Running A Game On A PC With No System RAM

March 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 46 Comments

As a clear sign of how desperate these RAMpocalypse times are becoming, we have [PortalRunner] over on YouTube contemplating how to run modern-day software on a PC that has no sticks of that most precious PC-related commodity that is not printer ink. What fallbacks do we have when purchasing some sticks of DDR5 is inconceivable due to budgetary limitations or chronic sticker shock symptoms? As it turns out, quite a few.

Of course, it should be noted up front that none of these options are particularly good or desirable. The video starts with simply trying to push Linux to see how little RAM it really needs using boot arguments. This unfortunately soft-bricks the system if not enough RAM is allocated for boot. Next is the idea of leaning heavily into swap, as today’s SSDs ought to be a lot faster than memory page swapping from a HDD. Only this turns out to be also too slow to be usable due to the sheer overhead that this adds.

Even more desperate is to try and use the video RAM on GPUs as a kind of system RAM, which sort-off works, but also with enormous overhead and an if possible worse experience than running a system off basically a pure swap file. Ultimately the most viable method is to lean into the CPU’s many megabytes of cache and modify a CoreBoot BIOS image to simply not initialize system RAM.

As long as you can squeeze your software into the BIOS image and available CPU cache memory, you can run amazing software like the Snake clone in the video. Of course this concept could be expanded upon, and maybe even made to work with UEFI BIOSes, but there will probably not be anyone running Linux from a 32 MB L3 cache any time soon.

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Water Cooling The MacBook Neo Laptop To Double Gaming Performance

March 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Recently [ETA Prime] felt a bit underwhelmed by the raw performance of his MacBook Neo when it came to running for extended periods under full load, such as when gaming. Thus the obvious solution is to mildly over-engineer a cooling solution that takes care of issues like thermal throttling.

The Apple MacBook Neo with its repurposed iPhone 16 SoC seems to have leaned hard into answering the question whether a smartphone can be a good general purpose personal computer. Ignoring the lack of I/O, it’s overall not a bad SoC for a laptop, but like when you try to push the CPU and GPU on a smartphone, they do get pretty toasty. Due to the minimalistic cooling solution in the MacBook Neo it’ll easily hit the 105°C thermal throttle limit.

Technically the ‘heatsink’ for this laptop is the aluminium case, as the SoC is coupled via a thermal pad to the case. This doesn’t leave a lot of space and the case will heat soak pretty fast, while also making retrofitting a cooling solution a challenge.

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Modern Smartphone Vs. 80s Supercomputer

March 26, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 49 Comments

One of the most common ways of comparing the processing power of some microcontroller or older smartphone in a fantastical way was to say that they had more processing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer. While this sounds impressive on the surface, the AGC was the first integrated circuit computer ever built and is predictably under-powered by almost all modern standards. A more apt comparison would be to compare a smartphone to a supercomputer from some bygone era, and someone has recently done just that.

The linked article looks at a modern iPhone 17 compared to the Cray 2 supercomputer. When the Cray 2 was first built in the mid 80s, it was the fastest computer in the world at 1.9 GFLOPS using four vector processors. A modern iPhone is estimated to have slightly more than that, so in some ways the iPhone comes out on top.

However, the Cray 2 was built with vector processors, a specialized type of processor meant to perform rapid calculations on specific types of data sets. So the Cray 2 may have been faster at these types of tasks than the more general-purpose A19 processor, and the A19 may have the edge in other tasks.

The other major difference the article doesn’t discuss is what software runs on these computers. The Cray 2 supercomputer ran a modified version of UNIX System V, which at the time was owned by AT&T (and which ran on plenty of other computers as well). Although proprietary in some sense, it was much more open than Apple’s iOS operating system, allowing users to run whatever software they wanted to run on the supercomputers that they bought and paid for, and to modify many parts of the operating system itself. In that sense, the Cray will always maintain the edge over Apple and their walled garden.

Retro Weather Display Acts Like It’s Windows 95

March 19, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 21 Comments

Sometimes you really need to know what the weather is doing, but you don’t want to look at your phone. For times like those, this neat weather display from [Jordan] might come in handy with its throwback retro vibe.

The build is based around the ESP32-2432S028—also known as the CYD, or Cheap Yellow Display, for the integrated 320 x 240 LCD screen. [Jordan] took this all-in-one device and wrapped it in an attractive 3D-printed housing in the shape of an old-school CRT monitor, just… teenier. A special lever mechanism was built in to the enclosure to allow front panel controls to activate the tactile buttons on the CYD board. The ESP32 is programmed to check Open-Meteo feeds for forecasts and current weather data, while also querying a webcam feed and satellite and radar JPEGs from available weather services. These are then displayed on screen in a way that largely resembles the Windows 95 UI design language, with pages for current conditions, future forecasts, wind speeds, and the like.

