Hacker News: 6SixTy

New comment by 6SixTy in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

6SixTy — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:27:58 +0000

Without being hands on, it's difficult to make a direct comparison. There's 2 processors according to CNX [0], and the HP core's instruction set might roughly be comparable to M55.

[0] https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/03/24/esp32-s31-dual-core-...

New comment by 6SixTy in "I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine"

6SixTy — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:30:58 +0000

BC-250 had a standard set of SuperIO and Southbridge, and the PS5 has a duo consisting of a custom NVMe controller and custom SuperIO. If what is true from the PS4 is applicable to the PS5, there had to have been some patches to the kernel in order to add platform support for those custom chips.

New comment by 6SixTy in "I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine"

6SixTy — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:35:05 +0000

It's unfortunately par for the course for something like a console to be like this. Consoles are often subsidized by licensing and publishing costs of games, so preventing you from running your own software is within their best interest.

New comment by 6SixTy in "TSA leaves passenger needing surgery after illegally forcing her through scanner"

6SixTy — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:08:20 +0000

Judging by how every single TSA agent is horrifically trained and doesn't have a drop of care in the world, abolishing the TSA would be a step up from having it.

New comment by 6SixTy in "MacBook Neo"

6SixTy — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:43:07 +0000

Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition. It would take a restructuring of laptops within the school system to kids/families having a joint ownership over the laptop to stop them intentionally destroying them. Even then, there are complications like kids that will absolutely destroy anothers' for fun.

And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Simplifying Vulkan one subsystem at a time"

6SixTy — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:36:30 +0000

My understanding with Mesa is that it has very few dependencies and is ABI stable, so freezing Mesa updates is counterproductive. I'm not sure about Snaps, but Flatpak ships as it's own system managing Mesa versions.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Nvidia's 10-year effort to make the Shield TV the most updated Android device"

6SixTy — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:38:41 +0000

I have to wonder if the Nintendo Switch picking up the Tegra X1 SOC has something to do with it. There's a good chance a lot of components of the (custom microkernel) operating system are derived from Android, and with the Switch receiving active support for so long, I wouldn't be surprised if the work between the Shield TV and Switch are related.

With the Switch being shipped for nearly 10 years, it pales in comparison to the shelf life of most any processor Apple, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek (?) push out.

Though Apple in particular is interesting, as their Apple TV lineup also has the same long legs, with the Apple TV HD/4th Gen releasing in 2015 and receiving the latest OS.

New comment by 6SixTy in "RISC-V is coming along quite speedily: Milk-V Titan Mini-ITX 8-core board"

6SixTy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:55:59 +0000

RISC-V Vector is roughly equivalent to MMX, SSE, and AVX. A lot of tasks without those instructions are flat out slower without.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Milk-V Titan: A $329 8-Core 64-bit RISC-V mini-ITX board with PCIe Gen4x16"

6SixTy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:34:09 +0000

Thing about RISC-V is that there are technically no barriers on doing as you see fit, but there's very clearly defined lines where community support isn't guaranteed, like custom extensions or screwing with already ratified extensions.

We actually don't know a lot about the UR-DP1000 chip, while we do know quite a bit about the 3A6000 because of Chips and Cheese. This makes a thorough analysis of the crimes committed within the core architecture of the UR chip more of speculation than a coherent discussion.

But we do know:

1. The UR-DP1000 does not have any Vector instructions 2. UR only has a 4 way OOO design, while the 3A6k is 6 way OOO 3. The cache architecture of the UR is more complicated, with 4 cores sharing 4MB L3 per cluster (2 clusters total), and a 16MB global L4 where the 3A6k doesn't have this 4. The UR chip doesn't have SMT

New comment by 6SixTy in "Milk-V Titan: A $329 8-Core 64-bit RISC-V mini-ITX board with PCIe Gen4x16"

6SixTy — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 20:11:55 +0000

Cache issues add another layer here, if it's not the whole issue. Device tree patches for the K3 have 2 clusters of 4 cores with shared 4MB L2 cache per cluster. Core 2 Duo P8400 has 3MB L2 shared between 2 cores, and Sandybridge-Haswell have per core L2 and shared L3.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Milk-V Titan: A $329 8-Core 64-bit RISC-V mini-ITX board with PCIe Gen4x16"

6SixTy — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:25:16 +0000

A TL;DR doesn't explain everything. The Milk-V Titan doesn't have Vector instructions or crypto, while the Pi 5 does. It's very clearly a broken benchmark.

