The Setun Was a Ternary Computer from the USSR in 1958

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=4vwOJE0Dq38

[Codeolences] tells us about the FORBIDDEN Soviet Computer That Defied Binary Logic. The Setun, the world’s first ternary computer, was developed at Moscow State University in 1958. Its troubled and short-lived history is covered in the video. The machine itself uses “trits” (ternary digits) instead of “bits” (binary digits).

When your digits have three discrete values there are a multiplicity of ways of assigning meaning to each state, and the Setun uses a system known as balanced ternary where each digit can be either -1, 0, or 1 and otherwise uses a place-value system in the normal way.

An interesting factoid that...

WCH CH32H417 dual-core RISC-V MCU offers USB 3.0, 500MB/s UHSIF, and Fast Ethernet interfaces

WCH CH32H417 is a high-performance dual-core RISC-V microcontroller clocked at up to 400 MHz with up to 960 KB flash, 896KB SRAM, and a range of interfaces, including a 5 Gbps USB 3.0 Host/Device SuperSpeed interface. Other notable features include a 500MB/s UHSIF (Universal High Speed Interface), 10/100Mbps Ethernet MAC and PHY, a SerDes high-speed isolated transceiver, a USB 2.0 High-Speed Host/Device, a USB 2.0 OTG Full Speed, USB PD support, and Display and Camera interfaces. The CH32H417 also offers the usual low-speed I/Os (95x GPIO, SPI…) and analog inputs and outputs (ADC/DAC). WCH CH32H417 CH32H417 specifications: Cores (Coremark: 5.73/MHz)...

Testing the Mono Gateway, a custom-built 10 Gbps Router

Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ.

In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf:

The Gateway is a small (1U/desktop) router with features like a 4-core Arm CPU, 8GB of ECC LPDDR RAM, and decent expansion options for a compact router.

Cincoze MD-3000 is a scalable DIN-Rail computer with up to 14th Gen 24-core Intel Core i9-14900 CPU

Cincoze MD-3000 is a high-performance, scalable DIN-Rail computer powered by a 12th, 13th, or 14th Gen Intel processor and designed to be expanded with up to six modules through the company’s “Scalable Expansion Deck” (SED) connected to the computer’s PCIe x16 slot. Based on an up to a 14th Gen 24-core Intel Core i9-14900 Raptor Lake-S Refresh CPU, the MD-3000 supports up to 96GB DDR5 SO-DIMM memory with optional ECC, up to two M.2 NVMe SSDs, and a 2.5-inch SATA bay, and is equipped with two 4K-capable DisplayPort connectors, five Gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 3.2 ports, an RS232/RS485 DB9...

Orange Pi Unveils AI Station with Ascend 310 and 176 TOPS Compute

Orange Pi closes the year by unveiling new details about the Orange Pi AI Station, a compact board-level edge computing platform built around the Ascend 310 series processor. The system targets high-density inference workloads with large memory options, NVMe storage support, and extensive I/O in a small footprint. The AI Station is powered by an […]

Может ли Orange PI 5 Plus с 32 ГБ памяти заменить домашний/офисный ПК?

Производительность ARM процессоров каждый год увеличивается и все ближе к x86 процессорам. Компания Apple давно отказалась от процессоров Intel в пользу процессоров собственной разработки на ARM архитектуре. Но домашний/офисный ПК это не только процессор, но и софт, драйвера, и подключение любых устройств из коробки. Компания Shenzhen Xunlong Software вначале 2023 г. выпустила одноплатный компьютер Orange PI 5 Plus на базе высокопроизводительного процессора Rockchip RK3588 с 32 ГБ ОЗУ и возможностью подключения NVMe SSD дисков. По техническим характеристикам такой одноплатный компьютер сопоставим с домашним/офисным ПК. Проверим на сколько комфортно работать за таким одноплатником, смотреть YouTube, видео, и конечно же поиграем, установим...

Year 2025 in Review, CNX Software stats, and looking ahead to 2026

Time for the last post of 2025, as the year is almost over. I’ll look back at key developments and notable products launched in 2025, share some CNX Software website traffic statistics, and look ahead to 2026. Year 2025 in Review After 22 product releases in 2024, Raspberry Pi calmed down a little bit in 2025, and the highlights of the year included the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard, the 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2, and a Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. What didn’t quite stop were the accessories from third parties for Raspberry Pi SBC...

VisionFive 2 Lite SBC Review – Ubuntu 24.04 on a low-cost RISC-V SBC in 2026

StarFive has sent me a sample of the VisionFive 2 Lite RISC-V SBC for review. It’s a low-cost credit card-sized board based on the StarFive JH7110S quad-core RISC-V SBC and designed to get started with Linux RISC-V on the cheap. When I first tested the earlier VisionFive 2 SBC with a StarFive JH7110 RISC-V SoC in February 2023, I didn’t call it a review, but rather a hands-on experience, since, at the time, many features still didn’t work properly. Almost three years have passed since then, so reviewing the VisionFive 2 Lite SBC with Ubuntu 24.04 will allow us to...

DFRobot HUSKYLENS 2 AI camera review – From built-in AI samples to training a custom model to detect elephants

Hello, today I am going to review the HUSKYLENS 2, released in October 2025. It is the next generation of HUSKYLENS, an AI vision sensor equipped with a Kendryte K230 dual-core RISC-V SoC with a 6 TOPS AI accelerator and a 2.4-inch IPS touchscreen. The device runs machine vision algorithms fully on-device, providing fast and low-latency performance, and includes more than 15 built-in AI models. HUSKYLENS 2 also supports deploying custom-trained models, including integration with Large Language Models (LLMs) via a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service. In addition, it is compatible with various microcontrollers, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi,...

Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode

In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up to 100 times faster, a big boost for spreadsheets and other number-crunching applications. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to compute trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in microcode. I'm part of a group that is reverse-engineering this microcode. In this post, I examine the 49 types of conditional tests that the 8087's microcode uses inside its algorithms. Some conditions are simple, such as checking if a number is zero or...