We’ve seen some fun weather displays over the years, from graphing types to the purely beautiful. If you’ve found a fun way to display the weather (or change it) don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline. Particularly in the latter case.

Repurposing Old AMD APUs For AI Work

March 18, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 22 Comments

The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good use for AI work, as [akandr] demonstrates.

The first thing you’ll have to figure out is how to take an individual BC250 APU and get it up and running. It’s effectively a full system-on-chip, combining a Zen 2 CPU with a Cyan Skillfish RDNA 1.5 GPU. However, it was originally intended to run inside a rackmount server unit rather than a standalone machine. To get it going, you’ll need to hook it up with power and some kind of cooling solution.

From there, it’s a matter of software. [akandr] explains how to get AI workflows running on the BC250 using Ollama and Vulkan, while noting useful hacks to improve performance like disabling the GUI and tweaking the CPU governor. The hardware can be used with a wide range of different models depending on what you’re trying to achieve, it just takes some careful management of the APU’s resources to get the most out of it. Thankfully, that’s all in the guide on GitHub.

We’ve already seen these AMD APUs repurposed before for gaming use. Unfortunately the word is out already about their capabilities, so prices have risen significantly in response to demand. Still, if you manage to score a BC250 and do something cool with it yourself, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!

Ternary RISC Processor Achieves Non-Binary Computing Via FPGA

March 16, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 34 Comments

You would be very hard pressed to find any sort of CPU or microcontroller in a commercial product that uses anything but binary to do its work. And yet, other options exist! Ternary computing involves using trits with three states instead of bits with two. It’s not popular, but there is now a design available for a ternary processor that you could potentially get your hands on.

The device in question is called the 5500FP, as outlined in a research paper from [Claudio Lorenzo La Rosa.] Very few ternary processors exist, and little effort has ever been made to fabricate such a device in real silicon. However, [Claudio] explains that it’s entirely possible to implement a ternary logic processor based on RISC principles by using modern FPGA hardware. The impetus to do so is because of the perceived benefits of ternary computing—notably, that with three states, each “trit” can store more information than regular old binary “bits.” Beyond that, the use of a “balanced ternary” system, based on logical values of -1, 0 , and 1, allows storing both negative and positive numbers without a wasted sign bit, and allows numbers to be negated trivially simply by inverting all trits together.

The research paper does a good job of outlining the basis of this method of computing, as well as the mode of operation of the 5500FP processor. For now, it’s a 24-trit device operating at a frequency of 20MHz, but the hope is that in future it would be possible to move to custom silicon to improve performance and capability. The hope is that further development of ternary computing hardware could lead to parts capable of higher information density and lower power consumption, both highly useful in this day and age where improvements to conventional processor designs are ever hard to find.

Head over to the Ternary Computing website if you’re intrigued by the Ways of Three and want to learn more. We perhaps don’t expect ternary computing to take over any time soon, given the Soviets didn’t get far with it in the 1950s. Still, the concept exists and is fun to contemplate if you like the mental challenge. Maybe you can even start a rumor that the next iPhone is using an all-ternary processor and spread it across a few tech blogs before the week is out. Let us know how you get on.

Relays Run This Balanced Ternary Adder

March 15, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

If you’re at all familiar with digital computing, you’ll know that computers represent everything in binary values of one and zero. Except that’s not technically the only way to do computing! You can use any numerical system you like if you build your hardware to suit, as [Jeroen Brinkman’s] ternary adder demonstrates.

As you might guess from the prefix, “ternary” refers to a base-3 numerical system. In this case, [Jeroen] implemented a balanced ternary system, which effectively uses values of -, 0, and + instead of just 1 and 0. The adder is built using relay logic, and is designed to handle 4 trits—the ternary equivalent of bits, where each trit can have one of the three aforementioned states. On a hardware level, trit states are represented with voltages of -5, 0, or 5 V in this case, and are handled with special tri-state switching elements that [Jeroen] constructed out of simple SPDT relays.

[Jeroen]’s write-up does a great job of explaining both ternary basics as well as the functioning of the adder. It’s also quite intuitive because it’s possible to see the relays clicking away and the LEDs flashing on and off as the circuit does its work to add values stored in ternary format.

If you’re trying to get your head around ternary computing from the very lowest level, this project is a great place to start. We’ve seen base 3 hardware built before, too—like this simple ternary computer lashed together from accessible components.

If you’re cooking up your own computing apparatus that uses some weird number system or something, remember—we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline!