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Three talks on the theme of the quest for computing speed.
For the final Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG) meeting of 2013 we had a series of talks on different approaches to improving the performance of a computer system.
Fast and Furious: Overclocking chips for fun and profit
First up was Omer Kilic, who started off with a humorous exploration of the overclocking scene, before delving into technical details and practical considerations. He then introduced “vftweak”, a tiny open source hardware board that was designed for getting the best performance out of a USB ASIC Bitcoin miner, whilst avoiding a meltdown!
Souping up the BBC Micro
The last time that Jason Flynn presented at an OSHUG meeting he gave a lightning talk on the, now recently launched, FUNcube satellite which he designed the on-board telemetry system for. This time Jason introduces us to the processor expansion options for the BBC Micro, and his own open hardware contribution which enables an FPGA-based processor to be retrofitted.
How compiler optimisation helps you get the best out of your hardware
The final talk came from Dr Jeremy Bennett, who gave us a whistle stop tour of compiler internals and compiler optimisation — having managed to shoehorn the key points from a 10 hour course into a presentation of less than 30 minutes!