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ConanTheLibrarian posted:What are some worthwhile sites for written articles these days? Defector They are also worker owned. e: oh, you mean tech-related stuff. whoops. my bad. Kibner fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jan 14, 2024 13:21
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ConanTheLibrarian posted:What are some worthwhile sites for written articles these days? I'd love to hear other people's recommendations, because it is dire out there now. I'd bet most of these are already familiar to y'all if you've been reading about computers on the internet for a while, but I feel like I might as well list them. The best stuff is still just people's blogs writing about what they're passionate about, like these:
None of those really try to keep up with the news, though. When Raymond mentions hardware it's typically problems with something that was super common and is now widely deployed, and Daniel Lemire absolutely loves AVX-512, which means that he's on a 4 year old laptop because Intel's client division is such a mess that 12th, 13th, and 14th generation parts don't support AVX-512 despite the fact that 10th, 11th, and that one weird 8th gen part, the i3-8121U supported AVX-512. Some bigger corporate publisher sites that still have decent written articles are Digital Foundry, which does written articles to accompany some but not all of their videos. For generalist consumer hardware stuff, I've found that https://www.techpowerup.com/ has stayed mediocre as Tom's and Anandtech became miserable shadows of their former selves. Another old site that has managed to stay mediocre rather than degenerating into ad-ridden drivel is El Reg: https://www.theregister.com/. What else should I be reading? Edit: Oh yeah, Phoronix is still around and doing their thing uncorrupted, which is posting absolutely every Linux-related press release that happens and running their benchmark suite on any hardware that gets sent their way.
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Jan 14, 2024 17:07
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don't bother following lemire on twitter though, he's from the jordan peterson school of canadian academia
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Jan 14, 2024 17:23
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I still like ArsTechnica but Phoronix is also a fav. Ars has less technical stuff than before it seems, I am not sure if the deep dive guy is still there.
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Jan 14, 2024 18:40
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The pedo guy is gone at least
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Jan 14, 2024 20:10
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Bunch of microprocessor guys and Linus Torvalds hang out on the forums at https://www.realworldtech.com but the main site is a shadow of what it once was. Chips and Cheese feels like its spiritual successor. Ars’ deep dive guys are long gone (which included the guy mentioned above). A number of people left to form Tech Report when Ars shifted to become more mainstream; many of TR’s people left to join industry and it too withered. phongn fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jan 18, 2024 |
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Jan 18, 2024 23:50
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The economist isn't tech focused but they do write about it a lot
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Jan 19, 2024 01:52
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also they think the only thing Pinochet did wrong was let the Chicago Boys run the Chilean economy instead of Oxbridge economists
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Jan 19, 2024 08:33
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Twerk from Home posted:Edit: Oh yeah, Phoronix is still around and doing their thing uncorrupted, which is posting absolutely every Linux-related press release that happens and running their benchmark suite on any hardware that gets sent their way. You say 'their' but assuming you're not doing a gender thing there it's literally always been one dude, afaik.
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Jan 19, 2024 16:16
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Hadlock posted:RISC-V is almost exclusively supported by Linux, so it's (probably) just a RISC-V Linux binary and talks to the kernel for audio video bindings. Presumably whatever custom kernel was compiled for the device should have adequate GPU support and whatnot. Modern GPU support is almost entirely in userland, the kernel just handles device arbitration and sending shaders etc to the GPU compiled by a .so file in userspace. It has an 'unknown Imagination GPU' - if Imagination has done a RISC-V userland driver for it, cool, though I wonder why they spent that much effort on it (and how much effort they spent). Otherwise you are getting a bare, unaccelerated framebuffer.
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Jan 19, 2024 17:33
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Hadlock posted:RISC-V is almost exclusively supported by Linux, so it's (probably) just a RISC-V Linux binary and talks to the kernel for audio video bindings. Presumably whatever custom kernel was compiled for the device should have adequate GPU support and whatnot. Ubuntu has had official support for RISC-V since the April 2020 release so presumably by the time this ships RISC-V will have been mainline for 4 years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZsBp0Gbg_8 The unmatched is also supported.
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Jan 20, 2024 10:31
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Haven't had as much time as I've wanted to post ITT re: some weird stuff and reply to others, but, just out of curiosity: anyone else here used or messed around with Parallax Propeller 1 or Propeller 2 parts?
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Jan 31, 2024 08:25
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I used to follow this project: https://latchup.blogspot.com/ https://jbush001.github.io/, a 32bit RISC processor with a 16 float wide SIMD FPU. There was a some work on a v2 version with a ring bus and multicore and even a hw triangle rasterizer, which was later removed. He even had a LLVM port. The project is now dead, but the blog was a nice read as far a I remember.
