might […]
After the previous attempt of running a PC off AA cells got a lot of comments, [ScuffedBits] decided to do the scientifically responsible thing and re-ran the experiment with all the peer-reviewed commentary in mind. Although we noted with the previous experiment that only alkaline cells were used, [ScuffedBits] rectified this by stating that both […]