This is why a bunch of RISC-V people won't buy boards without RV Vector instructions.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Milk-V Titan: A $329 8-Core 64-bit RISC-V mini-ITX board with PCIe Gen4x16"

6SixTy — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:54:44 +0000

Something is odd here, the Core 2 Duo only has up to SSE 4.1, while the RVA23 instruction set is analogous to x64-v3. I find it hard to believe that the SpacemiT K3 matched a Core 2 duo single core score while leveraging those new instructions.

To wit the Geekbench 6.5.0 RISC-V preview has 3 files, 'geekbench6', 'geekbench_riscv64', and 'geekbench_rv64gcv', which are presumably the executables for the benchmark in addition to their supported instruction sets. This makes the score an unreliable narrator of performance, as someone could have run the other benchmarks and the posted score would not be genuine. And that's on top of a perennial remark that even the benchmark(s) could just not be optimized for RISC-V.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Milk-V Titan: A $329 8-Core 64-bit RISC-V mini-ITX board with PCIe Gen4x16"

6SixTy — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:33:23 +0000

LoongArch is a weird mix of MIPS and RISC-V. There's not much that would be gained by investing a whole bunch into LoongArch that couldn't also be done to RISC-V, if at all.

New comment by 6SixTy in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

6SixTy — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:58:40 +0000

KWin/Xorg AFAIK has been on maintanence duty (i.e. fixes mostly come from XWayland) for >5 years now. KDE has expulsed the Xorg codebase of KWin into a seperate repo in preparation of a Wayland only future.

Even if KDE/Xorg is a stable experience is true now, it will not be true in the medium to short term. And a distro like Kubuntu might be 2 years out from merging a "perfect" KDE Plasma experience if it arrived right now.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Chinese auto giant Geely to announce entry into US EV market within 2-3 years"

6SixTy — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:05:28 +0000

My 2 cents is that Geely could leverage their existing Volvo and Polestar dealership network much like KIA/Hyundai. Geely Holdings own ~80% of Volvo cars, and a majority share of Polestar. Polestar doesn't own any manufacturing facilities, instead using Geely or Volvo factories.

Geely's entry into the US EV market could/should ultimately be downmarket of Volvo/Polestar, since both of those are luxury vehicle brands.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Who invented the transistor?"

6SixTy — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:48:54 +0000

There's something to be said that mass production is another distinct stage of invention. Karl Benz may have invented the first internal combustion engine car, and plenty more built cars by hand for the rich, but Henry Ford made cars anyone could have for cheap.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface"

6SixTy — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:44:12 +0000

That's a comical amount of pennies

New comment by 6SixTy in "Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface"

6SixTy — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:40:44 +0000

$1M to the US Government is like dropping pennies, less than that actually. By the READMEs, this font is actually a modification to another font and more sleuthing revealed that the author actually worked on this in his spare time.

New comment by 6SixTy in "Volvo Centum is Dalton Maag's new typeface for Volvo"

6SixTy — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:06:26 +0000

Part of making a typeface is making it subconsciously part of the brand. Though there's precedent for making a functional font in this use case as Airbus designed B612 for readability within their glass cockpits.

New comment by 6SixTy in "How SQLite is tested"

6SixTy — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:58:59 +0000

Considering that the support tier where you get access to the testing suite is 150K/year, I don't think they will be spilling any beans soon.