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Feb 18, 2024 22:46
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I was really looking forward to SiFive’s P550 board, but it sounds like that was quietly canceled or is stuck in development hell, and possibly been replaced by a P650 design that hasn’t been formally announced… In terms of non-x86 motherboards, what’s available in a uATX/ITX form factor with a PCIe x16 slot besides the Hifive Unmatched? The Milk-V Oasis would be perfect if it had an expansion slot, the Pioneer is wild overkill for what I’m looking for, and a lot of ARM boards have limitations in their PCIe root complex that make GPUs fraught to impossible. Is there another option I’m missing? I’ve already got a Power9, but that’s my main machine and I’m an inveterate tinkerer.
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Feb 20, 2024 23:20
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Hasturtium posted:the Pioneer is wild overkill for what I’m looking for as I understand these things, you’ve found your solution unrelated: did anyone collate all the RISC-V bashing from this thread anywhere? I’d love to have it in one place
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Feb 21, 2024 02:23
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Hasturtium posted:I was really looking forward to SiFive’s P550 board, but it sounds like that was quietly canceled or is stuck in development hell, and possibly been replaced by a P650 design that hasn’t been formally announced… In terms of non-x86 motherboards, what’s available in a uATX/ITX form factor with a PCIe x16 slot besides the Hifive Unmatched? The Milk-V Oasis would be perfect if it had an expansion slot, the Pioneer is wild overkill for what I’m looking for, and a lot of ARM boards have limitations in their PCIe root complex that make GPUs fraught to impossible. Is there another option I’m missing? I’ve already got a Power9, but that’s my main machine and I’m an inveterate tinkerer. I would not expect much in the way of tangible product out of SiFive in the near future considering they fired all their engineering staff last October.
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Feb 21, 2024 03:18
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Kazinsal posted:I would not expect much in the way of tangible product out of SiFive in the near future considering they fired all their engineering staff last October. That is a huge bummer but I appreciate you telling me. I didn't realize their problems were quite that massive. So, looking into options more, my best bets would appear to be: * A Loongson 3A5000 sold on AliExpress for about $400, offering the performance of an i5-750 or so and the fun and magic of an ISA that's more like MIPS64le than anything else, but with scattershot documentation, a community that largely speaks a language I simply do not know, and a toolchain that's undoubtedly worse than what I've worked with on x86, arm64, and ppc64le. Apparently you can get a test build of Debian running on it if you update the firmware... however that's accomplished. * A Sifive Hifive Unmatched, which is still being sold on Mouser for the princely sum of $740. That'd net me 16GB RAM and a motherboard that does all the things I'd hope for, but a SIMDless CPU that dukes it out with a Raspberry Pi 3. The raw speed would be infuriating compared to modern desktop class anything, but for tinkering it might be fine... * A Milk-V Pioneer, which would cost $1500 before I got a case, power supply, or drives to thwock into it and make it go. Plus it's still up for pre-order. I'll definitely keep a beady eye open for reviews, but for that kind of money I could grab an education-discounted Mac Studio and kick every other computer's rear end in my house. It's better outside of x86 than it's been for ages, but there's still a long way to go. Here's hoping for more interesting things to come. Edit: Well, heck, I just checked the official announcement and it looks like the Milk-V Oasis has a PCIe x16 slot after all. Looks like my ship is coming in near the end of the year… Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 05:03
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Hasturtium posted:It's better outside of x86 than it's been for ages, but there's still a long way to go. Here's hoping for more interesting things to come. get some FPGAs and switch ISAs whenever you want!
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Feb 21, 2024 05:07
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Hasturtium posted:That is a huge bummer but I appreciate you telling me. I didn't realize their problems were quite that massive. They're not (scroll down to the last update). They cut 20% of jobs across all functions to focus on their key markets. They have funding for years so they're not about to collapse.
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Feb 21, 2024 09:41
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Subjunctive posted:unrelated: did anyone collate all the RISC-V bashing from this thread anywhere? I’d love to have it in one place Here's two links I've collected, one old and one from a month ago. https://gist.github.com/erincandescent/8a10eeeea1918ee4f9d9982f7618ef68 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3639445 The second isn't exclusively about RISC-V and contains little outright bashing, but given who the author is, when he critiques RISC-V, it hits hard.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:01
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BobHoward posted:Here's two links I've collected, one old and one from a month ago. Thanks, the erincandescent one is something I’ve been looking for specifically.
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Feb 23, 2024 13:59
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That ACM article was a fantastic read. Thanks!
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Feb 23, 2024 15:14
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Kibner posted:That ACM article was a fantastic read. Thanks! Check out his older one he links at the end, "There is no such thing as a general purpose processor". That's really good too
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Feb 23, 2024 17:33
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:Check out his older one he links at the end, "There is no such thing as a general purpose processor". That's really good too I think his most interesting work is on CHERI, though.
