This article surveys the rapid rise of AI chips, explains why traditional CPUs fall short for deep learning, compares GPU, FPGA, and ASIC designs, outlines market dynamics in the US and China, and highlights emerging opportunities for specialized ASICs in mobile and edge applications.
This article examines the components of server architecture, the technological transformations introduced by 5G—including computing boundaries and scenarios—, the requirements imposed by edge and cloud computing on servers, and reviews various server types such as white‑label, open‑source, AI, and edge servers, along with key manufacturers.
This tutorial walks you through creating a match‑box‑sized NFC‑enabled smart card that consolidates employee badges, access cards and cafeteria cards, detailing hardware selection, PCB design, firmware, e‑ink screen handling, and open‑source resources for a compact, multifunctional device.
This article explains what a server is, its logical and hardware architecture, the role of firmware and operating systems, various classification methods—including form factor, instruction set, processor count and application type—and compares the market dynamics and technical advantages of X86 and ARM servers.
This article provides a detailed introduction to server fundamentals, covering what servers are, their logical and hardware architecture, firmware and operating systems, various classification schemes, and the ongoing competition between X86 and ARM server platforms in the data‑center market.
This article traces the evolution of Chinese domestic CPUs, examines the major manufacturers such as Feiteng, Kunpeng, Haiguang, Loongson, Zhaoxin, and Shenwei, and analyzes their architectures, performance, ecosystem, and market impact within the broader semiconductor industry.
This article presents a comprehensive overview of server fundamentals, covering the definition of servers, detailed hardware component technologies, and associated software and applications, illustrated through a series of instructional images compiled by the High‑Performance Computing Technical Committee and the Architecture Alliance.
This article provides concise definitions and explanations of 53 core operating‑system and hardware concepts—including block and character devices, controllers, DMA, scheduling algorithms, virtualization, and error handling—offering a quick reference for developers and students alike.
This article introduces the essential components of a server—CPU, GPU, and memory—explaining their roles, characteristics, and common configurations, especially for video processing and artificial intelligence workloads, while providing visual diagrams and further reading suggestions.
This article reviews Pony.ai's autonomous driving hardware evolution, detailing the company's hardware milestones, team structure, the Pony Alpha2 system, and the key challenges of cost, power consumption, rapid iteration, mass production, and complex road scenarios, while sharing practical solutions and future directions.
This article explains what an IoT platform is, how it fits into a complete IoT system, the functions it provides such as connectivity, protocol handling, security, data collection and analysis, and offers guidance on when businesses should adopt one despite cost trade‑offs.
This article explains the physical makeup of mechanical hard drives—including platters, heads, tracks, cylinders and sectors—shows how to view disk details with Linux commands like lsblk and fdisk, and clarifies common misconceptions about heads, cylinders and sector sizes.
This article explains how to master a new technology by combining observation, listening, hands‑on practice, and teaching, then dives into server fundamentals, operational responsibilities, hardware classifications, and the core components of computers and servers, illustrated with clear diagrams.
This article explains how modern operating systems sit atop processors, memory, and I/O devices, providing a simplified computer model, detailing kernel and user modes, CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, device drivers, interrupts, buses, boot processes, and the various types of operating systems in use today.
This article explains the historical shift from early north‑bridge memory buses to integrated CPU memory controllers, details the progression of SDRAM to DDR4—including voltage, prefetch and feature changes—covers future trends in capacity, voltage and frequency, and compares system memory bandwidth with GPU memory technologies such as GDDR5 and HBM.
An extensive survey of the global AI chip market lists over 90 companies—including major manufacturers, Chinese startups, and traditional IP vendors—detailing each firm's representative AI processors, development history, and key technological features to illustrate current industry trends and competitive landscape.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of FPGA technology, its architectural components, advantages over ASICs, current global and Chinese market sizes, growth drivers such as 5G and AI, and the challenges and prospects for domestic FPGA manufacturers.
