Top all-time · #17065
Sand, software and sound
Personal blog · sandsoftwaresound.nethardwareprogramming
Sand, software and sound is a personal blog at sandsoftwaresound.net about hardware and programming. Since 2020, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this electronics and computing blog for its posts on reverse-engineering a 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes and on store-forwarding and memory locality in CPUs. Comments cite it as a reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Electronics and computing for the fun of it
What Hacker News says?
Your description immediately made me think of the TI SN76577 "Complex Sound Generator" IC [1]. If I'm not mistaken it was used in the early versions of the MB Games Electronic Battleship game (think falling missile and white-noise explosion sounds). Edit: Not a decap, but this page [2] has links to the datasheet and other reference material that includes a block diagram, and even has circuit diagrams of the internal…
Comment linking /sn76477-complex-sound-generator/
on “Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes”Submitted ARM Cortex-A72 fetch and branch processing as a story · 73 points
HN discussionReplying to myself, because it seems like a comment in the blog answers my first question. > Hmm, in my experience with AMD-based hardware profiling, AMD CPUs may place the blame as far back as ~200 instructions (pathological worst-case) behind the instruction that was interrupted. pkhuong in this comment: http://disq.us/p/271zzg1 , suggests that he's using an Intel CPU. As such... > For example, page 18/37 of Intel…
Comment linking /perf/perf-tutorial-hot-spots/
on “Too much locality for stores to forward”Submitted Raspberry Pi 4 mini-review as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Arturia Keystep tear-down and cleaning as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Combo organ: Top octave emulation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted ARM Cortex-A72 Tuning: IPC as a story · 1 points
HN discussion