gpu

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A screen capture from Portal 2 running in Asahi Linux. The Asahi Linux logo is in the bottom right of the image as a watermark. The environment is a concrete and glass building with elements of nature taking over the room on the other side of the glass from the character. A red circle with a grey cube above it is in the foreground.

Asahi Linux Brings Better Gaming To Apple Silicon

October 29, 2024 by 8 Comments

For those of you longing for better gaming on an Apple Silicon device, Asahi Linux is here to help.

While Apple’s own line of CPUs are relatively new kids on the block, they’ve still been around for four years now, giving hackers ample time to dissect their innards. The team behind Asahi Linux has now brought us “the only conformant OpenGL®, OpenCL™, and Vulkan® drivers” for Apple’s M1 and M2.

The emulation overhead of the system means that most games will need at least 16 GB of RAM to run. Many games are playable, but newer titles can’t yet hit 60 frames per second. The developers are currently focused on “correctness” and hope to improve performance in future updates. Many indie titles are reported to already be working at full speed though.

You can hear more about some of the fiddly bits of how to “tessellate with arcane compute shaders” in the video below. Don’t worry, it’s only 40 minutes of the nine hour video and it should start right at the presentation by GPU dev [Alyssa Rosenzweig].

If you want to see some of how Linux on Apple Silicon started or some of the previous work on hacking the M1 GPU, we have you covered.

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C64 Gets A Graphics Upgrade Courtesy Of Your Favorite Piano Manufacturer

October 11, 2024 by 39 Comments

The Commodore 64 was quite a machine in its time, though a modern assessment would say that it’s severely lacking in the graphical department. [Vossi] has whipped up a bit of an upgrade for the C64 and C128, in the form of a graphics expansion card running Yamaha hardware.

As you might expect, the expansion is designed to fit neatly into a C64 cartridge slot. The card runs the Yamaha V9958—the video display processor known for its appearance in the MSX2+ computers. In this case, it’s paired with a healthy 128 kB of video RAM so it can really do its thing. The V9958 has an analog RGB output that can be set for PAL or NTSC operation, and can perform at resolutions up to 512×212 or even 512×424 interlaced. Naturally, it needs to be hooked directly up to a compatible screen, like a 1084, or one with SCART input. [Vossi] took the time to create some demos of the chip’s capabilities, drawing various graphics in a way that the C64 couldn’t readily achieve on its own.

It’s a build that almost feels like its from an alternate universe, where Yamaha decided to whip up a third-party graphics upgrade for the C64. That didn’t happen, but stranger team ups have occurred over the years.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

Learn GPU Programming With Simple Puzzles

September 25, 2024 by 9 Comments

Have you wanted to get into GPU programming with CUDA but found the usual textbooks and guides a bit too intense? Well, help is at hand in the form of a series of increasingly difficult programming ‘puzzles’ created by [Sasha Rush]. The first part of the simplification is to utilise the excellent NUMBA python JIT compiler to allow easy-to-understand code to be deployed as GPU machine code. Working on these puzzles is even easier if you use this linked Google Colab as your programming environment, launching you straight into a Jupyter notebook with the puzzles laid out. You can use your own GPU if you have one, but that’s not detailed.

The puzzles start, assuming you know nothing at all about GPU programming, which is totally the case for some of us! What’s really nice is the way the result of the program operation is displayed, showing graphically how data are read and written to the input and output arrays you’re working with. Each essential concept for CUDA programming is identified one at a time with a real programming example, making it a breeze to follow along. Just make sure you don’t watch the video below all the way through the first time, as in it [Sasha] explains all the solutions!

Confused about why you’d want to do this? Then perhaps check out our guide to CUDA first. We know what you’re thinking: how do we use non-nVIDIA hardware? Well, there’s SCALE for that! Finally, once you understand CUDA, why not have a play with WebGPU?

