Questions tagged [hardware]
Computer hardware is the collection of physical elements that comprise a computer system.
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Are there any guidelines for calculating hardware requirements in a containerized environment?
At an architectural section of an interview I was asked to produce hardware requirements for a certain system I designed. It was a microservice-based system which runs in Kubernetes, Openshift or any ...
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Design for hardware UIs
What is a suitable software design approach for handling user input from hardware buttons, where the function of each button depends on state?
I'm designing a musical instrument which has a lot of ...
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Can we reliably use unaligned scalars on contemporary hardware?
Processors have come a long way in their handling of unaligned data - from crashing at the very notion of it, through suffering severe penalties, all the way to having almost no impact.
I suppose it ...
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Accessing Hardware-based resources from multiple worker threads
I have a technical application that interacts with different hardware components: measurement devices, sensors, custom hardware. These use dedicated interfaces like USB, serial ports, TCP/IP ...
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How do android developers develop BLE-Clients without BLE Hardware? [closed]
First an foremost I would like to apologise if this is a trivial question, however it has been costing me a few workdays worth of freetime and I am appearantly too incompetent to figure this out ...
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Modelling multi-device manufacture machinery software
We are building a multi-device (different vendors, different types) manufacture machinery where these device work together orchestrated by our software and operated by a human being to create various ...
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Is it viable to use imprecise analog computers to simulate equally artificial intelligence?
I was searching about simulation of artificial intelligence, machine learning and subjects alike and saw the news that some startups around of the world are using analog computers to simulate ...
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Trade-off between usability and clean design
I have designed our in-house hardware testing framework. My goal is to ultimately release the framework into the public domain. Early on, my foremost design criterion was to provide a powerful yet ...
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Architecture for interfacing to embedded systems hardware in c++
I have been spending quite a bit of time recently researching the "best" (read most elegant. robust, simple to use, and resource friendly) ways to develop low-level hardware abstractions for ...
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What do the Trapezoid-shaped boxes mean in this schematic diagram of RISC architectures (from Wirth's compiler construction)
I am currently browsing through Niklas Wirth's compiler construction book. He presents a simple RISC architecture as a target for code generation using the following diagram. The symbols/shapes used ...
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How does cuRAND use a GPU to accelerate random number generation? Don't those require a state?
My understanding is that every PRNG or QRNG requires a state to prevent the next item in its sequence from being too predictable; which is sensible, as they're all running on deterministic hardware.
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Am I using the correct terminology for my project?
I'm currently the sole programmer for a project. We are creating a handheld device that includes a screen to display live data and video feed, push buttons to control the program's functionalities, ...
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Do multiple software-threads on a single hardware-thread system execute sequentially?
I understand that if a system consists of multiple hardware-threads the scheduler
assigns software-threads to hardware-threads.
However, hypothetically, let's imagine a system that does only consist ...
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How is code put onto a motherboard?
I want to create my own little piece of hardware, (not sure what yet, but that's where the coding part comes in..) and I'm stuck at this little question.
I have the parts, but not the means.
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How to show fluctuating data smoothly and accurately?
I am working on a project in which I have to read data from liquid level sensor installed in tank which measures fluid level and sends output in millivolt. The device has predefined ranges of voltage ...
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How to aid (do the testing for) a developer who doesn't own a touchpad to implement Precision bindings?
First of all, I consider myself to be a power user, but wouldn't dare to call myself a software designer.
I opened a feature request to add support for Windows' Precision Touchpad binding in the ...
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Is it possible to write unit tests for embedded systems with no prior embedded programming knowledge?
I have this question for a long time that is it possible for someone with no prior embedded systems programming experience to write unit tests? I have good knowledge of other languages like JAVA, ...
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Developing and debugging code with a logic analyzer?
Until now I used Arduinos with shields and ICs and mostly I used libraries to communicate with i.e. ADC, DAC, Real Time Clock, etc.
Now I want to do the same kind of programming with the same ICs ...
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How are electrons moved in processors/CPU? [duplicate]
During our class, he posed the question 'How are electrons moved by code' for our own reflection, the question seems to be vague but I assumed how are electrons moved in a processor/CPU since we were ...
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How would someone record GPU image output?
I notice the GPU, like latest Nvidia/AMD cards, have an output that goes to your monitor but I want to know if we can also use that GPU output feed into some kind of image recorder HARDWARE? If yes, ...
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How to detect that internal hard disk is removed and which files were copied? [closed]
Its easy to steal internal hdd, which do not generate sound signals to aware the owner while removing and allows Thief to copy the data.
Is there any way by which these thieves acts can be traced.
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Live encryption and decryption of audio
So I am trying to mix my software skills with my electronics skills, and I want to try something a bit different. Basically: buy a walkie talkie, take it apart, remove the microphone and put a rasp pi ...
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What is hardware debugging?
Could someone give a hint, in plain english, what it means to debug an HDL program?
Debugging is understandable as far as it concerns software but at this low level what does debugging means?
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API and motherboard
I'm new on API and still undergoing some research to gain knowledge for my presentations for next few days.
Different motherboard have different CPU socket.
So I was just wondering, do API affect ...
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Is memory allocation hardware handled or OS?
I am currently working on a bare metal project with an arm processor using GCC arm compiler. If I call malloc, is the allocated memory tracked in the MMU? For some reason I had assumed an OS typically ...
