server hardware

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.

The author of copyparty introduces the FOSS file server he has built over five years, demoing its features such as resumable uploads, WebDAV and deduplication. The video itself is shown running on a demo server.

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.

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.

A short video of five people carrying a live, running web server across the city by public transport to a new datacenter. It stayed powered and connected to the internet the whole way, so there was no downtime.

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.

Overclocker der8auer tours Hetzner's Falkenstein data center in Germany, showing custom racks, own mainboards, passively cooled servers and ATX-style cases on shelves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session in which Holly Mesrobian and Marc Brooker explain how AWS Lambda is built, including its sandboxing, isolation and scaling architecture. It covers what happens under the hood when serverless code runs.

Justine Tunney presents Redbean, a web server distributed as a single actually portable executable that runs on multiple operating systems. It embeds Lua, SQLite and MbedTLS in a fork-based server.

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.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.

Mike of mikeselectricstuff shows his heavily modified old BBC Micro system in a 28-minute tour of 8-bit hardware archaeology.

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.

Area 5150 is a demoscene production for the original 4.77MHz IBM PC with CGA graphics and PC speaker. This is the Evoke 2022 party version, captured from real hardware, and it won the Alternative Demo compo.

William Osman describes helping build parts of the MrBeast Squid Game event, including hacking together hundreds of wifi-controlled blood packs in about three weeks. He covers the chaos and near-failures along the way.

A 35C3 talk presenting a proof-of-concept SPI bus hardware implant with capabilities like those alleged in the Bloomberg Supermicro story, plus countermeasures for detecting such modchips.

A four-minute Velocity 2011 talk in which Artur Bergman, then at Wikia, argues bluntly and with profanity that SSDs should replace spinning disks in servers.

Loopop reviews the Polyend Tracker hardware tracker-style sequencer and walks through a tutorial from sampling to finishing a song. It covers most of the device's features.

A hobbyist builds a prototype full-frame CCD camera from scratch, with open-source design files and a custom PCB. The video shows the first, still rough prototype.

Ben Heck modifies a keyboard with magnets, Hall effect sensors and an Xbox controller so the WASD keys give analog control. He walks through the hardware build.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

The first video in Photon of Scoopex's Amiga hardware programming series. It shows how to set up an assembler and write a minimal 68000 program that waits for a left mouse click.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf 2018 keynote introduces Phoenix LiveView, which renders HTML on the server and updates the page over websockets. It includes a demo showing that latency is not the bottleneck one might expect.

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.

James Lambert demos a MegaTexture-style technique running on real Nintendo 64 hardware, built for an N64Brew game jam. It streams high-resolution textures onto stained-glass scenes on the console.

Part one of Capt. Grace Hopper's 1982 NSA lecture on the future of data, hardware, software and people. It includes her humor, her nanosecond demonstration and views on scaling and resisting old ways of doing things.