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If I were building a gaming PC on July 1, 2021, this is the machine I would actually want. I am not simply choosing the most expensive part in every category. The priority is gaming performance, then reliability, cooling and enough headroom to keep the system useful for years. Read more
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Microsoft announced Windows 11 at a dedicated event on June 24, 2021, led by Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. The announcement followed weeks of leaks — a build of Windows 11 had circulated online on June 15, 2021, confirming the visual redesign before the official event. The user interface changes included a centered taskbar and Start button (repositionable to the left in Settings), a new Start menu showing pinned apps and recent documents (but removing live tiles entirely), redesigned context menus and dialog boxes with rounded corners, a Widgets panel (news, weather, sports, calendar pulled from Microsoft services), and Snap Layouts (hovering over a window’s maximize button revealed 2–4 zone layout presets). The Microsoft Store was redesigned to allow Win32 application submission — developers could submit traditional desktop software, not only UWP/MSIX apps — addressing one of developers’ long-standing grievances with the previous Store. DirectStorage (a Windows API allowing the GPU to decompress NVMe data directly, bypassing CPU and system RAM for asset loading) was announced as a Windows 11 feature, though it was later backported to Windows 10 as well. Read more
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Artificial intelligence in 2021 is surrounded by excitement that sometimes makes it difficult to see clearly. The same conversation that includes genuine technical milestones also includes cryptocurrency speculation, NFT marketplaces, and metaverse announcements. The noise makes it harder to identify what is real and durable. Read more
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Google introduced LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at Google I/O on May 18, 2021 as a language model trained specifically for multi-turn, open-ended conversation. The model had 137 billion parameters and was trained on 1.56 trillion words of public web documents and dialogue data. Unlike Google’s earlier neural conversation research, LaMDA was designed to maintain coherent context across many conversational turns rather than responding to isolated queries. Read more
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Apple introduced a redesigned 24-inch iMac and a new iPad Pro in April 2021, both using the M1 processor announced at the Mac event in November 2020. The iMac, priced from $1,299, replaced the 21.5-inch and 27-inch Intel models with a single M1 design just 11.5 mm thick — thinner than many smartphones — in seven colors. It included a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, a 1080p front camera, and a six-speaker sound system. The M1 Mac mini and MacBook Air had already launched; adding the iMac and iPad Pro showed the chip could span from compact desktops to tablets with the same architecture. Read more
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Microsoft announced Mesh at its Ignite conference on March 2, 2021 as a cloud platform for shared, real-time mixed-reality experiences. The initial demonstration ran on HoloLens 2 ($3,500), showing multiple people in different locations appearing as holographic representations — either realistic avatars built from photogrammetry or simplified cartoon avatars — in a shared three-dimensional workspace where they could manipulate 3D models, annotate CAD files, and communicate spatially. The Azure backend handled spatial anchoring (tying virtual content to real-world coordinates), identity and access control, real-time state synchronization, and cross-device rendering adaptation. Read more
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NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, 2021 at an MSRP of $329. It used the GA106 die on Samsung’s 8nm process with 3,584 CUDA cores, 13 Shader TFLOPS, and — unusually for its price tier — 12 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus. The RTX 3060 Ti ($399, December 2020) used a cut-down GA104 die with 8 GB; the standard RTX 3060’s larger memory allocation was a deliberate decision to make it attractive for content creation workloads where VRAM capacity matters as much as throughput. Read more
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Computer science has produced many memorable sentences. The best of them are useful not because they settle arguments, but because they reframe questions in ways that make a problem easier to think about. Here are several I return to often, with what I actually think they mean. Read more
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Apple announced its transition from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon at WWDC in June 2020 and shipped the first M1 Macs — the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini — in November 2020. By January 2021, reviews and benchmarks have had time to accumulate, and the results are unusual enough to warrant serious attention. Read more
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WhatsApp began notifying its 2 billion users on January 4, 2021 about an updated privacy policy requiring acceptance by February 8, 2021 to continue using the app (a deadline later extended to May 15, 2021 after widespread backlash). The notification was poorly worded and generated mass confusion: many users interpreted it as WhatsApp announcing that it would begin sharing the content of private messages with Facebook for advertising purposes. Social media posts warning friends to switch to Signal or Telegram spread rapidly, often citing this misunderstanding. WhatsApp published blog posts attempting to clarify that message content remained end-to-end encrypted and invisible to WhatsApp’s servers — true since WhatsApp had implemented the Signal Protocol end-to-end encryption for all personal chats in April 2016. WhatsApp had been acquired by Facebook for approximately $19 billion in February 2014, and co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton (who left Facebook in 2018; Acton donated $50 million to found the Signal Foundation in January 2018 alongside Moxie Marlinspike) had originally committed to maintaining WhatsApp’s privacy properties. The January 2021 policy update was primarily about WhatsApp’s Business API: companies using WhatsApp to communicate with customers (for order confirmations, customer service, etc.) would be able to store those business-customer conversations on Facebook’s infrastructure and potentially use that data for Facebook advertising targeting. Read more
