You can check out the About page to find out more about who I am, so I won’t cover that here.
Why start a blog though? I see this as a space for a creative outlet. I’ve long been a hardware enthusiast – it’s why I ended up going into computer engineering in the first place.
College Life
I started college being convinced I would become a mechanical engineer and design cars in some capacity – engines, suspension, whatever. As part of that goal, I was part of the Baja SAE team for a whole two semesters. For those unfamiliar, Baja SAE teams build off-road go-karts and race them. I probably learned more by being part of that team for two semesters than I did anywhere else at Georgia Tech. I highly recommend student organizations like that to anyone in school.
What it did for me was basically prove that I wasn’t that interested in the nuts and bolts of vehicles, etc. I find the concepts interesting, but I didn’t enjoy the fabrication, tweaking, and designing as much as I’d anticipated. I had a sort of crystallizing moment when I assisted in building 3 new PCs to be used in the shop for CAD and similar – I realized I enjoyed putting together the computers and making them work way more than any of the design or fabrication work that I’d helped with to that point.
After that semester, I switched majors to computer engineering. I learned all sorts of things, from the class that forced me to install Linux to the ones that made me actively hate professors. My favorite classes though were the computer architecture classes, of course.
I started following computer hardware early in my college career, browsing sites like Tom’s Hardware and my personal favorite AnandTech. These sites covered more about computer hardware than I had ever seen. Once I got through some computer hardware classes, I even kept up with their articles describing changes to CPU cores like TLB size, reorder buffer size, etc.
Career
I’m by no means an expert in computer hardware. I’m a hardware design (RTL) engineer by trade, but the projects I’ve worked on haven’t given me any real depth of understanding of how a high-performance computer chip really works beyond any other tech enthusiast. I’d like to say I have a reasonable understanding of the general GPU pipeline, but I just haven’t learned enough about how all those pieces work together (yet).
That said, I started this blog partly to start diving in to some of the things that interest me most. That includes things like how memory latency affects gaming, the effective performance hit of new technologies (DLSS, FidelityFX, etc.), and if there’s a better way to inconsistencies in user experience than reporting average and 1/0.1 percentile frame rates. I also plan to go over my general thoughts on some consumer hardware. Nothing that’s super concrete – more general impressions of new toys like phones, tablets, and computers. I may even pick up some projects like writing a ray-tracer in hardware.
Those are more first-cut things that this blog will cover. I seem to have more ideas than I have time or hardware to test, so we’ll see how many of my ideas I can get through.
I hope this is useful, informative, or entertaining to anyone besides me, and if it is: welcome, and thanks for reading!
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