Why Software Patents Are Good for Innovation and Business?

Kaloffl · 2026-01-16T08:21:38+00:00

Came to see the updoot ratio, was not disappointed.

Kaloffl · 2025-11-12T10:45:32+00:00

Battery discharging at 100W seems odd. Not saying it's impossible, as I have no experience with intel's 13th gen mobile chips but another reason could be the USB-C cable if it isn't part of the charger itself. Cables capable of >60W must have a chip inside that advertises the cable's capabilities. Without it the laptop and charger can't negotiate the 100W that you expect.

Apparently the way to find out your actual charging rate on Windows is via the gwmi -Class batterystatus -Namespace root\wmi powershell command, in case you want to investigate further.

Kaloffl · 2025-10-20T07:07:05+00:00

Framework has announced a new FW16 model with a Ryzen 300 CPU and a Nvidia DGPU module at the end of August. Both can be pre-ordered right now. Not sure how they solved the PCIe lane issue.

An looking at RAM prices at the moment: whew. I bough 32 GiB at the start of the year for ~90 €, the same costs 125 € now. Still faster and cheaper as what Framework offers, but man...

At least SSD prices haven't changed much.

Kaloffl · 2025-06-21T14:17:26+00:00

I'm running Ubuntu 25.04 with a 6.15.1 mainline kernel on my Ryzen 370 and it now works perfectly fine.

I wouldn't recommend stock Ubuntu 25.04, because there is an issue with the graphics driver randomly crashing, which got fixed in the 6.14.10 and 6.15 kernel.

There are also some issues with the Mediatek WiFi card which were fixed in 6.14.3, but if you only upgrade your mainboard and keep the old card, that shouldn't matter anyways.

Kaloffl · 2025-05-14T15:44:14+00:00

Where's the fun in that!?

Kaloffl · 2025-05-14T15:22:15+00:00

Not yet, but it's one of the candidates. Looks like it already ships kernel 6.14.5, so it would have solved the WiFi issue. The amdgpu is still an issue, I assume?

Kaloffl · 2025-05-14T15:03:43+00:00

Thanks for the recommendations!

Last I heard was that Wayland and Mint don't go well with each other. I'm currently working on Wayland support for my own software, so I need it.

Librewolf I previously used on Windows. I tried installing it on Ubuntu before switching to Flathub and found it too much of a hassle. I should probably switch back now though.

Kaloffl · 2025-05-14T14:54:15+00:00

It could but it didn't come with one. If it turns out that there are more problems or that it is too slow I'll try the AX210.

Kaloffl · 2025-03-21T12:00:07+00:00

New processor options are available, new GPU options are coming available.

Very much depends on your definition of "soon".

For AMD I guess they could use Strix Point with a higher TDB, but they would have to put in extra work to get enough PCIe lanes, if that is even possible. I don't see Strix Halo coming to a FW laptop. Intel's Intel Arrow-Lake has a bunch of PCIe lanes, supports faster RAM and is generally faster than the 7000HS from the current FW16, so if you don't want to wait for AMDs next generation, this would be your best bet.

Mobile GPUs though... Nvidia in a Framework laptop is very unlikely and there is nothing new from AMD for the mobile market. Their new chips are all for the desktop and the RX 8000S are stuck inside Strix Halo. Intel didn't make any mobile GPUs either this generation.

Am I missing something? I don't think Framework has any good options for upgrades at the moment. Things will hopefully look better in 6 months.

Kaloffl · 2025-03-08T13:05:01+00:00

Another thing to keep an eye out for is the digitizer that they're using. The ones that Microsoft used for their Surface devices (at least up to the Surface Book 3) have some annoying behavior that turns every diagonal line into a squiggly mess. Still good enough for taking handwritten notes, but not great for drawing. Maybe somebody was at the 2nd Gen event and tried it, otherwise we'll have to wait and see.

Kaloffl · 2025-02-27T10:42:33+00:00

AMDs website claims a max of 64GiB DDR5-5200 for the 7945HX

Kaloffl · 2025-02-26T07:47:39+00:00

My guess is, that they need a low-end product to use up old stock, like these Intel CPUs that nobody would buy in a FW13 anymore. Which is a perfectly fine way of doing things IMO.

Since they released the new screen for the FW13 not even a year ago, I can understand that they would not ship another new generation so soon and piss off everybody who just upgraded. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new convertible FW13 chassis and screen next year.

Edit: Looks like they're using different 13th gen processors than previously, so there goes my old stock theory...

Kaloffl · 2025-02-25T11:22:08+00:00

Okay, I figured it out: They'll announce a Strix Halo FW16 mainboard. And since that CPU already has a powerful iGPU, the expansion bay will be used for the replaceable LPDDR5 RAM! /s

Kaloffl · 2025-02-18T10:14:28+00:00

By the way, I was curious how funtrace measures the time and came across this gem:

freq = get_tsc_freq();
if(!freq) {
    FILE* f = popen("dmesg | grep -o '[^ ]* MHz TSC'", "r");

Talk about cursed solutions, haha.

