rasz

CH32v303 costs more than much more capable ARM based RP2354A

VIA rights did not come from Cyrix.

Cyrix famously had to skirt IP laws by using TI and IBM foundries because those two companies had full Intel 3rd party licenses. Cyrix was sued and paid big bucks settlement just to be able to use Intels patent 338 (long expired). Later cross licensing had little to do with Cyrix, and more with National owning crapload of patents they could use to retaliate against Intel - that 1998 deal https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN0203... resulted in full cross licensing allowing National build straight 1:1 copies of Intel chips if they desired.

When VIA bought Cyrix from National they didnt inherit ANY of those licenses. VIA was sued just as original Cyrix and National did, and once again had to pay big bucks to settle despite just aquiring Centaur with a bunch of patents and Intel license https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/intel-and-via-set...

With current US administration? Do nothing, win.

>It's impossible to run full UBO (not Lite MV3 version) on current versions on Chrome.

Current version of Chrome seems to be 152.0.7977.39 released August 14, 2026.

August 14, 2026 Chromium 152.0.7977.38 based vivaldis napshot https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/address-field-calculator-an... has this in patch notes:

"[Extensions] Re-enable and extend Manifest V2 extension support for the time being (VB-130324)"

For all possible MV2 extensions this is unsustainable for a small company. Supporting just uBO used by tens of millions of people? pretty doable as it only relies on few hooks into C functions that arent going anywhere.

uBO still works in newest Vivaldi.

Vivaldi 8.1 still supports it (Chromium 150) as loaded unpacked extension.

Edit: and latest August 14, 2026 Chromium 152.0.7977.38 based Snapshot https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/address-field-calculator-an... has this in patch notes:

"[Extensions] Re-enable and extend Manifest V2 extension support for the time being (VB-130324)"

Size cap doesnt mean much when its a constant stream of small writes.

>Examples of games that either required or benefited from MMX enhancements in their software renderer were Eraser Turnabout, POD, and Extreme Assault

POD "Designed for Intel MMX" meant _one_ optional audio filter effect. It was added in order for Ubisoft to cash out $1 Million bribe Intel was handling out while running new Pentium Inside campaign. Intel later tried repeating same stunt with SSE while promoting new Pentium 3, but failed to bag any serious takers other than Rage Software. Rage made a fake game demo (Dispatched) for Intel 1999 Comdex Fall booth which Intel used to manipulate benchmarks for a couple years by lying to Anandtech claiming its a real game :| https://web.archive.org/web/20210807020603/https://www.anand... https://www.hardware.fr/articles/95-5/jeux-optimises.html

Two other examples from that link are SSE "optimized" Rage Software Expendables running slower than original, and "Pentium III optimized" PowerSlide by GT Interactive with zero fps difference. Neither ever released outside of Intels Comdex booth and marketing materials.

>Even though Quake and Quake II are often used as examples of games that benefited from MMX technology, it's important to point out that Quake's famous software renderer predates MMX.

Quake benefitted from MMX processors because those models had doubled L1 cache size :) No one cared about MMX, but jump from 16 KB to 32 KB meant visible fps bump in all games.

> So, Quake's fast performance was achieved primarily through techniques like fixed-point arithmetic

Quake didnt use fixed point math, whole magic of Quake relied on taking full advantage of pipelined FPU. Quake was never optimized for data locality tho and loved cache, the more the better. It scales linearly all the way to 2MB of L2 https://dependency-injection.com/2mb-cache-benchmarks/ and probably would higher if we had platforms supporting more to run tests.

>Many games and other multimedia applications shipped with optional MMX code paths

No, exact opposite. Barely any games, pretty much only the ones where Intel paid that $1m bribe, shipped with any MMX support directly because it was Integer only DSP like accelerator good for Audio/Video but useless for 3D.

>Real floating-point SIMD for x86 didn't arrive until SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) several years later with the Pentium III series.

but

>The first processor to ship with 3DNow! technology was the AMD K6-2 from 1998.

So which is it? :)

>3DNow! was never more popular than MMX.

It was much more popular where it counted considering game developers implemented it without bribes and it actually made games run faster. 3DNow's biggest problem was being introduced in bargain bin low end K6-2 CPUs.

>Developers faced the choice of supporting either Intel CPUs or AMD CPUs

True dichotomy. There is no choice because both technologies provide distinct non overlapping and non interchangeable features. Its like saying "Developers faced the choice of supporting audio filters or faster 3D"

>choosing MMX meant potentially supporting a larger fraction of PC gamers

MMX was _useless_ for early 3D accelerated gaming with CPU still having to perform FPU heavy T&L. Adding any MMX code meant lowering FPU performance of the renderer.

