memory performance

Grandmaster David Howell tests Magnus Carlsen by showing him chess positions and asking which famous games they come from. Carlsen recognizes many almost instantly.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

A Tiny Desk concert in which pianist Dan Tepfer plays with a Disklavier player piano driven by a program he wrote that responds to his playing. He performs four pieces from his Natural Machines project.

A one-minute clip of Rochus Keller performing as a one-man band: slap bass with the left hand, Rhodes and lead guitar with the right, and drums with the feet.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022. It is built on timing, misdirection and psychology, and the method defeated the show's hosts.

A hobbyist compares vertical bifacial solar panels against south-facing angled panels using winter production results. It tests whether the usual mounting approach is actually best.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

Nick Caston compares Unity's sample ECS/DOTS project (AngryBots) with his own from-scratch C++ and OpenGL clone. He benchmarks performance and discusses the effort involved in each approach.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow on Game Boy Color that uses glitches and frame-precise inputs to make the game execute an arbitrary program. It was later obsoleted by an improved run.

A short Microsoft promo comparing classic Teams with the rewritten new Teams side by side, claiming faster startup and better performance. The new version is shown taking around nine seconds to launch.

A short side-by-side recording by Jake Archibald of the same animation demo running in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Servo WebRender nightlies on a 60Hz display. It shows the smoothness difference of GPU-based rendering.

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.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

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.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

A one-minute NVIDIA research demo of foveated rendering for VR using SMI eye tracking. It renders at full detail only where the eye is looking, matching the physiology of human vision.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

A Dyalog demonstration of developing a Sudoku solver in APL, using an algorithm by Arthur Whitney with performance work by John Scholes. The narration steps through the array-oriented solution.

Eon is a demoscene production by The Black Lotus, released at Revision 2019 and designed for an Amiga with OCS chipset, 512 kB chip and 512 kB fast memory. This is the party version, which has some known glitches.

Sam Aaron live codes an ambient electronic set using Sonic Pi, the music programming environment he created. The performance shows code driving music in real time.

A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.

Tom Scott races a London black-cab driver who has memorized The Knowledge against a phone GPS across the city, comparing local expertise to navigation software.

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.

debuglive makes a 1990-style dance track on an Amiga 500 with a Stereo Master sampler and cheap secondhand records, showing how sampling and trackers worked within tight memory limits.

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.

Red Bull and the Dutch Drone Gods follow Max Verstappen's RB20 F1 car around Silverstone in a single FPV shot using a custom drone that accelerates to 300 km/h in about four seconds. The video also covers the year of development behind the drone.

Gamers Nexus builds a fully ray-traced demo in Unreal Engine to compare faked global illumination with RTX ray-traced GI. It covers the gains in dynamic scenes and accuracy against the performance cost and noise.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether higher frame rates and refresh rates improve gaming performance, using Shroud and other players on aim and reaction tests at 60, 144 and 240Hz. The video is sponsored by Nvidia.

Jonathan Blow gives a formal, hour-long demo of his Jai compiler focused on the implicit context feature. The context carries things like allocators through a program without explicit parameter passing, and the talk walks through the code.

IBM's record-setting stop-motion film made by moving individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, illustrating atomic-scale memory research.

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.

Road & Track puts a 2014 Porsche 911 Turbo through 50 back-to-back launch-control runs on a SoCal runway. The car completes 61 launches before the testers lose count.

A demo of Deldo, an Emacs package that lets Emacs hooks trigger vibration events on computer-controllable sex toys. It is an absurd teledildonics project that is half performance art.

Fully Charged gets an exclusive first drive of the Porsche Taycan, running 0-200 km/h launch control repeatedly. It covers the car's twin-motor 800-volt specs, claimed range and fast charging.

A live performance at AGDQ 2014 in which Super Mario World is made to execute arbitrary injected code, running other games like Pong and Snake on the cartridge. It is done through a TASBot feeding precise controller inputs.

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.