This article describes a tiny Linux‑based business card that boots in seconds, includes classic games and a MicroPython interpreter, runs on an 8 MB Allwinner F1C100s chip, and can be built for under three dollars using inexpensive components and DIY PCB fabrication.
The article reviews the evolution of artificial‑intelligence hardware, comparing traditional CPUs with parallel GPUs, reconfigurable FPGAs, fully custom ASICs, and emerging neuromorphic chips, highlighting their architectures, performance trade‑offs, power consumption, and current industry adoption.
This article provides a thorough overview of MySQL optimization, covering the underlying philosophy, risk considerations, participants, optimization scope across hardware, system, application, and database layers, practical tools, command‑line techniques, and detailed tuning recommendations for both system and database parameters.
This article explains why battery usage is critical for mobile apps, describes hardware‑based power measurement and the use of Google’s Battery Historian tool—including installation, command‑line data collection, parameter interpretation, and methods to improve test data validity.
This article explains how SSDs have transformed storage performance and details the characteristics, advantages, and use‑cases of the five main SSD interfaces—SATA, PCIe, M.2, mSATA, and U.2—helping readers choose the appropriate technology for their needs.
This article reviews the evolution of autonomous‑driving hardware, discusses key sensor technologies such as LiDAR and GNSS/IMU, outlines mechanical and electronic challenges—including size, weight, temperature, vibration, and electromagnetic interference—and presents Pony.ai’s PonyAlpha platform as a practical solution.
This article provides an in‑depth exploration of Linux’s timekeeping subsystem, covering how the kernel initializes and maintains system time, reads timestamps via vDSO and sequential locks, manages timers with various algorithms, and explains the underlying quartz crystal oscillator that generates the hardware clock.
The article explains the concept of Storage Class Memory (SCM), its role as a fast, non‑volatile memory tier between DRAM and NAND flash, and how NVMe and related standards enable new storage hierarchies that improve performance for AI, big data, and emerging technologies.
This article explains InfluxDB's storage engine workflow—including WAL, Cache, TSM files, compression components, and file management—then provides hardware sizing guidance based on write/query load, series cardinality, and recommends SSD storage with sample configuration settings.
The article explains how memory chips are organized into banks and matrices, why eight consecutive bytes are distributed across eight banks for parallel I/O, and how this hardware design makes 64‑bit (8‑byte) alignment essential for optimal performance.
This tutorial explains how to attach a 128×64 I2C OLED module to a Raspberry Pi, enable the I2C interface, install the Adafruit Python SSD1306 library, detect the device address, run example scripts, and adjust the code for different screen sizes.
RISC‑V, an open‑source instruction set architecture created at UC Berkeley, is rapidly gaining support from major tech companies, academic institutions, and governments worldwide because of its low cost, flexible licensing, and potential to become the Linux‑like foundation for CPUs, though concerns about fragmentation and lack of a strong steward remain.
This guide introduces key Linux commands—lshw, lscpu, lsusb, lsscsi, lspci, df, and free—explaining how to retrieve detailed hardware specifications, CPU details, USB devices, storage information, PCI components, disk usage, and memory statistics, complete with example outputs.
This comprehensive guide explains why load balancing is essential for high‑traffic websites, details vertical and horizontal scaling, compares DNS, IP, link‑layer, and hybrid approaches, outlines common algorithms such as round‑robin and weighted, and reviews hardware versus software solutions.
This article explains concurrency fundamentals by examining hardware-level cache coherence, memory barriers, and lock mechanisms, then shows how Go's sync.Mutex and Java's volatile keyword implement these concepts to ensure atomicity, visibility, and ordering across multiple cores.
The article examines the rumored Micron Octa-Level Cell (OLC) NAND flash that would store 8 bits per cell, discusses its technical feasibility, compares it with existing SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC SSDs, and highlights industry skepticism and potential market impact.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of smart IoT devices, their connectivity options, configuration methods, and detailed testing strategies—including sensor, network, performance, security, and integration testing—to ensure reliable interaction between hardware and mobile applications.
