Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hack a Day
We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure.
Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 data lines, and each of those lines contains a separate program selectable by a jumper. It’s a handy way of providing a set of diagnostics at the lowest level, but even with that discovery the weirdness isn’t quite over. We’re treated to a run-down of DEC Alpha code encoding, and should you have one of these machines, there’s all the code you need.
The Alpha was so special in the 1990s because with 64-bit and retargetable microcode in its architecture it was significantly faster than its competitors. From memory it could be had with DEC Tru64 UNIX, Microsoft Windows NT, or VMS, and with the last of which it was the upgrade path for VAX minicomputers. It faded away in the takeover by Compaq and subsequently HP, and we are probably the poorer for it. We look forward to seeing more about this particular workstation, should it come back to life.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Fun with virtualization
I am not a cool person.
I don’t get invited to all the cool people events.
I never get to bask in the glory of FOMO Apple glory.
It’ll be 20 years ago the rumors were insane that Apple was going to dump the beloved PowerPC for intel. Darwin (the open-source core to OS X) was publicly available on Intel processors, and the scene was set for one of the most exciting transitions of the time:
At the 2005 WWDC the bomb was dropped.
The star of the show, of course is that the entire OS X 10.4 Tiger demo was on the intel machine, and for a low price of being invited, belonging to the club & $999 USD you too could be part of the next big FOMO.
So as the big reveal went, not only was OS X on intel now a thing, it “secretly” was always a thing, and had always been the escape hatch from being locked in. And it’s no surprise, it saved NeXT as the i386 “white box” was the cheapest and fastest NeXT ever, just as further transitions to 64 bit then ARM64 would necessitate.
So how does one reasonably acquire one of these mythical beasts, 20 years after the fact? Well basically unless you are a cool kid in the know, you don’t.
however as mentioned in a few places the ATK was quickly out together with standard parts. And if this sounds like the genesis of the IBM 5150 PC, you’d be right! The star of the show is the late SSE3 enabled Pentium 4 processors and the Intel 915 chipset with onboard GMA 900 video.
Thankfully intel sold these parts to whomever basically wanted them, so they were sold on a bunch of partner boards, OEM, and even Intel fabricated boards. It may be my fault as typical board/processor/ram setups can be had for £5 in the UK, the magical 915 chipset has jumped these well north of £100. However, from my searching there are a few OEM systems with the needed chips, and that is the Dell Dimension 3100.
Now I know I got lucky as I got mine for £0.99 + £9 shipping! A huge shout out to my patreons for financing stuff like this! The unit was shown in pictures absolutely filthy, missing an optical drive and “untested”. We all know that it’s code for it was tested, it didn’t work, and it wasn’t worth their time to clean up and fix.
Opening the system up, revealed an ancient mechanical SATA disk, a bunch of dust bunnies, and empty memory sockets where the ram should go. Since I had purchased 7 other boards over the last 2 years (yes! Really! 7!!!), I have ample spare ram, gave it 2x512MB sticks, a new cr2032 CMOS battery, and the hard disk failed to spin or detect, but the machine powered up, did the POST test with no issues! I’ve got to say I was super happy so far! I have a £6 SSD I picked up from CeX, so I placed that into the machine, and now for the OS install.
My first choice was to create a Linux bootable USB stick and just copy the deadmoo image to the SSD. Of course, this came with the caveat that the disk is in the VMDK format which needed to convert using Qemu’s qemu-img utility to a raw disk image, then to compress it with gzip, as the Ubuntu install image seems to only understand gzip. I guess the next pro move is to see about a static standalone iSCSI target, or maybe even rsync? I think there is even Qemu network disk protocols by now, so it may be a way to get around the lack of optical media…? Anyways!
The deadmoo image can be decompressed and copied to the hard disk easily! It’s about 2gb compressed and 6GB uncompressed. A reboot, and we’re quickly and semi glitched in as Curtis to their desktop!
there is a pre-installed driver causing issues which drops us back to the fallback SVGA buffer, and I’m happy to report that the artificing you see under emulation is also present on physical hardware. Delete the TPM driver AppleTPMACPI.kext (the root password is ‘bovinity’), and reboot again. This time there won’t be any further glitches in the video, but there is another change to make, the core graphics needs to be replaced with the SSE3 variant so that after yet another reboot again Rosetta is fully working, giving us access to PowerPC applications (that don’t require Altivec! That wouldn’t arrive until 10.4.4 just in time for the public release!). This lets the screen savers run, and important applications like iTunes and Internet Explorer 5 for Max OS X.
