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205•awaaz•4h ago•35 comments

Dave Farber has passed away

https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/thread/TSNPJVFH4DKLINIKSMRIIVNHDG5XKJCM/
18•vitplister•39m ago•3 comments

Matchlock: Linux-based sandboxing for AI agents

https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock
40•jingkai_he•4h ago•8 comments

Reverse Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600

https://github.com/joshuanwalker/Raiders2600
16•pacod•3h ago•1 comments

Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory

https://github.com/localgpt-app/localgpt
247•yi_wang•10h ago•121 comments

Haskell for all: Beyond agentic coding

https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/beyond-agentic-coding
146•RebelPotato•10h ago•43 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (2023)

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
323•valyala•18h ago•66 comments

(AI) Slop Terrifies Me

https://ezhik.jp/ai-slop-terrifies-me/
29•Ezhik•1h ago•17 comments

LLMs as the new high level language

https://federicopereiro.com/llm-high/
138•swah•5d ago•254 comments

Rabbit Ear "Origami": programmable origami in the browser (JS)

https://rabbitear.org/book/origami.html
15•molszanski•3d ago•3 comments

The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Volume 1) Berkeley DB

https://aosabook.org/en/v1/bdb.html
45•grep_it•5d ago•8 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
242•mellosouls•21h ago•402 comments

Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-modern-and-antique-technologies-reveal-a-dynamic-cosmos-20260202/
11•sohkamyung•5d ago•0 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
195•surprisetalk•18h ago•201 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
198•AlexeyBrin•23h ago•36 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
215•vinhnx•21h ago•26 comments

uLauncher

https://github.com/jrpie/launcher
40•dtj1123•5d ago•10 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
378•jesperordrup•1d ago•118 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
86•gnufx•17h ago•66 comments

In the Australian outback, we're listening for nuclear tests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/australian-outback-nuclear-tests-listening-warramunga-faci...
20•defrost•2h ago•4 comments

LineageOS 23.2

https://lineageos.org/Changelog-31/
90•pentagrama•6h ago•25 comments

Wood Gas Vehicles: Firewood in the Fuel Tank (2010)

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-vehicles-firewood-in-the-fuel-tank/
58•Rygian•3d ago•29 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
119•momciloo•18h ago•28 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
157•samasblack•20h ago•97 comments

The Legacy of Daniel Kahneman: A Personal View (2025)

https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/1075/753
6•cainxinth•3d ago•0 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
623•theblazehen•3d ago•223 comments

Substack confirms data breach affects users’ email addresses and phone numbers

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/05/substack-confirms-data-breach-affecting-email-addresses-and-pho...
81•witnessme•7h ago•38 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
114•thelok•20h ago•28 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
201•speckx•4d ago•296 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
930•klaussilveira•1d ago•285 comments
Open in hackernews

FreeBSD Scheduling on Hybrid CPUs

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Scheduler/Hybrid
119•fntlnz•6mo ago

Comments

themafia•6mo ago
> Apart from some models of Alder Lake, it is now impossible to buy an Intel chip that does not have at least P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores.

Really? I just bought one:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236786/...

pixl97•6mo ago
How about change that to "Anything with more than 6 cores". Anything with 4 cores only has one speed of core. At 6 cores it more of a mixed bag, some have all the same cores, some have a split of performance and efficient cores. Anything over an i5 will have E cores.
swills•6mo ago
Hmm, I think Granite Rapids is all P-Cores and goes up to 86 cores (172 threads):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Rapids

c0balt•6mo ago
Yep, there are still server CPUs with only P-cores.

They are a bit expensive but I wouldn't expect them to drop these skews in the long term for HPC & compute bound workloads. My guess is that diamond rapids will also have some P-skews and maybe AP skews.

mlyle•6mo ago
Here there's weirdness, still, though because there's such a frequency difference you'll get between "low priority" and "high priority" cores.
dehrmann•6mo ago
There are also Xeons, but it limits an OS to use in data centers.
dijit•6mo ago
There are workstation Xeons. Though it seems that mobile Xeons are defunct now.
wtallis•6mo ago
> Apart from some models of Alder Lake

That bit actually still applies. Intel may have branded the 14100F as Raptor Lake, but it is almost certainly Alder Lake silicon, just a higher speed bin of the 12100F.

