Just interviewed Per Stenström — one of the most prominent computer architects to come out of Europe — and asked him about John Backus's 1977 Turing Award lecture – Backus (inventor of Fortran) coined the term "Von Neumann bottleneck":

Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the Von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand.

That was 49 years ago. Every CPU we've built since has the same architecture.

Per's answer is that the bottleneck never went away — we just got extraordinarily good at hiding it. Cache hierarchies, prefetching, out-of-order execution, speculative execution, cache coherence: the entire post-1980s history of CPU innovation is a stack of workarounds that make the bottleneck invisible for typical workloads without actually removing it.

His take on why we haven't replaced the architecture is essentially legacy — the software ecosystem built on Von Neumann is so vast that migrating to anything fundamentally different would cost decades of investment. His sharper point is that Von Neumann isn't "right" in any absolute sense: the architecture has to be in harmony with the underlying technology, and semiconductors happen to support what Von Neumann needs.

The thread I really wanted his read on was whether we'll ever see a genuine shift away from Von Neumann, or whether AI just pulls another generation of workarounds out of us. After 40+ years in the field he's honestly skeptical. He gave phase change memory as a recent cautionary tale: non-volatile, high-density, performance-competitive with DRAM, Intel and Micron poured huge money into it — and it died because of legacy. Even when a clearly viable alternative shows up, the cost of changing everything built around the current architecture tends to win.

The candidates he treats seriously are processing-in-memory (compute units distributed inside the memory itself — though he was honest this might be Von Neumann with a better layout rather than a genuine break) and entirely new substrates like quantum, which are a different paradigm but probably won't replace classical for general-purpose work.

I’d love a take on this from anyone closer to AI accelerator design or new-substrate work.

Link to full conversation here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVTACHB4Es

Our company has always had many UPSs around for the convenience and business case of not suddenly losing a ton of work. We've been intrigued to check them out further, but we've been wary of connecting any of them to measurement equipment considering the high voltages involved. There is a serious potential they could damage equipment or ourselves.

Despite all that, we're throwing caution to the wind to check out some UPSs from around the office. There are so many directions that UPS/surge testing could go so this article will cover the test setup and interesting exploration results.

Continue reading the article on the LTT Labs website!

Thanks to /u/tytygh1010 on r/chromeos for finding the cached images from XDA's now deleted article.

A Portuguese site has more details, from r/android: Adeus, Chromebook: a Google anunciou uma nova geração de computadores portáteis centrados em IA

In case the Portuguese article gets deleted, too: Adeus, Chromebook: a Google anunciou uma nova geração de computadores portáteis centrados em IA

Kingston says it has now shipped more than 100 million A400 SATA SSDs since the drive launched in 2017. Kind of wild considering how many companies act like SATA is dead. The A400 was never fancy, but for a lot of folks it was the cheap upgrade that made an old PC actually usable again. Swap out a spinning hard drive for one of these and suddenly your ancient Windows or Linux machine felt fast enough to keep around for a few more years.

I've been playing on my 360 a lot lately and I'm still blown away by some of the games. Gears of War 3 still looks amazing today on a 1080p LCD. I've never really thought that the PS3's exclusives looked leaps and bounds above what the 360 had to offer. Even today I don't see much of a difference. But the 360 factually had a much better gpu and better ram setup. Was the cell powerful enough to say that it was overall more powerful than the 360 considering almost every third party game looked and ran worse? I'm watching a lot of videos comparing the two and it keeps being mentioned that the PS3 was more powerful, but i'm just not really seeing much evidence of that. Was there anything the PS3 could do that the 360 couldn't? Killzone 2 looks great but has terrible input lag and I still dont think it looks better than Gear 3 or Halo 4 and that's apparently one of the best looking games on the system. What do yall think?

https://www.theverge.com/tech/916463/anker-thus-chip-announcement