标签：#hardware

What’s the most cliche possible gift you can give a relative? A digital photo frame, displaying a rotating slideshow of family photos. Now Aura has completely refreshed this product space with its gorgeous Aura Ink frame, which uses e-ink to create a display that doesn’t even look digital. Digital frames have always been so popular […]

Every connected device on your desk, from a smart plug to a fitness band to a hobbyist ESP32 board, runs on a descendant of one tiny chip that was never meant to change the world. In 1971, Intel released the 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor. It was not built for computers, robots, or the internet. It was built to run a desk calculator. The story of how a calculator chip became the foundation of modern IoT is one of the most instructive in all of electronics. A calculator contract that got out of hand The 4004 began as a job for hire. A Japanese calculator company called Busicom approached Intel in 1969 wanting a set of custom chips for a new line of printing calculators. The original plan called for around a dozen separate, purpose-built integrated circuits, each wired to do one fixed task. It was the standard approach of the era: if you wanted a device to do something, you designed silicon that did exactly that and nothing else. Intel engineer Ted Hoff looked at the sprawling design and proposed something radical. Instead of a pile of single-purpose chips, why not build one general-purpose processor that could be told what to do through software? A program stored in memory could make the same chip behave like a calculator today and something else entirely tomorrow. Stanley Mazor helped shape the architecture, and a newly arrived engineer named Federico Faggin turned the concept into a working device, inventing the silicon-gate design techniques that made it physically possible. Masatoshi Shima, Busicom's representative, worked alongside them on the logic. 2,300 transistors that started everything When the 4004 was announced on November 15, 1971, it packed about 2,300 transistors onto a single sliver of silicon. By modern standards that is almost nothing; a current smartphone chip holds tens of billions. But the leap was not about raw count. It was about the idea. For the first time, a complete central processing unit existed on one chip that an

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention... They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”

CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview that the situation is "unsustainable."

Snap's long-awaited smart glasses debut hasn't exactly done wonders for the company's stock.

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention... They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”

Qualcomm's CEO said today that the company is working on over 40 new AI hardware designs

For over a decade now, Snap has been working on this device. Now the glasses are finally here. So what stands out on first impression?

Plaud is trying to make a mark in a crowded market full of AI-powered meeting notetakers.

You scan one to pay at a sari-sari store, pull up a restaurant menu, or board a flight. The QR code has quietly become one of the most universal pieces of interface design on the planet. But it was never meant for any of that. The QR code was invented in 1994 to solve a very specific problem on a Japanese car factory floor, and the engineering decisions made under that constraint are exactly why it later conquered the world. A barcode problem on the assembly line In the early 1990s, Toyota's manufacturing arm had a data problem. Tracking thousands of distinct components through production meant scanning barcodes, and barcodes are stingy: a standard one-dimensional barcode holds roughly 20 characters. Workers were ending up with parts plastered in ten or more barcodes just to encode enough information, and each one had to be scanned separately. It was slow, and on an assembly line, slow is expensive. Masahiro Hara, an engineer at Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, took on the challenge of designing something better. He wanted a code that could hold far more data, be read much faster, and tolerate the dirt, smudges, and odd angles of a real factory rather than a clean lab. Designing for speed and any angle The breakthrough was going two-dimensional. By encoding data in a grid of black and white squares rather than a single row of lines, Hara's team could pack in thousands of characters instead of a few dozen. The name they chose, QR for "Quick Response," was a direct promise about scanning speed. The most recognizable feature of a QR code, the three large squares in its corners, solves the hardest part of the problem: letting a scanner instantly find the code and work out its orientation no matter how the part is turned. Hara's team analyzed printed material to find a black-and-white sequence that almost never occurs naturally in text and images, and settled on a ratio of 1:1:3:1:1 for those corner markers. Because that pattern is so rare in everyday print, a scanner ca

Plug a sensor into a switch, wire up a building full of cameras, or rack a server, and you are using Ethernet. It is the most widely deployed wired networking standard on earth, the quiet backbone under offices, factories, and data centers. And it is named after a scientific idea that turned out to be completely wrong. The name was not an accident or a marketing afterthought. It was a deliberate engineering choice, and the reasoning behind it explains why Ethernet outlived nearly every rival and still underpins industrial IoT half a century later. A memo, a laser printer, and a dead theory The date Ethernet enthusiasts celebrate is May 22, 1973. On that day, a young engineer named Robert Metcalfe, working at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), circulated a memo describing how to connect the Alto - one of the first personal computers - to a new device PARC had built: the laser printer. The problem was getting many machines to share one wire without their messages colliding into noise. Metcalfe needed a name for the shared medium that carried the signals. He reached back into nineteenth-century physics and borrowed the term luminiferous ether . For generations, physicists had assumed that light, being a wave, needed something to wave through - just as sound needs air. They called that invisible, all-pervading substance the ether, and they believed it filled the entire universe as a silent carrier of electromagnetic waves. The trouble is that the ether does not exist. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect it, and Einstein's special relativity in 1905 made it unnecessary altogether. By the time Metcalfe wrote his memo, the luminiferous ether had been a discredited idea for decades. He used it anyway, and on purpose. Why a debunked idea made for brilliant engineering Metcalfe later explained the choice plainly: "We called it Ethernet because the ether could be coax, twisted pair, radio, optical fibers, power line, whatever you wa

