WebGPU… Better Than WebGL?

March 9, 2022 by 19 Comments

As the browser becomes more like an operating system, we are seeing more deep features being built into them. For example, you can now do a form of assembly language for the browser. Sophisticated graphics have been around using WebGL since around 2011, but some people find it hard to use. [Surma] was one of those people and tried a new method that is just surfacing to do the same thing: WebGPU.

[Surma] liked it better and shares a lot of information in the post and — oddly — the post doesn’t use WebGPU for graphics very much. Instead, the post focuses on using GPU cores for fast computation, something else you can do with WebGPU. If your goal is to draw on the screen, though, you need to know the basics and the post links to a site with examples of doing this.

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A GPU PCB mounted on top of a preheater, with a hot air gun blowing on top of one of the DDR chips, held with tweezers, about to be removed from the board. Most of the other chips are already gone from the board, with only a few left.

GPU RAM Upgrades Are Closer Than You Think

January 30, 2022 by 34 Comments

We’re all used to swapping RAM in our desktops and laptops. What about a GPU, though? [dosdude1] teaches us that soldered-on RAM is merely a frontier to be conquered. Of course, there’s gotta be a good reason to undertake such an effort – in his case, he couldn’t find the specific type of Nvidia GT640 that could be flashed with an Apple BIOS to have his Xserve machine output the Apple boot screen properly. All he could find were 1GB versions, and the Apple BIOS could only be flashed onto a 2GB version. Getting 2GB worth of DDR chips on Aliexpress was way too tempting!

The video goes through the entire replacement process, to the point where you could repeat it yourself — as long as you have access to a preheater, which is a must for reworking relatively large PCBs, as well as a set of regular tools for replacing BGA chips. In the end, the card booted up, and, flashed with a new BIOS, successfully displayed the Apple bootup logo that would normally be missing without the special Apple VBIOS sauce. If you ever want to try such a repair, now you have one less excuse — and, with the GT640 being a relatively old card, you don’t even risk all that much!

This is not the first soldered-in RAM replacement journey we’ve covered recently — here’s our write-up about [Greg Davill] upgrading soldered-in RAM on his Dell XPS! You can upgrade CPUs this way, too. While it’s standard procedure in sufficiently advanced laptop repair shops, even hobbyists can manage it with proper equipment and a good amount of luck, as this EEE PC CPU upgrade illustrates. BGA work and Apple computers getting a second life go hand in hand — just two years ago, we covered this BGA-drilling hack to bypass a dead GPU in a Macbook, and before that, a Macbook water damage revival story.

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Picture of a monitor with a fake "ransomware" banner on it, and a PC with the ESP32 VGA devboard mounted into it in the foreground

ESP32 Pretends To Be GPU; Gives You A Ransomware Scare

December 30, 2021 by 27 Comments

Sometimes a piece of hardware meets a prank idea, and that’s how the fun Hackaday articles are born. [AnotherMaker] shows us some harmless entertainment at the expense of an IT enthusiast in your life – programming an ESP32-powered devboard with a VGA output to show an ever-feared “all your files are encrypted” screen on a monitor connected to it. The ASCII text in its 8-bit glory helps sell this prank, making it look exactly like a BIOS-hijacking piece of malware it claims to be; akin to UIs of the past that skilled hackers would whip up in x86 assembly. The devboard’s integration into a PCI card backplate is a cherry on top, a way to seamlessly integrate this into a PC case, making it look not particularly different from an old graphics card. In such a configuration, we don’t doubt that this would be a head-scratcher to a certain kind of an IT department worker.

If you already have someone in mind as a target for this prank, you’re in luck, since [AnotherMaker] has shared his source code, too, and all you need is a ESP32 with a VGA port set up. You can get the same devboard, or you can even solder it all together with an ESP32 breakout and resistors, if you’re on a time or money budget, since the schematics for the LilyGO devboard are public. Not all devboards gets such a fun application, but it’s always fun to see when someone thinks of one – a perfect prank scenario that calls for a very specific devboard.

Wondering how it’s even possible to output VGA from the ESP32? We’ve covered this in the past – like this R&D project done by [bitluni], who then went ahead and expanded on it by connecting six displays at once. If you’ve connected your ESP32 to a VGA port and ran some test sketches, a UI library will help you upgrade your idea into a ready project in no time.

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A GPU card with a home-made fan assembly

3D-printed Fan Mount Keeps Server GPU Cool In Desktop Case

November 6, 2021 by 10 Comments

Most readers of Hackaday will be well aware of the current shortages of semiconductors and especially GPUs. Whether you’re planning to build a state-of-the art gaming PC, a mining rig to convert your kilowatt-hours into cryptocoins, or are simply experimenting with machine-learning AI, you should be prepared to shell out quite a bit more money for a proper GPU than in the good old days.

