Day: December 21, 2024

Intel Terminates X86S Initiative After Formation Of New Industry Group

December 21, 2024 by 5 Comments

Although the world of the X86 instruction set architecture (ISA) and related ecosystem is often accused of being ‘stale’ and ‘bloated’, we have seen a flurry of recent activity that looks to shake up and set the future course for what is still the main player for desktop, laptop and server systems. Via Tom’s Hardware comes the news that the controversial X86S initiative is now dead and buried. We reported on this proposal when it was first announced and a whitepaper released. This X86S proposal involved stripping 16- and 32-bit features along with rings 1 and 2, along with a host of other ‘legacy’ features.

This comes after the creation of a new x86 advisory group that brings together Intel, AMD, as well as a gaggle of industry giants ranging from HP and Lenovo to Microsoft and Meta. The goal here appears to be to cooperate on any changes and new features in the ISA, which is where the unilateral X86S proposal would clearly have been a poor fit. This means that while X86S is dead, some of the proposed changes may still make it into future x86 processors, much like how AMD’s 64-bit extensions to the ISA, except this time it’d be done in cooperation.

In an industry where competition from ARM especially is getting much stronger these days, it seems logical that x86-oriented companies would seek to cooperate rather than compete. It should also mean that for end users things will get less chaotic as a new Intel or AMD CPU will not suddenly sneak in incompatible extensions. Those of us who remember the fun of the 1990s when x86 CPUs were constantly trying to snipe each other with exclusive features (and unfortunate bugs) will probably appreciate this.

Building A Custom Swiss Army Knife

December 21, 2024 by 3 Comments

The Swiss Army knife is the most well-known multitool, combining a bunch of functionality into a compact package. [Jeff Gough] decided to build a custom example featuring a selection of his favorite tools.

He documents the build in a video series on YouTube (see below). [Jeff] decided to take on the project as a gift for his mother after she’d mentioned she’d wanted a Swiss Army-style knife with a horse’s hoof tool and finished in the classic shade of British Racing Green.

[Jeff] starts by disassembling an existing knife, taking care not to damage it in the process. He then makes and installs multiple custom tools, including the aforementioned horse hoof tool and a RADAR/NKS key for opening disabled toilets in the UK. He even crafts a bespoke Philips head screwdriver, too. Finally, he assembles everything back together and gives the build a beautiful green finish.

A Swiss Army knife can be a neat gift, but it’s even nicer when it’s got a personal touch like this one. We’ve featured some other nifty multitools before, too. Not all Swiss Army knives actually contain a, you know, knife. No kidding.

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Training A Self-Driving Kart

December 21, 2024 by No comments

There are certain tasks that humans perform every day that are notoriously difficult for computers to figure out. Identifying objects in pictures, for example, was something that seems fairly straightforward but was only done by computers with any semblance of accuracy in the last few years. Even then, it can’t be done without huge amounts of computing resources. Similarly, driving a car is a surprisingly complex task that even companies promising full self-driving vehicles haven’t been able to deliver despite working on the problem for over a decade now. [Austin] demonstrates this difficulty in his latest project, which adds self-driving capabilities to a small go-kart.

[Austin] had been working on this project at the local park but grew tired of packing up all his gear when he wanted to work on his machine-learning algorithms. So he took all the self-driving equipment off of the first kart and incorporated it into a smaller kart with a very small turning radius so he could develop it in his shop.

He laid down some tape on the floor to create the track and then set up the vehicle to learn how to drive by watching and gathering data. The model is trained with a convolutional neural network and this data. The only inputs that the model gets are images from cameras at the front of the kart. At first, it could only change the steering angle, with [Austin] controlling the throttle to prevent crashes. Eventually, he gave it control of the throttle as well, which behaves well except at the fastest speeds.

There were plenty of challenges along the way, especially when compared to the models trained at the park; [Austin] correctly theorized that the cause of the hardship in the park was a lack of contrast at the boundary between the track and any out-of-bounds areas. With a few tweaks to the track, as well as adding some wide-angle lenses to his cameras, he was able to get a model that works fairly well. Getting started on a project like this doesn’t have as high of a barrier to entry as one might imagine, either. Take a look at this comprehensive open-source Python library for self-driving projects. If you want to start smaller, perhaps don’t start with a self-driving kart.

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