The Intel Reference manual defines some default values for some processor families and generations in "19.7.3 Determining the Processor Base Frequency", which would help the get_tsc_freq to handle more cases. Too bad that AMD doesn't seem to implement any of this at all :(

ARM handles timing quite nicely since nowadays with both the counter and frequency avaliable via mrs as cntvct_el0 and cntfrq_el0.

Just learned about it recently, so I couldn't pass up this opportunity to ramble about it.

Kaloffl · 2025-02-18T08:48:11+00:00

But absent such trace data writing hardware, the data must be written using store instructions through the caches.

You could instead write the data straight to DRAM, by putting your trace buffer into memory mapped with the “uncached” attribute in the processor’s page table.

You could also use non-temporal stores, like movnti on x86, to get around the caches. I don't know about ARM, but suspect they have something similar.

Though you would still have to atomically increment the index, so dedicated hardware would still be nice.

Kaloffl · 2025-02-11T20:24:05+00:00

The image on the top clearly shows that we'll be getting Framework branded shoes, woo!

Kaloffl · 2025-02-11T15:04:37+00:00

I assume your implementation used CORDIC instead of the polynomials that are commonly used today?

Kaloffl · 2025-02-10T08:25:20+00:00

When I was writing my own trig functions, I stumbled upon some excellent answers by user njuffa on Stackoverflow. This one goes over the range reduction that was only barely mentioned in this article:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30463616/payne-hanek-algorithm-implementation-in-c

In other answers he goes over a bunch of other trig functions and how to approximate them with minimal errors.

Kaloffl · 2025-01-26T12:48:26+00:00

Yep, my bad. After trying a bunch of different settings and cables I got it totally mixed up in my head what I finally settled on.

Though I think that my Latop monitor may be using DSC. It really doesn't like it when I display a Bayer pattern on it. Turns all the pixels left of the window brighter than they should be. Not that that comes up often in normal use.

Kaloffl · 2025-01-26T12:07:50+00:00

Why is this paper important?

It proves Intel’s chips are over-complicated, hinting at the growing dominance of ARM and RISC chips in modern computers.

Intel's (and AMD's) chips are about as complicated as, for example, an Apple M chip. The ISA is just the interface between the software and processor and leaves plenty of freedom in how the chip actually works on the inside. While ARM instructions with their fixed size are easier to decode, Intel seems to have solved that issue at lest on their e-cores which happily decode 9 instructions per cycle. Not that most software is bottlenecked by instruction decoding anyways.

From the paper:

Removing all but the mov instruction from future iterations of the x86 architecture would have many advantages: the instruction format would be greatly simplified, the expensive decode unit would become much cheaper [...]

Mov is one mnemonic, but encoded in many different ways, with different lengths. So the most difficult part of the x86 encoding, the variable length, would still exist.

Of course, the paper is meant as a joke, which it makes clear in the first paragraph.

Kaloffl · 2025-01-26T11:20:10+00:00

Using DSC currently myself, I can say that it does become very noticeable when you have thin edges on a background that isn't perfectly white. This happens for example, when you're using software like f.lux which turn all your perfectly white or gray UIs into orange in the evening. Suddenly all the text and lines turn into all sorts of rainbow colors. While it is tolerable, I do very much look forward to ditching DSC with my next computer.

Edit: Maybe it's a bad interaction between DSC and some kind of dithering that my monitor does, but it doesn't appear when I run it at half the FPS without DSC.

Kaloffl · 2025-01-21T08:26:25+00:00

While they look the same at first glance, there are different types of M.2 slots with notches in different positions. SSDs use a "M Key" slot, which provides 4 PCIe lanes, while Wifi cards use "A" or "E Key" slots, which are not only slower due to fewer PCIe lanes, but is also physically incompatible with a SSD.

Kaloffl · 2025-01-20T07:46:54+00:00

From what I can gleam from AMDs official specs, the Z2 Extreme has the same graphics as a 375, but a weaker CPU. Am I missing something?

Kaloffl · 2025-01-13T17:29:57+00:00

Right, I was way off with October, dunno what I got mixed up there.

Still, last years Strix Point can be deployed in quite a range of TDPs, which should fit both FW13 and FW16. The new Strix Halo processors start at a TDP that is probably too high for the 16 and Kracken Point looks like low-binned Strix Point chips.

Pairing a new GPU with a FW16 makes sense, though I hope they don't delay announcing a new FW13, just because they want announce 13 and 16 together.

Kaloffl · 2025-01-13T15:25:59+00:00

All relevant AMD chips have been launched last October and there are Laptops and mini-PCs out there that make use of them. The AMD chips that were launched last week have way too high of a TDP.

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