As Steve had demo’d it’s pretty amazing at how much just works. You can really get an appreciation at just how truly portable C is, and how LIBC is the real cross platform winner is. The company behind Rosetta transitive, had a bright future ahead of them as you can’t get a better public endorsement that Steve Jobs at a WWDC! SGi had licensed them for Itanium IRIX, and if the other Unix vendors didn’t partner there was also a Linux path. Honestly, I’m surprised SUN didn’t buy them and do the same thing as Apple and jettison the SPARC, as they can sell a LOT more 1u servers, desktops and laptops than giant E10ks, but IBM equally scared and trapped on their AIX / UnixWare Itanium merge Monterey that sold like 5 units, instead bought the company and quickly disappeared the technology.
What a shame for the industry, but x86_64 still is an unstoppable force. Well at least until someone seriously challenges them.
Getting back to OS X, this is meant for developers, and the deadmoo image has X code installed, although I prefer to use the cli tools. This is a weird time in history as many things may support OS X, but they make really bad platform assumptions, and force endian directions breaking the given stance of all OS X is big endian – even though Intel Darwin has been around the entire time.
Ive had good luck with stuff that is much later than vintage 2005, as I’m lazy and it’s 2025. The fun stuff id built were:
I had thought that the performance using GCC 3 would be better than GCC 4 for Qemu, but after a lot of work I’d benched it with DooM v1.1 that V4 is faster.
Compatibility with OpenGL games is atrocious, but I’m pretty sure by the time 10.4.4 went public compatibility was better, although I doubt contemporary machines did all that well as there is a reason there was a rush to get intel versions out.
Building your own:
The primary ingredient here is a board with the Intel 910/915 Graphics chips, which limits us to the late Intel Pentium 4 boards, with that terrible integrated video. It’s not the best video chipset in the world, but the only one that 10.4.1 had 3d acceleration for.
I had found out that the Dell 3100 pre-built tower has the supported chipset & CPU, however it doesn’t have the correct onboard network card.
The Intel LAN boards of the era with the 915 moniker & Pentium 4 should be fine enough.
Although in the recent years these boards have gotten rather expensive. I can’t imagine why, as they absolutely suck for retro gaming as you’d 100% use a GPU, Other than 10.4.1 I can’t imagine why anyone would want a P4/915 combo.
While you could dd a deadmoo image onto 2 disks, then play partition games, it’s far easier to use the converted ISO with 10.4.1 to just boot up and install if that is an option.
If you don’t have a 910/915 based board, you can run this under emulation well enough. The weird graphical glitches you’ll experience are present on real hardware as well.
While not terribly useful, it is an interesting glimpse as at least x86 is available to the masses.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Source: The Verge - All Posts
A few years after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, including $12 billion in debt it had as part of his takeover. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach,” writes Musk.
In response to a deal cementing about $11 billion in lost value since the 2022 sale, X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted, “The future could not be brighter.”
Despite failing so far to make X an “everything app,” Musk has tied these two ventures together closely since launching xAI in the summer of 2023, saying that access to the vast trove of data from Twitter / X would give it a major advantage, and prominently placing xAI’s Grok tool within the social app. This week, Grok launched an integration beyond X, joining Telegram.
The arrangement is also a reminder of a previous Musk deal combining two companies he controlled. Tesla Motors acquired SolarCity, a company with Musk as its largest individual shareholder and his cousin Lyndon Rive as CEO, for $2.6 billion in 2016 and dropped “Motors” from its name. Musk didn’t mention Tesla in the announcement, after already proclaiming “I have, like, 17 jobs” at a hastily-announced all-hands meeting for the car company last week — it’s unclear if this deal adds to or subtracts from the number.
Today’s tweet also didn’t mention his ambition for the service to handle “someone’s entire financial life,” but it does repeat his claim of X as “the digital town square.”As we noted in January, xAI staffers were also X employees, with company laptops and access to its code base. Musk had also previously claimed X investors would own 25 percent of XAI, but as of January, that had not materialized for X employees with shares in the company.
While X’s valuation had reportedly dropped since the 2022 takeover before recently rebounding, the value of xAI has risen along with other companies in the space like Nvidia and OpenAI, where Musk has gone from co-founder and early investor to rival and legal antagonist since walking away in 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported xAI had been valued at $50 billion in an investment round last November, more than double its $24 billion valuation during another funding round in the spring of 2024.
@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).
Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.
X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth.
xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach. The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge. This will allow us to build a platform that doesn’t just reflect the world but actively accelerates human progress.
I would like to recognize the hardcore dedication of everyone at xAI and X that has brought us to this point. This is just the beginning.
Thank you for your continued partnership and support.
Source: Hacker News