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Hackaday Links: September 15, 2024

September 15, 2024 by 10 Comments

A quick look around at any coffee shop, city sidewalk, or sadly, even at a traffic light will tell you that people are on their phones a lot. But exactly how much is that? For Americans in 2023, it was a mind-boggling 100 trillion megabytes, according to the wireless industry lobbying association CTIA. The group doesn’t discuss their methodology in the press release, so it’s a little hard to make judgments on that number’s veracity, or the other numbers they bandy about, such as the 80% increase in data usage since 2021, or the fact that 40% of data is now going over 5G connections. Some of the numbers are more than a little questionable, too, such as the claim that 330 million Americans (out of a current estimate of 345.8 million people) are covered by one or more 5G networks. Even if you figure that most 5G installations are in densely populated urban areas, 95% coverage seems implausible given that in 2020, 57.5 million people lived in rural areas of the USA. Regardless of the details, it remains that our networks are positively humming with data, and keeping things running is no mean feat.

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Startup Claims It Can Boost CPU Performance By 2-100X

June 12, 2024 by 47 Comments

Although Moore’s Law has slowed at bit as chip makers reach the physical limits of transistor size, researchers are having to look to other things other than cramming more transistors on a chip to increase CPU performance. ARM is having a bit of a moment by improving the performance-per-watt of many computing platforms, but some other ideas need to come to the forefront to make any big pushes in this area. This startup called Flow Computing claims it can improve modern CPUs by a significant amount with a slight change to their standard architecture.

It hopes to make these improvements by adding a parallel processing unit, which they call the “back end” to a more-or-less standard CPU, the “front end”. These two computing units would be on the same chip, with a shared bus allowing them to communicate extremely quickly with the front end able to rapidly offload tasks to the back end that are more inclined for parallel processing. Since the front end maintains essentially the same components as a modern CPU, the startup hopes to maintain backwards compatibility with existing software while allowing developers to optimize for use of the new parallel computing unit when needed.

While we’ll take a step back and refrain from claiming this is the future of computing until we see some results and maybe a prototype or two, the idea does show some promise and is similar to some ARM computers which have multiple cores optimized for different tasks, or other computers which offload non-graphics tasks to a GPU which is more optimized for processing parallel tasks. Even the Raspberry Pi is starting to take advantage of external GPUs for tasks like these.

Retrogadgets: The Ageia PhysX Card

May 6, 2024 by 27 Comments

Old computers meant for big jobs often had an external unit to crunch data in specific ways. A computer doing weather prediction, for example, might have an SIMD (single instruction multiple data) vector unit that could multiply a bunch of numbers by a constant in one swoop. These days, there are many computers crunching physics equations so you can play your favorite high-end computer game. Instead of vector processors, we have video cards. These cards have many processing units that can execute “kernels” or small programs on large groups of data at once.

Awkward Years

However, there was that awkward in-between stage when personal computers needed fast physics simulation, but it wasn’t feasible to put array processing and video graphics on the same board. Around 2006, a company called Ageia produced the PhysX card, which promised to give PCs the ability to do sophisticated physics simulations without relying on a video card.

Keep in mind that when this was built, multi-core CPUs were an expensive oddity and games were struggling to manage everything they needed to with limited memory and compute resources. The PhysX card was a “PPU” or Physics Processor Unit and used the PCI bus. Like many companies, Ageia made the chips and expected other companies — notably Asus — to make the actual board you’d plug into your computer.

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A standard-compliant MXM card installed into a laptop, without heatsink

MXM: Powerful, Misused, Hackable

April 18, 2024 by 26 Comments

Today, we’ll look into yet another standard in the embedded space: MXM. It stands for “Mobile PCI Express Module”, and is basically intended as a GPU interface for laptops with PCIe, but there’s way more to it – it can work for any high-power high-throughput PCIe device, with a fair few DisplayPort links if you need them!

You will see MXM sockets in older generations of laptops, barebones desktop PCs, servers, and even automotive computers – certain generations of Tesla cars used to ship with MXM-socketed Nvidia GPUs! Given that GPUs are in vogue today, it pays to know how you can get one in low-profile form-factor and avoid putting a giant desktop GPU inside your device.

I only had a passing knowledge of the MXM standard until a bit ago, but my friend, [WifiCable], has been playing with it for a fair bit now. On a long Discord call, she guided me through all the cool things we should know about the MXM standard, its history, compatibility woes, and hackability potential. I’ve summed all of it up into this article – let’s take a look!

This article has been written based on info that [WifiCable] has given me, and, it’s also certainly not the last one where I interview a hacker and condense their knowledge into a writeup. If you are interested, let’s chat!

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