The trick is to redesign the bricks for worse tolerances. With 3D printers you can print very nuanced springy elements that are impossible to achieve with injection molding. I got some reasonable bricks years ago on cheap printers with PETG, should work even better now with modern printers and ABS.
There is also prompt processing that's compute-bound, and for agentic workflows it can matter more than tg, especially if the model is not of "thinking" type.
Orange Pi 5, "plus" version also has 2gen 1-lane pci-e (M.2 wifi), and 3gen 4-lane pci-e (M.2 SSD) and 2x2.5Gbit ethernet.
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
How is the software support? That’s the main thing keeping me on rPi. I tried Pine64 and it was terrible. Never could get my PineBook Pro to boot reliably.
There are always little things. As far as I know, desktop works pretty well and there are people running PS2 emulation on it, which has always been super heavy.
arm64 has come a long way for that use case.
It's been solid as the VM host so far. I wrote an Armbian SD card and it just worked. Once a VM is booted though, many things become irrelevant outside of arm64 support.
I haven't tried again since February, so there's a decent chance my issues are fixed, but ZFS wouldn't build and VLAN support was disabled for the NIC. Not blockers, but it did make me rethink some ideas I had.
You'd need to spend at least 110kWh to convert CO2 back to propane, maybe much more. No matter what you do, LPG -> CO2 -> LPG cycle has to be energy-negative.
MMU allows linux to provide a "flat" memory space to each userspace process. This memory space is assembled from 4KB pages that can be randomly dispersed throughout physical memory. Say, you want to malloc() 1MB of memory on a system that's been up for some time. Physical memory may not have a fitting continuos chunk of memory, but virtual memory of a newly created process will always have one, provided that there is enough free pages available.
In other words without MMU all programs share the same memory space, and if it get fragmented, generally you'd have to reboot. With MMU fragmentation can still be an issue, but it's greatly reduced, since each process has its own memory map. And if memory of the process gets framgmented, you can just restart it. If runtime supports object compaction/relocation, then fragmentation may be not an issue at all.
Re access to memory locations -- mostly any direct access to instruction or data memory in userspace program automatically goes through MMU remapping.
Thanks. I realized that there are several types of MMU. I was thinking of the simple MMU (on 32bit MCU) that limit memory access. Not the one that provides the illusion of virtual addressing.
I've yet to see a voltage regulator IC with built-in caps. DC-DC modules sure, but author argues that this kind of info (module / ic) should be present in schematics. BTW, some linear regulators can't handle ceramic and low-ESR capacitors at output, and may be better with none if that's the choise.
I hate to maybe be proving his point by showing that I'm not into the EE field and thinking of a board mounted DCDC-converter as a voltage regulator (which it is but not what you usually call it in english?)
I would still argue that logic IC have alot of internal pull ups. Or that eg. "Reset sequence of digital component is wrong" is a bad whiteboard question.
I believe that without qualification "linear regulator" could be just anything that regulate voltage. Usually you can easily tell from schematics around it if it's some switching IC, an LDO or a module. And if you have layout or 3d render of the board it'd be almost certain.
Otherwise the person may just ask: "where are caps, or is this thing a module or what?"
In my experience, "linear regulator" refers specifically to voltage regulators which drop from a high voltage to a lower voltage by burning all of the power in between (e.g. the venerable 7805).
They're useful if the voltage drop isn't too large and/or if you need a particularly stable output voltage; contrast them with switching regulators, which are more efficient but have some amount of output ripple.
One design that I worked on used a switching regulator to generate 5V, then linear regulators to generate something like 3.7V and 2.9V for various sensitive analog circuits.
No, switchers aren't “linear.” And on a schematic the regulator isn't going to be a box labeled “regulator”! It will have a part number, probably a familiar one.
ICs with multiple power domains have a boot sequence that must be followed or the IC isn't in the proper state. Many interview questions fall into the "assumed assumptions" category. Simply saying, "lets reset to a known good state and modify one variable at time disqualifies many candidates". Because we don't teach science like we should. We should be teaching the scientific method before we teach the three Rs.
