AmpBenzScientist @AmpBenzScientist@qoto.org

@thendrix There's a larger group below where I live but they are quite different. A Black Supremacist group with some odd beliefs. They are friendly but secretive. It's a compound but they don't cause any trouble. I think they get along well with the Klan too. The south is weird but it's all I know.

So the Architectures of the last 4 supercomputers might be surprising.

x86-64 with Radeon
Arm and something else.
Power9 (2 Processors paired with 4 Tesla GPUs)
Sunway

PowerPC is not dead and Sunway is believed to be most closely related to DEC but that's a stretch.

PowerPC, OpenSPARC and other open RISC designs aren't going away anytime soon.

@igelsQTs I think MIT Mathematicians refused to use anything else. They had 3 chalk boards that were on like an ellipse shaped track so they could have 2 stacked at once. There were like 4 of these systems in a classroom.

Mathematicians hate the white boards and I feel the pain. White boards lose the ability to erase overtime. Chalkboards just needed to be cleaned.

I've seen like 3 generations of the markers. The solvents used in the early generations were somewhat close to drug precursors lol. It's all rather impressive but it begs the question of why. Chalk can go back into the environment, the weird film pigment is probably not that good.

@PawelK I remember it because I refused to buy a Raspberry Pi. I eventually got a Beaglebone Black after a Banana Pi. I've seen the OMAP processors pop up in so many different places. It was a good little processor.

Parrot the quadcopter maker used the OMAP SoCs on the quadcopters. With the comparatively massive amount of DSPs on the OMAP, it was built for more than others.

It would have been easier to develop on a microkernel if I didn't pick four of them. My relationship problems in the past too.

@igelsQTs I miss chalkboards.

@ThatCrazyDude That just sounds like a Ukrainian. Survive your tank being destroyed and make early designs of a new type of rifle while recovering in a field hospital. Its daughters are better shots than Russian soldiers.

Russia shouldn't have invaded STALKER territory.

@PawelK Wait there was that weird Texas Instruments thing too on the OMAP processors. I don't think they used Mali. It was PowerVR. That was a long time ago.

@PawelK They always want to keep their secrets even if they are no longer relevant.

@PawelK I like it somewhat. Old classic hax are making comebacks in a new way. A powerful GPU makes hax easier to carry out.

@PawelK The deeper I go the more I see FPGAs being the solution. Unfortunately I've never had the opportunity to use a FPGA. I keep seeing Xlinix and Altera popping up in electronics. I know what they are capable of and I want to play with them.

They are being used in projects to develop open wifi adapters, open graphics and some other cool areas. The efficiency is getting better and something is going to be needed to deal with acceleration on RISC architectures. One could increase the complexity of the RISC processors but they are better off running the less complicated instructions as fast as possible. An FPGA could effectively be the coprocessor for the more complex logic and run as fast as it can. Two different heat zones and hardware doing what it is best at.

It sounds dumb but one hypersonic missile allegedly uses a RISC design and an FPGA for terrain mapping and following terrain at Mach 5. It might not sound like a big deal but one mile per second of complex readings and controls that are needed IRT puts it far ahead of anything I've ever seen.

This arms race is actually going to be challenging enough to be fun.

@PawelK AMD/RADEON/ATI, Intel and Nvidia.

@igelsQTs There was a Russian proverb that said that a man who smiles without reason is simple minded. I don't smile but I don't hold onto anger. I don't know why people hold onto anger or why Americans are on Fedi.

@igelsQTs It doesn't help to keep such emotions around. Carpe diem.

@igelsQTs Essentially the early relationship between the USA and the Russian Federation.

Updating UEFI on a Thinkpad just feels like it's going to break. It does use TianoCore so that's something cool. It just keeps me updated with compatibility for the latest malware.

@PawelK Ghidra uses Sleigh and Sled so it is somewhat like that but more abstraction. It doesn't need to be fed much information at all about a processor. It's not like any other disassembler or decompiler I've used before. I only needed pcode and cdefs I think to build a custom processor. I followed the NSA material to do most of it.