Wave Computing announced that the MIPS instruction set architecture and its latest R6 core will be released as open source in early 2019, sparking industry debate about the move’s impact on MIPS’s market position, licensing revenue, and competition with RISC‑V, especially in the AI and Chinese markets.
The article reviews the two main development routes for artificial intelligence chips—traditional architectures that enhance CPU, GPU, and FPGA performance and emerging neuromorphic designs like IBM TrueNorth—detailing their structures, advantages, limitations, and industry adoption.
This article explains the concept of load balancing, compares DNS‑based, hardware‑based, and software‑based solutions, and details common balancing algorithms such as round‑robin, load‑aware, response‑time, and hash strategies, highlighting their advantages, limitations, and typical use cases in high‑traffic systems.
This article provides a detailed, English-language overview of server hardware and architecture, covering non‑x86 and x86 classifications, instruction set families, measurement units, firmware components, memory and storage distinctions, cache hierarchy, CPU affinity, networking standards, and management protocols such as SNMP.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of server fundamentals, covering RASUM characteristics, instruction‑set classifications, form‑factor types, benchmark suites such as TPC and SPEC, key hardware components, memory technologies, PCIe evolution, and remote management solutions like IPMI and KVM over IP.
This article provides a detailed technical overview of server classifications, hardware components, measurement units, firmware, networking, storage standards, performance benchmarks, and management protocols, offering readers a solid foundation for understanding modern server systems and their operational considerations.
This article translates hardware latency into human‑scale time, revealing how disks, networks, memory and other components appear painfully slow from a CPU’s viewpoint and why performance optimization is a complex, system‑wide challenge.
This article provides a comprehensive, easy‑to‑understand overview of performance tuning, covering what, why, when, where, who, and how to optimize hardware, operating systems, and applications, with practical examples, metrics, tools, and step‑by‑step procedures for both pre‑deployment and post‑deployment optimization.
After the holiday break, this guide walks operations engineers through a comprehensive checklist—including hardware inspection, server preparation, network device checks, monitoring platform readiness, remote access security, and post‑holiday work review—to ensure systems run smoothly and securely.
This article walks through a real‑world SQL Server performance‑tuning investigation, explaining the six‑factor analysis framework, diagnosing CMEMTHREAD waits, and presenting concrete hardware, configuration, and code‑level solutions that eliminated the issue and improved overall database throughput.
This article shares a developer’s year‑long experience of live‑coding on YouTube, covering why to stream, essential software and hardware, OBS setup, room description, chat management, scheduling, and practical advice to help newcomers start their own coding broadcasts.
This article provides a detailed overview of the main building blocks of a generic SSD controller, explaining how each part—from host interfaces and SMART monitoring to wear leveling, encryption engines, and defect management—interacts with NAND flash to deliver performance, reliability, and security.
The Intel 545S SSD, featuring a 64‑layer TLC 3D NAND architecture, is evaluated through extensive synthetic and real‑world benchmarks, revealing solid sequential speeds, decent read latency, but notable firmware stability issues that currently limit its recommendation despite an attractive price point.
This guide explains why server IO utilization spikes above 60% during early‑morning hours, covering hardware self‑test, RAID battery failures, cache policy misconfigurations, and step‑by‑step commands for MegaRAID and HP servers, plus BIOS adjustments and best‑practice recommendations to prevent performance degradation.
This article introduces the fundamentals of virtualization and cloud computing, explains their relationship, describes computer hardware components, shows how operating systems abstract resources, outlines hardware checks for virtualization support, and previews software solutions, providing a clear, beginner-friendly overview of how virtual machines are created and managed.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of IoT security, detailing the IoT architecture—including cloud platforms, mobile clients, and hardware terminals—while analyzing major security threats such as insecure data storage, weak server controls, unencrypted transmission, client injection, improper authentication, key protection flaws, session mishandling, and sensitive data leakage.