>If you wrote a 3DNow!-optimized renderer, it would only benefit AMD chips that supported it.

The difference being 3DNow!, unlike MMX, actually did benefit AMD owners FPS numbers. NovaLogic software based Voxel renderer is the sole exception, NovaLogic might be the only company consciously using MMX in a game without a bribe :o

>Finally, the ultimate blow to AMD's 3DNow! was Intel's introduction of SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) with the Pentium III in 1999.

Look at start of my comment :) Its super hard to find a game benchmark that visibly showed SSE having a positive effect. Partly because first SSE implementations werent that great, partly because developers were still learning SIMD programming.

>what ultimately made the old MMX registers unnecessary? If you ask retro tech enthusiasts, most answers would point to the introduction of SSE2 by Intel in 2000.

The ultimate blow was being useless beyond DSP tasks (fixed point video/audio/soft modem). Whole idea of MMX came from Intel's Native Signal Processing (NSP) initiative started after they bought Digital Video Interactive (DVI) division from General Electric (developed at famous Sarnoff Research Center). Intel wanted to own software peripherals, Gates didnt like this and made them kill NSP https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1998/11/11/microsoft-sai...

MMX wasnt even good at fast memory transfers losing to MOVSD. Pentium MMX 'rep movsd' 0.27 cycles per byte, Mem copy with MMX registers 0.29 cycles per byte. Dead link: http://www.pennelynn.com/Documents/CUJ/HTML/14.12/DURHAM1/DU... sadly archive.org didnt catch it in time :( only https://web.archive.org/web/20241202110443/http://www.pennel... remains. SSE2 finally beat MOVSD in 2000.

Dont like SSD wear for no reason. I wont look at those logs anyway on my personal gaming pc so its all useless.

Painfully and slowly clicking one item at a time in computer management/event viewer/windows logs/applications and services :|

Im sure this can be automated, but I want to see what Im disabling instead of going bulk all.

>Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget

They can always cut down on candles, they will be fine.

One of the first things I do on win10 is disable most of excess logging.

Oh how I love totally predictable poetterings reply to previous bug report that got closed because "measuring it wrong" and "this is not a support forum".

Which makes me suspect its because they were looking up their superiors or politicians. With Flock, like cell site data, its trivial to determine who you are sleeping around with.

Wasnt the patent pretty much "and then I dump raw sensor data to a JPEG2000 codec"?

Sounds like similar paper "win" to DEC OpenVMS lawsuit against Microsoft where MS penalty was supporting Alpha while DEC trained its enormous sales/engineering arm to sell and support NT thus killing any incentives to buy DEC hw in the first place. DEC moved upstream the value chain and Microsoft moved tons of NT to all existing DEC corporate customers.

> Even the PC compatible lines of the era were built to a very high quality standard.

DEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'

@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and it worked, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.

There was a problem with that idea, DEC engineers working for AMD made K7 too fast for Alpha to compete.

You can weld and glue aluminum, nothing unsafe about it as long as you cut out the damaged part.

>If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.

but AI generated that target list so its all good!

"900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours"

"1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours"

"2,000 targets in 96 hours"

keep shooting, Im sure those are all good targets and totally not a waste of ammo

Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo has 2x official Tomahawk range and payload and costs ~$600K to make with minimal margins.

I tiktok it. Its not true unless a random person reads it out loud to a cell phone.

Perks of centrally planned economy.

or you could just dunk your elbows into some ice water

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/quick-and-cheap-cooling-solutio...

https://www.hprc-online.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/HPRC...

https://www.army.mil/article/257626/the_arm_immersion_coolin...

super high tech https://www.firstlinetech.com/core-tech/arm-immersion/

There are no peace deals, every time Trump said they made a deal Iran side didnt knew anything about it. Those are just announcement to manipulate stock markets and congress/senate.

Its sold to consumers as stats & diagnostics. Companies do this to sell your data and in hopes of roping you into recurring revenue schemes.

Could start with Sulphur spray into atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

Wonder how much 2020 Bunker Fuel ban contributed.

>Why though?

So you burn more tokens. I had a situation recently where LLM asked to interpret bitmap inside the source code encoded as glyphs kept calling into Imagegen and generating photorealistic pictures of computer monitors displaying some random example hallucinated logos with captions like "your logo would go here" :o. I had to take over and directly prompt to write javascript that draws the bitmap. LMM generated single page js app performing this task (fillRect to canvas) in less than a second, 10 mines of js.

mq9 ~$20m price tag will buy a LOT of robodogs with machine guns able to exterminate disproportionally more people per $ and time unit.