Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / A blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr shows the Workspaces Thin Client setup. (credit: Jeff Barr/Amazon)
Amazon has turned its Fire TV Cube streaming device into a thin client optimized for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon's Workspaces Thin Client also supports Amazon's Workspaces Web, for accessing virtual desktops from a browser, and AppStream.
The computer is a Fire TV Cube with a new software stack. All the hardware—from the 2GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 16GB of storage, to the Arm processor with 8 cores, including four running at up to 2.2 GHz—remain identical whether buying the device as an Alexa-powered entertainment-streaming device or thin client computer. Both the Fire TV Cube and Workspaces Thin Client run an Android Open Source Project-based Android fork (for now).
Source: OSNews
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable pin was going into the memory controller chip in several Mac models, so I was pretty confident that in-system programming was possible.
As luck would have it, multiple people pointed out to me that an Apple internal utility used for ROM flashing had been uploaded to the Macintosh Garden. It was recovered from a prototype PowerBook 520 purchased in 2020. Of course, I had to download this utility and figure out how it works.
I honestly cannot believe it’s taken this long for such a tool to become available one way or the other. Classic Macs are incredibly popular in the retro community, and being able to reflash the ROMs like this is incredibly useful. It took some work and disassembly, but Doug Brown got it working.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot of supercomputer throughput, but more supercomputer throughput doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll solve technological problems faster.
A detailed look at China’s new supercomputer. The conclusion quoted above is very well supported by the data and research concerning this new supercomputer, and the article is a great read.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
I got talked into going to SC again this year, as I have almost every year since 2009.
It’s not really my area of focus, but it’s always interesting.
UK’s presence featured a mixture of IT/CCS types and researchers, the research end of the booth was mostly focused on ongoing Parallel Bit Pattern Computing work, featuring a new demo/visualization thing that I built much of the hardware and some of the software for in the 3 weeks before we left for the conference (the rest came from Hank modelling some printable parts, pulling the compute engine from an older demo he wrote, and building some adapter code). It was more exhausting than the conference itself, but a really fun prototyping/micomanufacturing flex. Fancy 3D printed parts, 2020 extrusion, some laser cut bits, piles of addressable LEDs, a bit of embedded electronics. There is also a partially-functional prototype backplane to link 4 EBAZ425 FPGA boards through an Aggregate Function Network as a PBP substrate that …I designed. There’s a lot of not-my-job work I did on display; I should probably start throwing more of a fit about that.
Some notes about the stuff we were showing and interesting(?) industry observations below.
Continue reading