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Feb 23, 2024 22:25
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:David Chisnall has some really good articles for the association of computing mastery, including when he (in)famously wrote about how C is not a low-level language and how there's no such thing as a general-purpose processor - both of which sparked quite a lot of conversation. Are those conversations collected or summarised somewhere?
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Feb 25, 2024 12:17
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ConanTheLibrarian posted:Are those conversations collected or summarised somewhere? I’d recommend marc.info for finding mailing lists about it, though
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Feb 25, 2024 18:00
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I found some more Inmos T805 Transputer CPUs in a box in my office along with an Inmos VMEbus board fully decked out with CPUs-less TRAMs also a couple decked out with TRAMs that do have CPUs installed I think it may be a signal from past me to write some Occam-2 or something
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Feb 26, 2024 09:06
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https://www.gsmarena.com/snapdragon_8_gen_4_launch_confirmed-news-61797.php qualcomms breaking the stalemate of everyone besides apple just gluing reference cores together by going back to making their own cores whether they're any good remains to be seen
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Feb 29, 2024 22:39
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The Oryon CPU was designed by a team led by Gerard Williams III, Apple's former CPU lead. He left Apple after A14/M1 because he wanted to make a server chip using Apple's CPU cores, but got shot down by other Apple execs. So he founded a startup, Nuvia, and managed to recruit some of Apple's CPU engineers. But then he accepted Qualcomm's offer to buy Nuvia and now he's back in consumer products. There's lots of hot takes out there on this, people think losing Williams to QC means QC's going to blow Apple away. However, great man theory sucks. CPU design teams are a lot more than one senior manager, or even the subset of engineers he got to leave with him. There's also all the intellectual property - Nuvia obviously didn't get to legally take any of Apple's, and a lot of Apple's success during Williams' tenure resulted from steady incremental improvements rather than every CPU generation being a clean slate. Starting over from scratch implies a lot of extra work. I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of the brains departed with some  too, just because this always happens to some extent. However, shipping any of it in Qualcomm products is risky, as Apple absolutely will be dissecting everything to see if there's any excuse to sue. They already tried suing Williams for various things, and that was when Nuvia wasn't even going to be a direct competitor.So there's reasons to expect that QC's new CPUs should be good. Can they beat M3 or M4? I have doubts; reaching parity with something as refined as Apple's Arm core in a single generation is a tall order even if Williams got literally all the key people.
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Mar 1, 2024 10:50
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Well, Nuvia was interesting because it wasn’t just one person, who’d previously worked on Apple silicon - and so far as I know, all the interesting people are still at what’s now Qualcomm.
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Mar 1, 2024 12:47
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:Well, Nuvia was interesting because it wasn’t just one person, who’d previously worked on Apple silicon - and so far as I know, all the interesting people are still at what’s now Qualcomm. We're talking about the Qualcomm product, Oryon, by the Nuvia people. I am skeptical. While there's a lot of space in chip design for different optimization choices, the design considerations and market positions that put Apple in the performance lead aren't changing.
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Mar 1, 2024 14:15
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in a well actually posted:We're talking about the Qualcomm product, Oryon, by the Nuvia people. Also, is Oryon actually going to be a non-mobile chip like Qualcomm has talked about for years?
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Mar 1, 2024 14:17
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:Sure, but if Qualcomm can manage to shrink the performance gap considerably, it's not like it'll be a bad thing. I've seen some rumors that the Nuvia Qualcomm server side chip is cancelled, following the previous two Qualcomm arm server cancellations. Also ARM is suing Qualcomm claiming Nuvia's server license didn't transfer with the acquisition.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:13
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in a well actually posted:I've seen some rumors that the Nuvia Qualcomm server side chip is cancelled, following the previous two Qualcomm arm server cancellations. 
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Mar 2, 2024 13:30
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eschaton posted:I found some more Inmos T805 Transputer CPUs in a box in my office (You should write some occam-2/occam-pi if you haven't already, Transputers or not, just for the hell of it.)
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Mar 6, 2024 22:34
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I just set up an m88k-interest mailing list for people still interested in the Motorola 88000 series
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Mar 7, 2024 21:44
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eschaton posted:I just set up an m88k-interest mailing list for people still interested in the Motorola 88000 series That doesn’t look like majordomo?
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Mar 7, 2024 22:58
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Subjunctive posted:That doesn’t look like majordomo?
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Mar 7, 2024 23:14
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eschaton posted:I just set up an m88k-interest mailing list for people still interested in the Motorola 88000 series
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Mar 8, 2024 00:36
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I wonder how much 88K Macintosh hardware is out there. (for those who don't know, when Apple was investigating options for transitioning away from 68K, 88K was one of them, and it got as far as them manufacturing a bunch of prototype 88K Macs for software development work.) Actually I wonder how much 88K hardware is out there at all. Not a wildly successful ISA!
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Mar 8, 2024 01:34
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