This article provides an overview of electronic computers, describing their definition, evolution, hardware components, system architecture, and the universal nature of modern machines, followed by an introduction to Linux distributions, core philosophies, essential commands, and usage examples, offering a concise foundation for beginners in computing.
This article explains computer hardware and software components, details the role and functions of operating systems, outlines major Linux distributions and their philosophies, and provides practical command-line syntax, examples, and help-retrieval methods for essential Linux commands.
This guide walks DBAs through evaluating current database resources, establishing performance baselines, building business pressure models, conducting realistic stress tests, and applying a seven‑layer optimization roadmap—from statement tweaks to hardware upgrades and business‑level adjustments—to ensure the system can handle ten‑fold or hundred‑fold growth.
This article explains how major companies keep MySQL fast at massive scale and provides practical techniques—including schema design, InnoDB advantages, table compression, bulk loading order, and hardware choices—to optimize MySQL performance for billions‑row tables.
This guide explains how to improve MySQL server performance by applying BIOS tweaks, CPU and memory profile settings, disabling NUMA, choosing the right RAID level and cache options, selecting optimal filesystems and I/O schedulers, and adjusting Linux kernel parameters for maximum efficiency.
This article explains common load‑balancing algorithms—including round‑robin, random, least‑connections, source‑IP hash, and weighted methods—describes their advantages and drawbacks, and examines hardware load‑balancing devices such as F5 and A10, covering functional, performance, stability, security, and cost considerations.
This article examines the compatibility challenges in data‑center environments, outlining how hardware, software, firmware, and networking components across multiple layers—from applications and operating systems to storage, virtualization, and disaster‑recovery—must be coordinated to ensure seamless, efficient operation.
This article examines the common reasons MySQL performance may lag—outdated hardware, sub‑optimal database design, and poorly written application code—and provides concrete guidance on CPU, memory, storage, schema, and query optimizations to improve response times.
This article reviews the evolution of VR hardware, explains core display principles, compares low‑cost Cardboard with high‑end headsets, discusses latency, motion sickness, interaction and graphics constraints, and offers practical guidance for creating high‑quality VR games.
Load balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to enhance performance, ensure high availability, and enable horizontal scaling, with various implementations such as DNS, HTTP, IP, link‑layer, and hybrid methods, each employing algorithms like round‑robin, random, least connections, hash, and weighted distribution, plus hardware options.
This article explains SSD fundamentals, including flash memory principles, device composition, controller functions, common pitfalls, performance degradation causes, and best practices for monitoring and maintaining SSDs in enterprise environments, ensuring reliability and data integrity.
This article shares practical findings on how using two or three monitors can significantly improve developers' productivity, outlines the hardware considerations, and recommends tools like UltraMon for managing multiple displays effectively.
The article traces the shift from hardware‑centric profit models to the dominance of free and open‑source software, highlighting how programmers emerged as a vital profession in the 1980s and how software now underpins virtually every aspect of modern life.
The article examines how internet companies drive hardware reconstruction, covering large‑scale server and rack customization, modular storage solutions, and the role of AI‑focused hardware, highlighting the shift toward open‑source designs, scale‑out capabilities, and integrated cabinet deployments for modern cloud infrastructures.
The article shares five practical insights—balancing hardware cost and capability, testing NoSQL yourself, monitoring memory and CPU metrics, accounting for network latency, and avoiding virtualization—to help engineers achieve cost‑effective, high‑performance scaling of distributed databases.
This guide lists thirteen Linux commands and tools—including /proc/cpuinfo, cpufreq-info, cpuid, dmidecode, hardinfo, i7z, likwid, lscpu, lshw, lstopo, numactl, and x86info— that reveal comprehensive CPU hardware information such as vendor, model, frequencies, cores, caches, and topology.
