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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!

Andrew Back

Open source (hardware and software!) advocate, Treasurer and Director of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation, organiser of Wuthering Bytes technology festival and founder of the Open Source Hardware User Group.
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