Bargains are still to be had in the second-hand market though. [Devon Bray] chanced upon a pair of Nvidia Tesla K80 cards, which are not suitable for gaming and no longer cost-effective for mining crypto, but ideal for [Devon]’s machine-learning calculations. However, he had to make a modification to enable proper thermal management, as these cards were not designed to be used in regular desktop PCs.

The reason for this is that many professional-grade GPU accelerators are installed in rack-mounted server cases, and are therefore equipped with heat sinks but no fans: the case is meant to provide a forced air flow to carry away the card’s heat. Simply installing the cards into a desktop PC case would cause them to overheat, as passive cooling will not get rid of the 300 W that each card pumps out on full load.

[Devon] decided to make a proper thermal solution by 3D printing a mount that carries three fans along with an air duct that snaps onto the GPU card. In order to prevent unnecessary fan noise, he added a thermal control system consisting of a Raspberry Pi Pico, a handful of MOSFETs, and a thermistor to sense the GPU’s temperature, so the fans are only driven when the card is getting hot. The Pi Pico is of course way more powerful than needed for such a simple task, but allowed [Devon] to program it in MicroPython, using more advanced programming techniques than would be possible on, say, an Arduino.

We love the elegant design of the fan duct, which enables two of these huge cards to fit onto a motherboard side-by-side. We’ve seen people working on the opposite problem of fitting large fans into small cases, as well as designs that discard the whole idea of using fans for cooling.

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What Kind Of GPU Are You?

July 22, 2021 by 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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Trying (And Failing) To Use GPUs With The Compute Module 4

November 10, 2020 by 15 Comments

The Raspberry Pi platform grows more capable and powerful with each iteration. With that said, they’re still not the go-to for high powered computing, and their external interfaces are limited for reasons of cost and scope. Despite this, people like [Jeff Geerling] strive to push the platform to its limits on a regular basis. Unfortunately, [Jeff’s] recent experiments with GPUs hit a hard stop that he’s as yet unable to overcome.

With the release of the new Compute Module 4, the Raspberry Pi ecosystem now has a device that has a PCI-Express 2.0 1x interface as stock. This lead to many questioning whether or not GPUs could be used with the hardware. [Jeff] was determined to find out, buying a pair of older ATI and NVIDIA GPUs to play with.

Immediate results were underwhelming, with no output whatsoever after plugging the modules in. Of course, [Jeff] didn’t expect things to be plug and play, so dug into the kernel messages to find out where the problems lay. The first problem was the Pi’s limited Base Address Space; GPUs need a significant chunk of memory allocated in the BAR to work. With the CM4’s BAR expanded from 64MB to 1GB, the cards appeared to be properly recognised and ARM drivers were able to be installed.

Alas, the story ends for now without success. Both NVIDIA and ATI drivers failed to properly initialise the cards. The latter driver throws an error due to the Raspberry Pi failing to account for the I/O BAR space, a legacy x86 feature, however others suggest the problem may lay elsewhere. While [Jeff] may not have pulled off the feat yet, he got close, and we suspect with a little more work the community will find a solution. Given ARM drivers exist for these GPUs, we’re sure it’s just a matter of time.

For more of a breakdown on the Compute Module 4, check out our comprehensive article. Video after the break.

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A Dead Macbook GPU Shouldn’t Stop You, With This BGA Soldering Hack

June 28, 2020 by 42 Comments

On some 2011 Macbook Pro models, there is a tendency for the Radeon GPU to fail. This should mean game over for the computer, but surprisingly salvation is offered by its having not one but two GPUs on board. The Intel processor also has a GPU, and Apple use a pile of logic in an FPGA to switch at will between them. The community have produced fresh FPGA code to revive a dead Mac on its Intel GPU, but at the expense of losing brightness control. [Ayilm1] has brought back the brightness with a clever BGA reworking hack that gains access to a brightness control line present on the Intel BD82HM65 Platform Controller Hub chip but not used in the Macbook.

We’re used to impressive soldering work here at Hackaday, and we’ve seen our share of wiring direct to the balls on an upturned BGA chip. This is a similar idea but at another level, as a section of the top insulation on an in-place BGA is removed to expose the microvia above the ball carrying the required signal. A tiny wire is soldered to the exposed pad and taken to a piece of copper tape stuck down to provide mechanical strength, and a piece of enameled copper wire is run from that to the other side of the PCB where lies its destination. It comes with FPGA code to take advantage of it, but even for non-Macbook owners, it’s an extremely impressive piece of work. It’s not the first fine-soldering Macbook fix we’ve seen, either.

Thanks [lightpink784] for the tip.