Samsung is plotting to replace your M.2 SSD with a storage chip smaller than a fingernail to improve battery life and supercharge ondevice AI inference

<p>Rahim Amir is a UAE-based tech writer who enjoys building PCs as much as he enjoys writing about them. He has been professionally writing about PC hardware since 2023, focusing on buyer’s guides, hardware reviews, and sponsored content and features related to tech.<br><br>Having built hundreds of gaming PCs and being an avid gamer in his spare time, Rahim tends to have stronger opinions about hardware than most. This is particularly on display when he gets his way with powerful, but minimalistic RGB builds even as Small Form Factor (SFF) PCs come a close second.<br><br>In addition to his contributions to TechRadar, Rahim’s work has also been featured on Game Rant and financial news websites.<br><br>When he’s not working, you can find him playing DotA with friends or schmoozing to take the world over in Civilization. Alternatively, you can find him binging through the entirety of the Lord of The Rings universe with extended editions in play where applicable.<br><br>You can currently catch Rahim grinding Path of Exile 2, complaining about his (extremely low) unique loot drop rate, or actively participating in one of the numerous (and heated) debates centered around Tolkien's universe on multiple forums daily.<br><br>If you have a PC build or a Satisfactory playthrough in progress, he is likely to have some advice to send your way, especially regarding verticality being key for the latter. For the former, Rahim enjoys all aspects of the process including researching the components he will eventually use, benchmarking the latest and greatest hardware he can get his hands on, and somewhat surprisingly, cable management once he gets his latest build to POST.</p>

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Source: Latest from TechRadar

Just In: An eInk, ESP32-based Game Boy

This is one of those projects that was both inspired and made possible by the absolute embarrassment of dev boards available to the modern hacker. In this case, the dev board was the M5Stack PaperS3, which as the name implies combines an ESP32-S3 with an e-ink panel. [Wenting Zhang] picked one up and was immediately inspired to try and make an e-ink Game Boy.

The M5Stack PaperS3 made this project possible by exposing the display with row/column control — parallel, some would call it, as opposed to the usual serial interface of SPI. That allowed [Wenting] to work some of the same e-ink magic he perfected on his Modos monitors to allow partial refresh at up to 60 Hz. That the ESP32-S3 is capable of emulating a Game Boy while driving the screen should surprise no one, since it can emulate an MSX while outputting VGA or even Windows 95 on a 386. In this case, he’s basing the actual Game Boy emulation on Crank Boy.

Of course the e-ink screen on the M5Stack is far larger and has a much higher resolution than what the Game Boy shipped with, which lets him implement touch controls and scale the image up 3X so he can fake a couple of shades of grayscale while actually outputting black and white. Even better, if he was actually playing this thing on the regular, once the high-refresh portion of the screen starts to wear out, he can flip the orientation and keep gaming on the virtually-unrefreshed control portion of the screen — doubling the lifetime of the system, something many of you raised as a concern when we last looked at a his e-ink monitor project.

The only real shortcoming of this hack is the sound. With one-bit beeps coming out of the M5Stack buzzer, it’s got nothing on Nintendo’s hardware. Of course, that’s partially down to using the hardware as-is. With the addition of an I2S sound chip like the one used in the MOD player project we featured recently, you’d just need to squeeze out enough processor cycles to make this sound as good as it looks.

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Source: Blog – Hackaday