What is AMD ROCm?

AMD ROCm is a GPGPU compute solution exposing two APIs: OpenCL and HIP. OpenCL and its upsides and downsides are more well-known, so I’ll focus on what HIP is in this blog post. What is HIP? HIP is a wholesale clone of the CUDA APIs, including the driver, runtime and libraries’ APIs. That’s not a… Continue reading What is AMD ROCm?

What is the minimum number of libraries to run a “hello world” on iOS Simulator?

For iOS simulators, dyld_sim is used as the dynamic linker. How small can the list of dependencies be to run a “hello world” in such an environment? When a binary that uses the simulator is loaded, dyld uses DYLD_ROOT_PATH to be able to locate usr/lib/dyld_sim, which is a build of dyld compiled for the iOS-sim… Continue reading What is the minimum number of libraries to run a “hello world” on iOS Simulator?

NVIDIA GSP Firmware

On recent driver revisions for Linux x86_64 (this does not apply to AArch64 NVIDIA drivers at this time), NVIDIA shipped firmware for a new coprocessor, the GPU System Processor. This coprocessor uses the RISC-V instruction set. The current revisions of the GSP firmware has code for TU10x (Turing), GA100 (Ampere datacenter), GA10x (Ampere) and Gnext… Continue reading NVIDIA GSP Firmware

SQL Server on Arm

Microsoft has an edge SQL Server product that is also available on Arm in addition of x86 processors, offering core functionality. However, forget about .NET extensibility, snapshots, replication and other features that are excluded from this product. The Developer edition is limited to 4 cores and 32GB of RAM. Azure SQL Edge can be pulled… Continue reading SQL Server on Arm

Thoughts on Tachyum (part 2)

(Part 1 at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/01/thoughts-on-tachyum/, let’s assume that most Tachyum claims are true) Tachyum is a company saying that their VLIW processor will change computing, being a “universal processor” that can be used for all workloads. They still claim that they’ll be able to ship their Prodigy processor this year. According to them, they were able… Continue reading Thoughts on Tachyum (part 2)

mrustc on macOS

9 days ago, I pushed to https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc/pull/151 a more complete mrustc on macOS branch including Apple Silicon support, to have an alternative Rust compiler available for the platform. The patch-set is tested with Rust 1.29.0. mrustc’s Rust 1.39.0 support is not quite complete yet at this point in time. Notes: Rust 1.29.0 does not officially… Continue reading mrustc on macOS

Not-an-iPad-review

I ordered an iPad Air (again) on Sunday and picked it up on Monday. So far, it’s quite good, with the Apple Pencil being the killer feature of the device. Scribble is what makes it shine, and what i’m writing this blog post with. It allows to just write text anywhere with the pencil to… Continue reading Not-an-iPad-review

Open source rhetoric? or FUD?

I’ve been reading this blog post. (titled “Heads up: Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linux OS”) The headline by itself already sets the tone for what’s next in the article. First, repositories added by default in the OS are not considered as “secret”. I’ll however give a pass to that headline as… Continue reading Open source rhetoric? or FUD?