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FireEye disclosed on December 8, 2020 that it had been breached and its Red Team tools stolen; investigating that intrusion led to the discovery of a much larger campaign. On December 13, 2020, SolarWinds and the U.S. government simultaneously disclosed that SolarWinds Orion — a widely deployed IT monitoring platform used by the U.S. government, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure — had been compromised at its build stage. Attackers (attributed to APT29, Russia’s SVR intelligence service) had modified SolarWinds’ Orion software build process between March and June 2020, inserting a backdoor component called SUNBURST into legitimate, digitally signed Orion updates (versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1). Approximately 18,000 organizations downloaded the malicious updates; among SolarWinds’ roughly 33,000 customers at the time, the installed-base included the U.S. Treasury, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, NIH, and parts of the Department of Defense. Read more
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Quantum computing is often described as a technology that will make computers unbelievably fast. That description is too simple and somewhat misleading. A quantum computer is not a faster version of an ordinary computer for every task. It is a different model of computation that can offer major advantages for specific kinds of problems — and very little advantage for most of the things ordinary computers do every day. Read more
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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many software teams to work remotely for much longer than they expected. Software development was already more remote-friendly than many professions, but working from home occasionally is very different from building an entire working culture around distance. Read more
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Apple released the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini with M1 on November 17, 2020. The MacBook Air started at $999, the MacBook Pro at $1,299, and the Mac mini at $699 — unchanged prices from their Intel predecessors. Apple had announced the transition from Intel to Apple silicon at WWDC in June 2020, promising a two-year transition window; the first M1 Macs arrived only five months later. Read more
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Every November 10, Turkiye pauses to remember Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Read more
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AMD announced Zen 3 on October 8, 2020 with the Ryzen 5000 desktop processor family, going on sale November 5, 2020: Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores/32 threads, $799), Ryzen 9 5900X (12c/24t, $549), Ryzen 7 5800X (8c/16t, $449), and Ryzen 5 5600X (6c/12t, $299). The foundational architectural change was the redesign of the Core Complex (CCX): Zen 2 divided its cores into two 4-core CCXes each with their own 16 MB L3 cache, so a thread on one CCX accessing data cached on the other CCX faced ~40 ns of cross-CCX latency. Zen 3 merged all 8 cores of a CCD (Core Chiplet Die) into one unified CCX sharing a single 32 MB L3 cache, cutting cross-core L3 latency from ~40 ns to ~10 ns. The impact was largest in gaming workloads where the game engine, physics, audio, and rendering threads frequently accessed shared game state: Ryzen 5000 regularly outperformed the competing Ryzen 3000 by 15–20% in gaming despite using the same TSMC 7nm (N7P slightly refined) manufacturing process, demonstrating that the architectural bottleneck had been the CCX boundary latency rather than clock speed or manufacturing node. Read more
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A traditional antenna has a radiation pattern largely fixed by its physical shape and orientation. If you want to direct signal in a particular direction, you physically point the antenna that way. Smart antennas change this. By combining multiple antenna elements with signal processing, a system can steer its effective beam electronically — no moving parts required. In 2020, with 5G networks rolling out and Wi-Fi 6 becoming standard in new hardware, smart antenna techniques are no longer only a research topic. They are inside the devices people are using today. Read more
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If you are beginning Computer Engineering in 2020, your first year is starting in an unusual time. Read more
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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the GeForce RTX 30 series on September 1, 2020 in an online event, with the RTX 3080 ($699), RTX 3090 ($1,499), and later RTX 3070 ($499, October 29) going on sale September 17, October 24, and October 29 respectively. The Ampere architecture (GA102/GA104 dies manufactured on Samsung 8nm, not TSMC as NVIDIA had used previously) reorganized the streaming multiprocessor design so that each SM contained twice the FP32 CUDA core count of Turing by adding a second FP32 data path that could also execute INT32 simultaneously — effectively doubling FP32 throughput without doubling the SM count, at the cost of the INT32-FP32 overlap being an architecture-specific optimization rather than general-purpose parallelism. The RTX 3080 shipped with 8,704 CUDA cores and 10 GB GDDR6X at 320 GB/s bandwidth; the RTX 3090 shipped with 10,496 CUDA cores and 24 GB GDDR6X at 936 GB/s. The GDDR6X memory (developed by Micron) used PAM4 (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation 4) signaling at 19.5 Gbps per pin versus GDDR6’s 16 Gbps, adding approximately 21% bandwidth at equivalent pin count and frequency. Compared to the RTX 2080 Ti ($999, Turing’s flagship, 4,352 CUDA cores, 11 GB GDDR6, 14.2 TFLOPS FP32), the RTX 3080 offered approximately 29.8 TFLOPS FP32 — more than 2× the shader throughput — at $699. Read more
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The year 2020 has made the importance of digital infrastructure unusually visible. Work, education, communication, shopping, entertainment, and many public services have moved online at a scale few people expected, and in many cases at a speed that revealed which systems were ready and which were not. Read more