VLIW Never Died, It Just Left Your Laptop
VLIW flopped as the universal CPU dream, then quietly found religion in workloads compilers can actually predict.
#hardware
17 transmissions tagged #hardware
The $400 Million Machine That Runs on Mirrors
ASML's High-NA EUV machine just etched 8nm features in a single pass. It costs $400M, weighs as much as a bus, and humanity has fewer than a dozen of them.
Arm Just Became Its Own Customers' Competitor — And RISC-V Is Laughing
Arm spent 35 years selling blueprints. Then it decided to sell finished chips to the same companies it was supplying. Somehow this surprises people.
RISC-V Was Supposed to Be the Clean Slate. Vendors Didn't Get the Memo.
GhostWrite lets unprivileged code write anywhere in physical memory on T-Head RISC-V chips. It cannot be patched. This was supposed to be the good architecture.
CERN Burns Neural Networks Into Silicon to Avoid Drowning in the Universe
CERN generates 40,000 exabytes of data per year. Their solution: compile ML models directly to FPGA silicon and make discard decisions in 50 nanoseconds.
R.I.P. Mac Pro: The Cheese Grater Rusts in Peace
Apple killed the Mac Pro yesterday with no plans for a successor. Here's why they were right to do it.
I Bought a Tesla's Brain Off eBay for $250 and Found SSH Open
Researcher pulls Tesla Model 3's MCU from a crashed car, powers it up on his desk, and discovers the car is running an internal network with SSH and a REST API wide open.
Edison's Revenge: Why Every New AI Data Center is Going DC
AC power has run data centers for decades. The AI era is killing it — and the math is brutal.
The 'Unhackable' Xbox One Finally Got Hacked — Thirteen Years Later
Microsoft's 2013 console survived a decade of attempts before 'Bliss' dropped it with voltage glitching. The story of why it lasted so long is more interesting than the hack itself.
Your Next GPU Needs This Noble Gas (And Iran Just Blew Up 30% of It)
Iranian drone strikes on Qatar's Ras Laffan knocked out a third of global helium supply. Your chips run on the stuff. Two weeks of inventory remain.
RISC-V Was Always Five Years Away. Now It's Two Months Away.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will be the first long-term release to ship RVA23 RISC-V as a first-class citizen. Is this the moment RISC-V stops being vaporware?
NABU Invented Cloud Streaming in 1982 and Nobody Cared
A Canadian computer from 1982 did cloud streaming before the internet existed — then 2,200 units sat in a barn for 23 years.
Canonical Says 2026 Is the Year of RISC-V. We've Heard This Before.
The ISA built by committee finally has a real LTS release coming — and the Framework Laptop already has a RISC-V mainboard. Maybe this one's different.
90% of the World's Advanced Chips Come From One Island. Everyone Knows. Nobody Cares.
Silicon Valley has been warned, bribed, and threatened about Taiwan dependency for years. Still nothing. The single biggest supply chain vulnerability in human history, brought to you by profit margins.
The IBM 9020: The Franken-Mainframe That Ran U.S. Airspace for 30 Years
IBM bolted a bunch of System/360s together with shared memory and handed the FAA the keys to America's skies. It worked. For three decades.
Your Data in a Shot Glass: Microsoft Wants to Store It for 10,000 Years
Project Silica just landed in Nature — femtosecond lasers burning data into Pyrex for ten millennia of archival storage. It works. It's wild. There's a catch.
Europe Baked a RISC-V Chip on Intel's Fab and It Actually Works
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center taped out a RISC-V test chip on Intel 3, booted Linux on it, and quietly advanced Europe's bid for chip sovereignty.