Smith & Wesson Model 340PD
The Smith & Wesson 340PD is an ultra-light J-frame five shot snubnosed revolver chambered for .357 Magnum.
Design
It has a frame constructed of scandium enhanced aluminum alloy, a titanium alloy cylinder, and a corrosion resistant steel barrel liner. Unloaded it weighs only 12 ounces (340 g) and when loaded remains under 1 pound (0.45 kg).
With no external hammer it operates double action only.
M&P340
A variant of the Model 340 is the M&P340, part of Smith & Wesson's M&P line of handguns. It features a PVD coating and stainless steel cylinder. It has XS Sights® 24/7 Tritium Night sights and weighs 13.3 ounces (377.8 g). It is available with or without an internal lock.
Design limitations
There is a prohibition against using ammunition with bullet weight less than 120 grains (7.8 g) due to the risk of frame erosion from powder that is still burning after too rapid exit of the light projectile. Another warning in the owners manual is recoil may pull the cases of unfired rounds in the cylinder rearward with enough force to unseat the bullets, causing the cylinder to jam. It has also been said that accuracy is compromised in these types of ultra-light revolvers since the barrel is a steel sleeve liner rather than a single solid piece of steel.
List of Super NES enhancement chips
The list of Super NES enhancement chips demonstrates the overall design plan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, whereby the console's hardware designers had made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console. This standardized selection of chips was available to increase system performance and features for each game cartridge. As increasingly superior chips became available throughout the SNES's vintage market years, this strategy originally provided a cheaper and more versatile way of maintaining the system's market lifespan when compared to Nintendo's option of having included a much more expensive CPU or a more obsolete stock chipset.
As a result, various enhancement chips were integrated into the cartridges of select game titles. The presence of an enhancement chip is most often indicated by 16 additional pins on either side of the original pins, 8 to each side.
Super FX
The Super FX chip is a 16-bit supplemental RISC CPU developed by Argonaut Games that was included in certain game cartridges to perform functions that the main CPU can not feasibly do. It is typically programmed to act as a graphics accelerator chip that draws polygons to a frame buffer in the RAM sitting adjacent to it.
NEC µPD7720
The NEC µPD7720 is the name of fixed point digital signal processors from NEC (currently Renesas Electronics). Announced in 1980, it became, along with the Texas Instruments TMS32010, one of the most popular DSPs of its day.
Background
In the late 1970s, telephone engineers were attempting to create technology with sufficient performance to enable digital touch-tone dialing. Existing digital signal processing solutions required over a hundred chips and consumed significant amounts of power.Intel responded to this potential market by introducing the Intel 2920, and integrated processor that, while it had both digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters, lacked additional features (such as a hardware multiplier) that would be found in later processors. Announcements for the first "real" DSPs, the NEC µPD7720 and the Bell Labs DSP-1 chip, occurred the following year at the 1980 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits conference. The µPD7720 first became available in 1981 and commercially available in late 1982 at a cost of $600 each. Beyond their initial use in telephony, these processors found applications in disk drive and graphics controllers, speech synthesis and modems.
