Nvidia Acquires ARM for $40 Billion

Nvidia announced on Sunday evening that it has reached an agreement to acquire Arm Limited from SoftBank for a cool $40 billion.

In this age of headlines that use the b-word in place of nine zeros it’s easy to lose track, so you may be wondering, didn’t SoftBank just buy …read more

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Degrees of Freedom: Booting ARM Processors

Any modern computer with an x86 processor, whether it’s Intel or AMD, is a lost cause for software freedom and privacy. We harp on this a lot, but it’s worth repeating that it’s nearly impossible to get free, open-source firmware to run on them thanks to the Intel Management Engine …read more

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Folding@Home And Rosetta, For ARM

Most readers will be aware of the various distributed computing projects that provide supercomputer-level resources to researchers by farming out the computing tasks across a multitude of distributed CPUs and GPUs. The best known of these are probably Folding@Home and Rosetta, which have both this year been performing sterling service …read more

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Bluepill Copies Code So You Don’t Have To

You really should learn to read Morse code. But if you can’t — or even if you can, and just want a break — you can always get a computer to do it. For example, [jmharvey1] has a decoder that runs on a cheap Bluepill dev board.

The device uses …read more

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Changing System Architectures And The Complexities Of Apple’s Butterfly Approach To ISAs

Apple computers will be moving away from Intel chips to its own ARM-based design. An interesting thing about Apple as a company is that it has never felt the need to tie itself to a particular system architecture or ISA. Whereas a company like Microsoft mostly tied its fortunes to …read more

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DIY robot arm construction kit makes pick-and-place competitive

Craft and construction kits have been a blessing in our recent lockdown phases, and now there’s a new one that might appeal to those interested in tinkering with robots. ArmPal is a robot arm kit that you build yourself, then pit against other robot ar… Continue reading DIY robot arm construction kit makes pick-and-place competitive