Hardware & Electronics
FPGAs, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, components and DIY projects.
11 published articles
Consumer Hardware
CMF, Elektron and OhSnap show budget gear beats feature bloat
CMF's $79 Clip Pro earbuds, Elektron's $349 Model grooveboxes and OhSnap's $50 Snap Grip Stand all won the Verge's reviews by owning their trade-offs. The same pattern shows up in AR glasses. Buyers should take note.
2026-08-23
HDR10+ ADVANCED: Samsung and Prime Video ship it first
Can scene-by-scene metadata fix motion smoothing's bad reputation?
Prime Video is the first streaming service to adopt HDR10+ ADVANCED on Samsung's 2026 TVs from August 2026. The standard adds Enhanced Overall Brightness and scene-aware Intelligent Motion Smoothing, the setting with the worst reputation in home theater, now backed by smarter metadata.
2026-08-11
GPU Architecture
AMD MI455X doubles memory capacity, Hugging Face tests confirm 3x request throughput
Early results from Hugging Face show the AMD Instinct MI455X can handle three times more concurrent requests than the MI300, thanks to 432 GB of HBM4 memory. The Transformers library achieves 99.5% success rate on 24 key model architectures.
2026-07-30
Hardware Inflation
The memory shortage is making your next gadget more expensive
Qualcomm and Roku lead a wave of hardware price hikes as a memory shortage, fueled by AI demand, is expected to last through 2027. The increases ripple across smartphones, streaming devices, and other electronics, with no relief in sight.
2026-07-26
Hardware
A 128 GB desktop that undercuts Nvidia cloud rentals by 6x
AMD's Ryzen AI Halo targets local AI development with 128 GB unified memory, support for up to 200B parameter models, and claims of up to 7.3x faster performance than Apple M4 Pro on certain image generation tasks. The platform runs on both Windows and Linux, a differentiator against Nvidia's Linux-only DGX Spark.
2026-07-25
AI & Robotics
Nvidia's robot model just unlocked a three-order-of-magnitude advantage: time
NVIDIA Research's RoboTTT scales robot model context to 8K timesteps, three orders of magnitude beyond current policies, unlocking one-shot imitation from human video and 87% performance gains, suggesting context length as a new scaling axis for robot foundation models.
2026-07-17
Hardware & Electronics
A 40nm chip just made Nvidia's A100 look 478 times slower
A joint team from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a neuromorphic chip that processes neural dynamics 50 to 478 times faster than an NVIDIA A100 GPU while using a fraction of the power. The 40nm phase-change memristor chip achieves millisecond-level real-time neural dynamics, opening the door to surgical navigation and brain digital twins.
2026-07-16
Market momentum
Nvidia just crossed $3 trillion again. The AI spending machine isn't slowing down.
Nvidia's market cap crossed $3 trillion as AI infrastructure demand keeps growing. The milestone underscores that enterprise GPU purchases remain strong despite growing competition from AMD and startups offering cheaper inference chips.
2026-07-16
AI Infrastructure
The trillion-dollar bottleneck in AI isn't algorithms, it's power and cooling
The explosive growth of generative AI is exposing a hard limit: the physical infrastructure needed to train and serve models at scale. Hyperscalers, chip designers, and a wave of energy-focused startups are pouring capital into rethinking data centers, cooling, and power delivery, betting that the next frontier of AI competition is infrastructural, not algorithmic.
2026-07-10
Data Engineering
JPEG at quality 92: the boring data engineering choice that made Photoroom's 7B model work
Photoroom releases the fourth part of its PRX model development series, detailing a data pipeline that prioritizes breadth and consistency over per-image perfection. The post reveals that JPEG compression at quality 92 is indistinguishable from PNG for training, and that the fastest captioner won over the most accurate one when scaling to hundreds of millions of images.
2026-07-06
Distributed databases
Five database optimizations that turned 10-second queries into milliseconds
Large order tables in distributed databases suffer from unstable index selection, expensive table lookups, and wasted partition scans. This analysis presents five production-tested optimizations for PolarDB-X, with real-world latency drops from seconds to milliseconds.
2024-08-01