See https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/compare.htm... and note how none of them get the higher DRAM frequency support or larger L2 caches characteristic of Raptor Lake silicon.

ethan_smith•6mo ago
The i3-14100F is just one example - Intel still sells numerous non-hybrid models across their lineup including most i3s, Pentiums, Celerons, and many server/workstation Xeons. The documentation's claim about availability is overstated.
dehrmann•6mo ago
The high-level pitch of P cores and E cores seems so elegant, but when it actually comes to scheduling, it gets messy fast. Even in a laptop running off a battery, you can't simply switch to E cores because some short-lived work might be latency-sensitive. You also can't assume long-running work should be on an E core because maybe you're anxious to get that video encoded. Even for lots of small work, different core can have different performance characteristics, and a P core might be more efficient for certain workloads.
jcelerier•6mo ago
As a user with a laptop, the last thing I want is the OS to decide for me. I want to tell it myself "this is sensitive, put all your energy into it because I'm five minutes away from pushing that important work and I have seven minutes of battery left" or "this won't work at all if run at less than 2 GHz" vs "I must drag what I'm doing along for as long as I can, save every bit of battery possible. The computer can't know about these cases.
twoodfin•6mo ago
FWIW, Apple leaves it up to the app developer to specify a quality-of-service for a particular execution context:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•6mo ago
I feel like cases 1, 2, and 3 broadly fit into "Battery Saver", "Performance", and "Battery Saver" modes?
jcelerier•5mo ago
Yes exactly - which I set myself depending on my current use case at hand. I definitely don't want the OS to try and guess
bluGill•5mo ago
The problem is you don't really think about those cases early enough to matter. 7 minutes of battery isn't even a knowable thing - that is current average (though often not calculated that well) and could be 10 minutes if nothing happens (no emails arrive, no web pages rendering in the background, don't touch anything on it....), but if you try to run that 5 minute task in reality you have 2 minutes of CPU using the P cores, or 5 minutes using the E cores - but on the E cores you need 7 minutes. The above times are all made up of course, but they give the idea.

If when the battery is full you make the right decisions your battery can last longer. However this isn't something you can do. You don't want a pop-up when your email program spawns a thread to check for new email - programs do this all the time and the system doesn't know if the thread itself will run for a few ms or for hours. In most cases the battery consumed by the popup will be more than the thread itself uses. You want the system to make the right decisions - but the right decision depends on your system and someone else with a difference CPU may need different decisions.

nine_k•6mo ago
Funny enough, Unix already has user-settable priorities, aka "nice level". ACPI gives us an idea how plentiful the power is.

So, when powered by AC power, schedule everything on P cores when possible, schedule processes that eat a lot of CPU on P cores, same for any process with a negative nice value.

When powered by a battery, schedule anything with non-negative nice value on E cores, keep one P core up for real-time tasks, and for nice-below-zero tasks.

These are two extremes, but I suppose that the idea is understandable.

mrheosuper•6mo ago
>when powered by AC power, schedule everything on P cores when possible

Sometime I feel like that is undesirable. It may make system consume more power, thus more heat output and louder.

nine_k•6mo ago
A laptop and a desktop certainly would balance P and E differently!
wtallis•6mo ago
> So, when powered by AC power, schedule everything on P cores when possible, schedule processes that eat a lot of CPU on P cores, same for any process with a negative nice value.

Even when plugged in, you may have thermal limitations. P cores will chew through your power budget more aggressively than E cores. For latency-sensitive workloads you do want to emphasize the P cores, but when throughput is the goal you'll usually be better off not ignoring the E cores, and not trying to run the P cores at high frequency where they're much less efficient. Intel started adding E cores to consumer chips in large part so they could score better on throughput-oriented multithreaded benchmarks like Cinebench; they're decent at compiling code, too, but you'll still want the P core for the linker.

