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Tales on the wire
Personal blog · essenceia.github.iohardwareprogramming
Tales on the wire is a personal blog at essenceia.github.io about hardware and programming. Since 2025, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for hardware write-ups: an Alibaba Cloud FPGA NIC project, a blake2s hashing ASIC tapeout, and a 'Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode' post that moves into logic cells, RTL and ASIC floorplanning.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-10-03
What Hacker News says?
So out of all the inference only chips which ones can I buy? The only report is a smartnic fpga from Alibaba where we take an onnx design and write our own. https://essenceia.github.io/projects/alibaba_cloud_fpga/ On my M2 Pro Mac Mini the ANE only allows 2 gigabytes compared to the Metal GPU which can use the system ram. Currently playing with https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/ai-accelerator/... which is…
Comment linking /projects/alibaba_cloud_fpga/
on “OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell”Submitted Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+ as a story · 257 points
HN discussionhttps://essenceia.github.io/projects/alibaba_cloud_fpga/
Comment linking /projects/alibaba_cloud_fpga/
on “Corundum – open-source FPGA-based NIC and platform for in-network compute”Submitted Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+ as a story · 7 points
HN discussionMight as well just link directly to the blog post: https://essenceia.github.io/projects/blake2s_hashing_acceler...
Comment linking /projects/blake2s_hashing_accelerator_a_solo_tapeout_journey/
on “Solo ASIC tapeout on a budget: detailed write up”Submitted Two Weeks Until Tapeout as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWell, that escalated quickly. From skimming the first few screenfuls of the page, I thought it was going to be about a beginner programmer's first time dissecting the low-level bit structure of floating-point numbers and implementing some of the arithmetic and logic from scratch using integer operations. And then she writes about logic cells, hardware pipeline architectures, RTL (register-transfer level), ASIC floor…
Comment linking /about/
on “Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode”Submitted BLAKE2s Hashing Accelerator: A Solo Tapeout Journey as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counting Until the End of the Universe as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Makes an Exceptional Engineer? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bfloat16 from Scratch as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The hardware isn't broken, the documentation is as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Floating Point from Scratch as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Most Useless ASIC as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The door out of Tapeout Hell as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ugly by Design as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Silicon Is Broken as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode as a story · 1 points
HN discussion