Once the domain of esoteric scientific and business computing, floating point calculations are now practically everywhere. From video games to large language models and kin, it would seem that a processor without floating point capabilities is pretty much a brick at this point. Yet the truth is that integer-based approximations can be good enough to […]
Until the late 1990s, the concept of a 3D accelerator card was something generally associated with high-end workstations. Video games and kin would run happily on the CPU in one’s desktop system, with later extensions like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, etc. providing a significant performance boost for games that supported it. As 3D accelerator cards (colloquially […]
Every few years or so, a development in computing results in a sea change and a need for specialized workers to take advantage of the new technology. Whether that’s COBOL in the 60s and 70s, HTML in the 90s, or SQL in the past decade or so, there’s always something new to learn in the […]
For those of you longing for better gaming on an Apple Silicon device, Asahi Linux is here to help. While Apple’s own line of CPUs are relatively new kids on the block, they’ve still been around for four years now, giving hackers ample time to dissect their innards. The team behind Asahi Linux has now […]
The Commodore 64 was quite a machine in its time, though a modern assessment would say that it’s severely lacking in the graphical department. [Vossi] has whipped up a bit of an upgrade for the C64 and C128, in the form of a graphics expansion card running Yamaha hardware. As you might expect, the expansion […]
Have you wanted to get into GPU programming with CUDA but found the usual textbooks and guides a bit too intense? Well, help is at hand in the form of a series of increasingly difficult programming ‘puzzles’ created by [Sasha Rush]. The first part of the simplification is to utilise the excellent NUMBA python JIT […]
A single board computer on a desk is fine for quick demos but for taking it into the wild (or even the rest of the house) you’re going to want a little more safety from debris, ESD, and drops. As SBCs get more useful this becomes an increasingly relevant problem to solve, plus a slick […]
Synthetic-aperture radar, in which a moving radar is used to simulate a very large antenna and obtain high-resolution images, is typically not the stuff of hobbyists. Nobody told that to [Henrik Forstén], though, and so we’ve got this bicycle-mounted synthetic-aperture radar project to marvel over as a result. Neither the electronics nor the math involved […]
When shopping online, there’s plenty of great deals out there on modern graphics hardware. Of course, if you’re like [Dawid] and bought a GTX1050 Ti for $48 from Wish, you probably suspect it’s too good to be true. Of course, you’d be correct. [Dawid] notes from the outset that the packaging the card ships in […]