hardware architecture

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) talks about clean architecture and design, including keeping the database and frameworks out of the center of an application. It is an hour-long conference talk.

David Patterson's talk on the history of computer architecture, from RISC and superscalar designs to the end of Dennard scaling and Moore's Law. It argues that domain-specific architectures and open instruction sets open a new golden age.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) presents the principles of Clean Architecture, covering dependency direction, boundaries, and why frameworks and databases should be details rather than the center of an application.

Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a Hot Chips 2023 keynote on the challenges of building hardware for deep learning. He traces how GPUs have been adapted for machine learning, especially training.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

Martin Fowler's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on the different things people mean by event-driven architecture. He identifies four patterns, including event notification and event-carried state transfer.

Sandy Munro sits down with engineers from 3IS to compare the electrical architectures of the Tesla Model Y, Ford Mach-E and VW ID.4. They discuss ECU counts, bus architectures and what the differences mean for cost and integration.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems gives a Google Tech Talk on running Java business applications on a machine with about a thousand cores. He covers hardware and software codesign, including garbage collection hardware and the JIT.

Bob Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, gives a Roguelike Celebration 2018 talk questioning whether entity component systems are the only way to structure a game. He walks through alternative architectures drawn from roguelike development.

Joe Grand recounts being hired to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million of cryptocurrency. He describes three months of experimentation, voltage glitching, failures and high-stakes attempts with only one chance to get it right.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.

Christopher Domas's Black Hat talk demonstrates a hardware backdoor in a third-party x86 processor, a hidden core that grants root from userland. He uses it to discuss how feasible broader hardware backdoors might be.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

A GDC 2015 talk in which Natalya Tatarchuk describes the multithreaded renderer Bungie built for Destiny. It covers the low-latency architecture across platforms, its successes and its challenges.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Microsoft's Tony Chen explains how the Xbox One was designed to resist physical attacks, including secure boot, encrypted memory, a security processor and a hypervisor. The goal was to make any hardware attack cost more than the price of many games.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.

Christopher Domas presents research at DEF CON 26 showing a hidden alternate instruction set and undocumented hardware backdoor in some x86 processors, found on a third-party CPU. He uses it to ask how feasible wider hardware backdoors are.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

Tony Chen of Microsoft explains at BlueHat Seattle 2019 how the Xbox One was designed to resist physical attacks. He covers the security design and hypervisor-based OS architecture that kept the console uncracked for years.

Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

Jacob Geller's video essay examines how architecture in schools and in video games, such as cover shooters, is shaped by violence. It touches on brutalism, campus policing and protests.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

A two-hour Oxide and Friends session answering questions after shipping the first Oxide rack. Topics include making hardware as a startup and why Oxide chose illumos.

Louis Rossmann, a Macbook repair shop owner, goes through a long list of Apple hardware engineering failures, from GPU defects to keyboards and repair practices.

2kliksphilip examines UserBenchmark, a hardware comparison site known for strongly biased, pro-Intel writing. The video explains the site's credibility problems and points viewers to better sources for CPU and GPU information.

The Floppotron plays a cover of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams using an orchestra of old computer hardware such as floppy drives, hard drives and scanners, driven by microcontrollers. It is a short music performance rather than an explanation.