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5 results for “mattst88”
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I've been on the lookout for faster RAM for my #AlphaServer ES47 (https://mattst88.com/computers/es47/) for a few years.
It takes ECC RDRAM in large quantities, which is not common because as far as I can tell it was only ever used by this system and by some early high-end Pentium 4s.
The ES47 currently has 20x 1GB PC800 ECC RIMMs (16 GB effective), which allows the CPUs to run at 1150 MHz. With PC1066 the CPUs could run at 1300 MHz.
But even 10x 1GB PC1066 ECC RIMMs would cost $300+ on #eBay today.
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This was a delightful read, tech is still cool from time to time, if you know where to look and no money is involved.
Which is another way of saying, if you have some spare time you could also spend your evening reading a blog post about decompiling Silicon Graphics' PROMs. This is fedi's bread and butter.
https://mattst88.com/blog/2026/02/08/Reverse_Engineering_the_PROM_for_the_SGI_O2/
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I landed some improvements and small optimizations to #pixman's AltiVec code. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/136
It was fun working with a new (to me) instruction set and trying to figure out how to puzzle together the pieces into something that improved the `pix_multiply()` function (which is kind of the core primitive of most fast paths).
I couldn't figure out a way to use the `vec_mradds`/`vmhraddshs` instruction. Maybe you can? (see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pixman/pixman/-/merge_requests/136#note_2699795)
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I fixed an issue in pixman's Altivec code the other day -- https://cgit.freedesktop.org/pixman/commit/?id=207626180d0282bb14a50f2e494174f54ac8a6ce
And in the process, I read through the Altivec docs and discovered that there are vector instructions that pack and unpack between a8r8g8b8 and a1r5g5b5 formats (but nothing fo r5g6b5).
Any clues why? Was a1r5g5b5 really common on Mac OS or something? I don't think I've seen a1r5g5b5 used anywhere.
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You know how some people that know Java don't put it on their résumé because they don't want to work in Java?
For me, that's #autotools, #autoconf, #automake
PSA: please switch your projects to #Meson