I’ve struggled with insomnia since I was very young. Like many chronic overthinkers, I tend to fall asleep best when my mind is occupied by something else, such as podcasts, YouTube compilations, or my personal favorite: rain sounds. But earbuds can be uncomfortable, and playing audio out loud isn’t exactly considerate when I’m staying at […]

The new round values the physical AI startup that aims to automate heavy engineering and drug design at $41 billion.

CUDA for AMD Lemonade, Intel Arc Pro Linux Gains, XPU Manager 2.0 Today's Highlights Today's top GPU news highlights include AMD's Lemonade SDK gaining NVIDIA CUDA support, significant performance improvements for Intel Arc Pro GPUs on Linux 7.1, and the major 2.0 overhaul of Intel's XPU Manager for better GPU management on both Windows and Linux. AMD's Lemonade SDK For Local AI Adds NVIDIA CUDA Support (Phoronix) Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Lemonade-10.7-Released AMD has released a new version of its Lemonade SDK, a powerful local AI server solution designed to leverage AMD's diverse hardware ecosystem, including their CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. The most significant update in this release is the addition of NVIDIA CUDA support. This integration allows developers to utilize NVIDIA GPUs within their Lemonade-powered local AI deployments, bridging a critical gap in cross-platform AI development. The inclusion of CUDA support is a strategic move, enabling Lemonade to tap into NVIDIA's extensive CUDA ecosystem and a vast array of pre-optimized models and libraries. This means that applications built with Lemonade can now seamlessly target a wider range of hardware, offering unprecedented flexibility for developers working with local AI. For users, it provides the choice to deploy their AI models on either AMD or NVIDIA hardware using a single, unified SDK, expanding the potential reach and efficiency of their AI workloads. Comment: This is a massive step for cross-vendor AI development. Being able to use AMD's Lemonade SDK to deploy local AI models and then seamlessly target NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA truly unifies the AI backend landscape for diverse hardware setups, making it incredibly practical for hybrid environments. Intel Arc Pro B70 Showing Off Some Performance Wins With Linux 7.1 (Phoronix) Source: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-71-arc-pro-b70 Recent testing by Phoronix indicates that Intel's Arc Pro B70 discrete GPUs are demonstrating notable perform

Vortex 3.0 RISC-V GPGPU, Pragtical SDL GPU Backend, NVIDIA RTX Spark Launch Today's Highlights Today's top stories highlight significant advancements in open-source GPU hardware with Vortex 3.0 adding a 3D pipeline and a lightweight code editor, Pragtical, leveraging an SDL GPU backend for UI rendering. NVIDIA also unveiled RTX Spark, a new 'superchip' aimed at bringing personal AI agents to Windows PCs with accelerated on-device processing. Vortex 3.0 Released As Full-Stack, Open-Source RISC-V GPU Now With 3D Pipeline (Phoronix) Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vortex-3.0-RISC-V-GPGPU Vortex, an open-source, OpenCL-compatible RISC-V GPGPU implementation developed by Georgia Tech, has released its next major version, 3.0. This significant update introduces a full 3D rendering pipeline, marking a crucial evolution from its previous focus solely on general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) compute. The expansion into 3D graphics capabilities makes Vortex a more comprehensive open-source GPU solution, enabling it to handle a wider range of visual and computational tasks. As an open-source hardware design, Vortex 3.0 provides developers, researchers, and hardware enthusiasts with unparalleled access to study, modify, and implement its architecture. Its OpenCL compatibility ensures that it can leverage existing GPGPU codebases, fostering experimentation with RISC-V-based GPU development, custom hardware accelerators, and exploring alternative GPU instruction sets and architectures. This release allows for deeper exploration into the integration of compute and graphics within an open framework. This development is pivotal for the open-source hardware and RISC-V ecosystems. It underscores the growing maturity of RISC-V for demanding compute and graphics workloads, offering a royalty-free alternative to proprietary GPU designs. The inclusion of a 3D pipeline extends its utility beyond just general-purpose compute to full graphics rendering, potentially impacting future embedded syst

The iOS 27 developer beta includes code that references the fold state and screen angle of a device.

