Collaborate Disseminate
The original Xbox forever changed the console world, because it was basically just PC components laced together in a slightly different architecture. It featured a Pentium 733 MHz CPU with …read more Continue reading Giving The Original Xbox 256 MB Of Memory
One of the problems with being engaged in our hobby or profession is that people assume if you can build a computer out of chips, you must know all the …read more Continue reading Everything You Wanted to Know about SDRAM Timing But Were Afraid to Ask
Even though a computer’s memory map looks pretty smooth and very much byte-addressable at first glance, the same memory on a hardware level is a lot more bumpy. An essential …read more Continue reading Data Alignment Across Architectures: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
This month’s CES saw the introduction of max speed DDR5 memory from SK Hynix. Micron and other vendors are also reportedly sampling similar devices. You can’t get them through normal channels yet, but since you also can’t get motherboards that take them, that’s not a big problem. We hear Intel’s …read more
Over on the Cloudflare blog, [Marek] found himself wondering about computer memory, as we all sometimes do. Specifically, he pondered if he could detect the refresh of his SDRAM from within a running program. We’re probably not ruining the surprise by telling you that the answer is yes — with a little more than 100 lines of C and help from our old friend the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), [Marek] was able to detect SDRAM refresh cycles every 7818.6 ns, lining right up with the expected result.
The “D” in SDRAM stands for dynamic, meaning that unless periodically refreshed by …read more
Continue reading Peering Into a Running Brain: SDRAM Refresh Analyzed from Userspace
There are piles of old 128MB and 256MB sticks of RAM sitting around in supply closets and in parts bins. For his Hackaday Prize project, [esot.eric] is turning these obsolete sticks of RAM into something useful – a big, fast logic analyzer. It’s cheap, and simple enough that it can be built on a breadboard.
If using old SDRAM in strange configurations seems familiar, you’re correct. This project is based on [esot.eric]’s earlier AVR logic analyzer project that used a slow AVR to measure 32 channels of logic at 30 megasamples per second. The only way this build was possible …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: The Cheapest Logic Analyzer