cpu

A short 2001 Tom's Hardware clip that runs Quake 3 on several popular CPU and motherboard combinations of the era, then removes the CPU cooler to see which chips survive. It shows how different processors handle losing their heatsink or fan.

The 8-Bit Guy reviews the Color Maximite 2, a modern ARM-based computer that boots straight into BASIC. He shows what it can do as a retro-style machine.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

Linus Tech Tips replicates the Threadripper workstation Linus Torvalds built for himself, discussing the parts such as the CPU and cooler.

Enderman gets Windows 11 running on a Pentium 4 system with a Radeon HD 5870 and 8 GB of DDR2. It explores how an unsupported, ancient CPU can be made to work by using the rare last Pentium 4 variant and a registry flag.

Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.

Linus Tech Tips water-cools a 2020 MacBook Air, tearing it down and showing the cooling design along the way. The video shows the gap between the CPU lid and die and how little the stock heatsink does.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) presents a deliberately trollish computer architecture built on IEEE-754 floating point, using NaN and infinity to define logic gates. He builds working hardware around the idea.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

A Samsung-backed viral demo that builds a fast computer from 24 256GB MLC SSDs in a RAID 0 array and shows the throughput results.

Dave Ackley presents robust-first computing and the ULAM programming language for the Movable Feast Machine, a cellular-automata-like architecture. It was a short video for the Future Programming Workshop 2015.

LGR looks at the Silicon Graphics Indigo2, a UNIX workstation that cost about $86,000 in 1995, covering its pros and cons, games it can run, and whether it is worth owning today.

Linus Tech Tips opens up an M1 MacBook Air to test whether better thermal pads could improve performance in the fanless design. It looks at what Apple left on the table.

Der8auer visits Tescan and uses an electron microscope to compare real transistor sizes on Intel 14nm and AMD 7nm chips. It shows that process node names do not match physical measurements.

A short Princeton CITP video describing cold boot attacks, where encryption keys remain in DRAM after power loss and can be recovered. It covers the attack against disk encryption such as BitLocker, FileVault and TrueCrypt.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether chaining many PCIe riser extensions causes loss of GPU performance. They keep adding extensions to see how far the signal will go.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a 1991 IBM 9121 thermal conduction module from a System/390 mainframe, a 63-layer ceramic hybrid module with 2772 pins worth about $250,000, and demonstrates a BGA desoldering technique.

Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks GPU gaming performance on Linux using the Bazzite OS, an exploratory first step toward establishing a Linux testing methodology. It compares results against Windows and notes where Linux still falls short.

Level1Techs' Wendell shows Intel's Flex 170 GPU providing GPU-accelerated virtual desktops on Proxmox 8.1 without subscription licensing, using SR-IOV, and demonstrates many desktop instances running at once.

CuriousMarc and colleagues at the Computer History Museum try to compile and run a FORTRAN II program on a 1959 IBM 1401. The machine has only 16k of memory and a CPU not meant for scientific work, so success is far from guaranteed.

A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.

A short demo reel of the 1985 Silicon Graphics IRIS 2400 workstation animating flat-shaded polygons on a 68010 CPU. It shows the early SGI graphics that preceded their later fame.