Melatonic•6mo ago
Always personally disable turbo boost. Especially on laptops
casenmgreen•6mo ago
If I run a game, I limit CPU to about 50% clock speed.

Only way to stop laptop getting crazy hot and fans meaningfully reducing pressure on desk of laptop...

antonkochubey•5mo ago
With modern CPUs, disabling turbo boost will leave tons of performance off the table
wtallis•5mo ago
Far better would be to tweak the time constants to your liking, so that you can use the full clock range of the chip, but constrain its sustained power draw for quiet and long battery life.
arp242•6mo ago
That's not really how nice levels have worked traditionally, and would disallow specifying "run on Performance cores, but yield to other processes quickly".
casenmgreen•6mo ago
I may be completely wrong, but I read that E cores are not power efficient, rather they are die space efficient.
bell-cot•5mo ago
They're both - though Intel has mostly talked up the power efficiency.

For CPU's, those two types of efficiency are closely related. Omitted transistors (in an E core design) neither take up die space, nor consume power. And CPU cooling systems are ultimately measured by how many watts of heat they can remove from each unit of die area - so fewer watts from a smaller core. (That's at a given temperature difference, etc. But your die will die if any part of it gets too hot. And revving up the CPU cooling fan is generally not preferred.)

dietr1ch•5mo ago
I think that here is where things are lacking. There's not enough information that can be conveyed to the OS with just a number, and the number seems fixed and not tied to user input (active application, user just clicked, action blocking presentation).

It'd be cool if tasks told you about their workload in terms of latency throughput, and cadence required (hello skipping audio when you compile hard).

irusensei•6mo ago
Thats one of the reasons I switched back to Linux. I've bought Alder Lake and a couple of RockPro64s that have heterogenous CPU sets.
Dead_Lemon•6mo ago
Maybe its just me, but this P&E arch is underwhelming and screams similar issues AMD bulldozer again. Claims of massive core counts with mediocre performance, and little control over how things are assigned to the cores. Maybe that will improve over time with improved schedulers, but I doubt it. Its looks like an architectural issue. The experience feels so inconstant, even ending up worse than the prior generations with all normal P cores with lower core counts. I'm avoiding Intel P&E CPUs with anything that needs consistent performance, as my limited experience with the new Intel chips leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and a frustrating computing experience.
DevelopingElk•5mo ago
I see the heterogeneous architectures as mostly a plus. If you want the most throughput for a highly parallel workload given a power and silicon budget 100% E cores would be best. If you have some workloads that don't parallelize well then a few P cores are best. Heterogeneous gives possibilities to optimize for both cases. There is another knob to turn, and mistakes can be made, but this should be an overall positive.

My bigger concern with the newer Intel CPUs are the crashes and reliability issues that were reported.

ksec•5mo ago
You do realise every single Smartphone has had P&E core for the past 6 - 7 years? The problem is more with Intel.
monster_truck•5mo ago
Intel is quietly having their bulldozer moment
johnklos•5mo ago
That's not really fair to Bulldozer CPUs.

The AMD Bulldozers put a lot of new, untested ideas in to practice. Some of them paid off, while many did not, at least not in the short term. There were, however, many good ideas, and many of those lived on and helped make Ryzen what it is.

Over time, Bulldozer performance has matched and exceeded contemporary Intel performance, both because compiler optimizations have made better use of the CPU and because of the slowdowns from Spectre / Meltdown affecting Intel much more than AMD. I still run an FX-8150 server and have compared it with an Intel 2600K system in many tasks.

Do we think that Intel is going to use their current shitshow to make a golden age of Intel CPUs, like how Bulldozer led to Ryzen? I personally don't think so. They've put all their cheap tricks in to their CPUs, tricks which require huge slowdowns when flaws are found, and unless / until they start caring about actually doing things correctly rather than playing fast and loose with hundreds of watts, they'll keep trying to game the benchmarks, will keep having flaws and problems, and will keep losing market share.