What Kind Of GPU Are You?

July 22, 2021 by Al Williams 9 Comments

In the old days, big computers often had some form of external array processor. The idea is you could load a bunch of numbers into the processor and then do some math operations on all of the numbers in parallel. These days, you are more likely to turn to your graphics card for number crunching support. You’ll usually use some library to help you do that, but things are always better when you understand what’s going on under the hood. That’s why we enjoyed [RasterGrid’s] post on GPU architecture types.

If you can tell the difference between IMR (immediate mode) and TBR (tile-based) rendering this might not be the post for you. But while we knew the terms, we found a lot of interesting detail including some graphics and pseudo code that clarified the key differences.

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Who Flew Across The Atlantic First? The Airborne Boats Of 1919

July 22, 2021 by Al Williams 47 Comments

Aviation history is a bit strange. People tend to remember some firsts but not others and — sometimes — not even firsts. For example, everyone knows Amelia Earhart attempted to be the first woman to fly around the globe. She failed, but do you know who succeeded? It was Jerrie Mock. How about the first person to do it? Wiley Post, a name largely forgotten by the public. Charles Lindbergh is another great example. He was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, right? Not exactly. The story of the real first transatlantic flight is one of aviation hacking by the United States Navy.

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Miller (Effect) Time

July 21, 2021 by Al Williams 10 Comments

While the Miller effect might sound like fun, it is actually the effect of parasitic capacitance in amplifiers. What do you do about it? Watch the video below the break from [All Electronics] and find out. We like how the test circuit it uses has a switch to put the mitigation circuitry in and out of the test for comparison purposes.

Actually, the Miller effect can refer to any impedance but in practice that is most often parasitic capacitance because of the construction used for tubes and transistors. The sometimes tiny capacitance gets multiplied by the inverting gain of the stage and increases the amplifier’s input impedance. This, in turn, reduces the bandwidth of the stage.

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Injection Molds From Your 3D Printer

July 20, 2021 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Last time we checked in with [CrafsMan] he had bought a benchtop injection molding machine. This time, he shows off how to 3D print molds. If you have ever had to spend to make tooling for injection molding, you’ll appreciate being able to make molds relatively inexpensively.

To test his workflow, [CrafsMan] created a little 3D figurine and brought it into TinkerCad. From there he created a mold and used Lychee Slicer to print it using resin.

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AppCAD Does Transmission Lines

July 20, 2021 by Al Williams 7 Comments

Broadcom and Agilent are perhaps not household words in every household, but among those who work with RF, they are common enough names. An Agilent developer wrote AppCAD to help with common RF design computations and now works for Avago who bought Broadcom. But whoever’s branding is on it, you can download the tool from Broadcom or check out the latest beta version. Then watch [IMASI Guy’s] video below on how to use part of it.

What can it do? According to the website:

S-Parameter Analysis and Plotting
Active Circuit Bias Design
Cascade Noise and IP3 Analysis
Transmission Line Analysis
Signals and Systems
Complex Math Engineering Calculator

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The Story Behind Ohm’s Law

July 20, 2021 by Al Williams 22 Comments

Do you ever wonder how much of what we do you could figure out from scratch? Tying your shoe might seem simple now, but kids have trouble mastering the skill, and dreaming it up for the first time is even harder. The same holds true for a lot of technology we use every day. Would you think up the computer mouse or even the computer if they didn’t already exist? Surely, though, one of the simplest and most useful math equations that is fundamental to electronics — Ohm’s law — would be easy to figure out, right? It is often the first thing you learn about electronics, but figuring it out that first time turned out to be quite difficult.

The fellow who discovered the relationship was Georg Ohm, a high school math and physics teacher from Köln. What you might not know is that the first time he published it, he got it wrong. But, lucky for us, he figured out his mistake and was able to correct it.

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Software Defined… CPU?

July 19, 2021 by Al Williams 45 Comments

Everything is better when you can program it, right? We have software-defined radios, software-defined networks, and software-defined storage. Now a company called Ascenium wants to create a software-defined CPU. They’ve raised millions of dollars to bring the product to market.

The materials are a bit hazy, but it sounds as though the idea is to have CPU resources available and let the compiler manage and schedule those resources without using a full instruction set. A system called Aptos lets the compiler orchestrate those resources.

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