Navigating the tech space today often feels like walking a tightrope between two extremes: massive corporate monopolies holding all the keys, and idealistic local projects trying to build everything from scratch. But this doesn't have to be an "Us vs. Corporations" battle. We don’t need to completely eliminate corporate tools; we need to leverage them. The real pragmatic goal is to use localized, decentralized data-driven systems to solve real-world physical problems on the ground, in real time. When people hear the word "decentralized," they often assume it means chaotic fragmentation, isolation, or losing control of data. It doesn't. Decentralization does not mean losing data; it means movement. In fact, the paradox of modern tech is that More Decentralized Data = Centralized Utility. 1. Moving Beyond "App Consumption" to Localized Edge Data For too long, the cultural conversation around tech has been stuck in the clouds. We talk about "the cloud" abstractly, and the average consumer's tech vocabulary is limited to a handful of corporate app names. True tech pragmatism brings data collection back down to earth, turning communities from passive consumers into active, node-operating contributors. Here is what that looks like in practice: Hyper-Local Climate Grids: Instead of teaching students about weather patterns using generic data from an airport weather station 50 miles away, a school can deploy its own low-cost local weather station. Students learn from their immediate microclimate, and that real-time local data is fed back into a wider community grid. Optimized Infrastructure: Instead of spending millions on speculative traffic studies, we can use existing, low-cost edge cameras to count traffic patterns locally. This decentralized edge data tells planners exactly what kind of infrastructure—like traffic lights (or "robots" as we call them here) or bypass lanes—a specific zone actually needs. It is planning based on true utility, not guesswork. The Energy Grid

Linux 7.1 Boosts Intel Arc, Flatpak Integrates ROCm, Vintage AMD Driver Refined Today's Highlights Recent developments enhance GPU performance and accessibility, with the Linux 7.1 kernel providing significant gains for Intel Arc Battlemage graphics. AMD's ROCm compute platform gains broader deployment potential through Flatpak 1.18 integration, while an older AMD GPU driver sees notable code cleanups. Linux 7.1 Helping Intel Arc Battlemage Graphics Achieve Better Performance (Phoronix) Source: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-b580-linux-71 Phoronix reports that the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is delivering superior graphics performance for Intel's Arc B580 Battlemage desktop graphics card compared to the current stable Linux 7.0. This indicates ongoing, critical optimization work within the open-source Linux graphics stack, directly impacting the gaming and compute capabilities of Intel's latest GPU architecture. Such kernel-level improvements are vital for unlocking the full potential of new hardware on Linux platforms, ensuring users receive the best possible experience from their Intel Arc GPUs. The performance uplift suggests that deeper integration and fine-tuning of the kernel's display and compute drivers are progressing, addressing potential bottlenecks and enhancing throughput. For users and developers leveraging Intel Arc GPUs on Linux, this kernel update is a significant milestone, promising more stable and efficient operation for various workloads, from gaming to professional applications. It highlights the dynamic nature of Linux driver development, where continuous collaboration leads to tangible performance benefits even before major hardware refreshes. Comment: This shows how crucial kernel updates are for modern GPUs on Linux. Early adopters of Arc Battlemage should definitely keep an eye on Linux 7.1 for a noticeable performance bump. Flatpak 1.18 Released With Integration For AMD ROCm (Phoronix) Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fl

Ask almost any engineer what "Wi-Fi" stands for and you'll hear the same answer: "Wireless Fidelity." It is one of the most repeated facts in tech, it appears in textbooks and product manuals, and it is wrong. Wi-Fi does not stand for Wireless Fidelity. In fact, it does not stand for anything at all. A name invented by a branding agency In 1999, the industry group then known as the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance — today the Wi-Fi Alliance — had a problem. The wireless networking standard it was promoting carried the memorable name "IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence." That string is precise, but no consumer was ever going to ask a store clerk for an 802.11b router. The technology needed a brand. So the alliance hired Interbrand, the same firm behind names like Prozac and the Compaq brand, to invent something catchy. Interbrand returned with a shortlist of about ten candidates, and the group chose "Wi-Fi." Phil Belanger, a founding member of the alliance, has been blunt about it for years: the name has no expanded meaning. It was picked because it was short, easy to say, and rhymed with "Hi-Fi," a term consumers already associated with high-quality audio gear. So where did "Wireless Fidelity" come from? The myth has a real origin. Some board members were uncomfortable shipping a brand name that "meant nothing," so the alliance briefly bolted on the tagline "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity." It was a backronym — two words reverse-engineered to fit the syllables "Wi" and "Fi" after the fact. The phrase was clumsy, it never described the technology accurately, and once the alliance brought on more marketing-savvy members it was quietly dropped. The tagline disappeared; the misconception it planted did not. Why this matters if you build connected things This is a fun piece of trivia, but it points at something real for anyone doing IoT and embedded development . The protocols we treat as immovable technical bedrock are often shaped as much by branding, licensing,

Apple's WWDC nears: Here's what you can look forward to.