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Why do disks write data in chunks of page size?
In my understanding, even if i want to overwrite a byte in middle of a file, OS and/or disk will read the content of the size of page, modify one byte and then write the contents back.
What is the ...
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Architecture for Large-Scale Matrix Multiplication: Distributed Architecture or One Strong Server
I've asked a question about Scaling Matrix Multiplication by CPU Cores on StackOverflow and it seems that merely adding more CPU cores to this problem won't reduce the time to do Matrix ...
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Are design principles of functional programming languages and current hardware (register-machines) contrary?
Functional languages seek to minimize accidental state (computationally-convenient but logically unnecessary data dependencies) by endorsing the most granularly modular, mathematically unambiguous ...
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Is wrapping a hardware resource using polymorphism going too far?
I am writing a simulation engine consisting of a number of components, each of which operates on a fixed set of shared buffers.
In practice, the simulation will run entirely on the GPU. When ...
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What does "address space" means when talking about IO devices?
The following quote is from this page:
While some CPU manufacturers implement a single address space in their
chips, others decided that peripheral devices are different from
memory and, ...
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How does the Base Address Registers (BARs) in a PCI card work?
I am trying to understand how the Base Address Registers (BARs) in a PCI card work, this is how I think they work:
Each function in a PCI card have 6 BAR fields, and each BAR field is
32-bit in size.
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Does the PCI bus only consists of the devices in the PCI slots? [closed]
I am learning about the PCI bus, and there is something that I am not sure of. A motherboard have some PCI slots to put the PCI cards in:
Now when we say that we have a PCI bus, do we mean that the ...
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Why does Mike Pound measure his computer's computational ability by its graphics cards, and not its processors?
I was recently watching a great Computerphile video on passwords in which Mike Pound brags of his company's supercomputer having 4 graphics cards (Titan X's, to be exact).
As a numerical simulation ...
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What does "data bus control" mean?
This video mentions the following:
What does it mean for the DMA controller to be granted the data bus control, does that mean the CPU cannot use the bus to access memory and IO devices until the DMA ...
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Can unsigned and signed (two's complement) multiplication be performed on the same hardware? [closed]
I know they can for addition and subtraction, but I'm not quite sure if they can for multiplication.
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How is it possible to have limitless availability of threads while only having a finite number of physical processing units?
So I'm having trouble understanding the relationship between threads (software) and processor cores (hardware).
Basically my understanding of a processor core is a unit that deals with commands and ...
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OO software design for interfacing hardware
My question is: How can I maximize encapsulation for wrapper-classes that interface with hardware.
The hardware is connected to a PC through COM-Ports or USB ports and I am either reading/writing to ...
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Quick wireless transmission
I'm looking for a way to send a signal between a raspberry pi and a smart phone. What I want to do is hash a few basic bits of information about the phone to use as a UUID. I then want to transmit ...
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How does a single thread run on multiple cores?
I am trying to understand, at a high-level, how single threads run across multiple cores. Below is my best understanding. I do not believe it is correct though.
Based on my reading of Hyper-threading,...
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Can the CPU manipulate the pins of an IO port directly?
Based on what I know so far, when you plug an IO device into an IO port (for example, when you plug a printer into a parallel port), the printer will be represented to the CPU as just another RAM chip....
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How data is accessed in Memory-Mapped I/O?
This is an example of Memory-Mapped I/O:
So basically you access the device controller registers through memory.
Now my question is, when you for example write to the memory location that maps to ...
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Can an IO device have some memory space or can it only have registers?
I am learning about IO devices, and so far I have only seen examples of IO devices that have registers and no memory space. For example, this is a printer that have three registers and no memory space:...
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Are "Control register" and "Status register" and "Data register" part of the device itself?
I am studying about Memory-Mapped I/O from here. I have read the following:
From the CPU's perspective, an I/O device appears as a set of
special-purpose registers, of three general types:
...
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Can a driver running in kernel mode access a port directly?
Based on what I know so far, if I want to create a driver, and want the driver to send data on some port (for example: serial/parallel/USB), my driver will communicate with the port driver, and the ...
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Why do device drivers in Linux need to run in kernel mode?
Say I have a device that is connected to the computer through a USB port, and I created an application to communicate with this device. In this application I used the USB driver to communicate with ...
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Does a serial port have a device driver?
I am learning about device drivers, and based on what I know so far, if your application wants to communicate with some device, it cannot communicate directly with the port that your device is ...
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What role did hardware improvements have in the development of modern languages (eg Python / Java)?
I'd like to ask about the history of programming languages - specifically, the role of hardware in language development over the past 20-30 years.
I have been reading about the history of Python, and ...
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How to get machine client information from web application?
I am writing a ticket system in PHP(with Laravel) for about 350 users and around 200 machines. I know that already are good solid solutions available, but I'm doing some very useful projects to learn, ...
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Is it possible for a computer system to have constant/zero CPU load?
For example, a simple program in a simulated environment that waits for user input seems to be doing no work, so I guess it uses CPU only for the time.
I'd like to know if computer systems (that don'...
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Large Scale Machine Learning vs Traditional HPC Hardware
I've spent the last few days working with tensorflow for the first time as part of a natural language processing assignment for my degree. It's been interesting (fun isn't the right word) trying to ...
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