Hardware Archive

Dell is back with a brand new XPS 13 this year at the Consumer Electronics Show, and it looks like the best one yet. After gradually improving the screen with a new model last year, 2015's XPS 13 will ship with an even better and truly beautiful 13.3-inch "infinity" display. It has an incredibly tiny 5.2mm bezel on the top and sides. While previous models of the XPS 13 have always had an impressively small bezel, the latest feels truly edge-to-edge, and it's dazzling to look at. Dell hasn't just stopped at thin bezels, though, and the 2015 model now has an optional 3200 x 1800 high-resolution touchscreen display. That’s a massive improvement over the 1366 x 768 resolution we disliked on the original.

Alongside that, Dell has vastly improved the trackpad. I usually hate most Windows laptop trackpads, but I was very surprised with the new XPS 13. It’s using a glass button and a precision trackpad, which is something Microsoft has been encouraging OEMs to implement. Precision trackpads allow Windows 8.1 to directly control the pointer, multi-touch, and gesture support in trackpads, making them feel more like a mini touch-screen with smoother scrolling and better zooming and panning support. Gliding around with the Dell XPS 13 felt very smooth, although we’ll need to review it fully to test exactly how good it is. Either way, you’ll want a precision trackpad on your next laptop.

Now in 2015 and with the launch of the Tegra X1, we can finally begin putting the picture together. Erista as it turns out is something of a rapid release product for NVIDIA; what had been plans to produce a 16nm FF part in 2015 became plans to produce a 20nm part, with Erista to be that part. To pull together Erista NVIDIA would go for a quick time-to-market approach in SoC design, pairing up a Maxwell GPU with ARM Cortex A57 & A53 GPUs, to be produced on TSMC's 20nm SoC process.

The Hardkernel ODROID-C1 features an Amlogic S805 SoC that features a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A5 processor and Mali 450MP2 graphics. This board also has 1GB of DDDR3 memory, Gigabit Ethernet, 40 GPIO pins, eMMC / microSD storage, four USB 2.0 ports, and one USB OTG port. While coming in close to the size and price, the specs of the ODROID-C1 are far superior to the Raspberry Pi with a better SoC, double the RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and an extra USB port.

When we announced the Model B+ back in July, we said that we'd also be producing a lower-cost variant, analogous to the original Model A. Since then, James has been beavering away, and today we're pleased to announce the release of the Raspberry Pi Model A+ at a new low price of $20.

In contrast to TPMs, which were designed as fixed-function devices with a predefined feature set, TrustZone represented a much more flexible approach by leveraging the CPU as a freely programmable trusted platform module. To do that, ARM introduced a special CPU mode called "secure mode" in addition to the regular normal mode, thereby establishing the notions of a "secure world" and a "normal world". The distinction between both worlds is completely orthogonal to the normal ring protection between user-level and kernel-level code and hidden from the operating system running in the normal world. Furthermore, it is not limited to the CPU but propagated over the system bus to peripheral devices and memory controllers. This way, ARM-based platforms become effectively kind of a split personality. When secure mode is active, the software running on the CPU has a different view on the whole system than software running in non-secure mode.

Tantos took over working with the disk. He rewrote the recovery tools, plus a simulator for the software and supporting equipment like printers, monitors, keyboards and more. For the greater part of the last year, he arduously reverse engineered the OS from the image. Despite a few remaining bugs, the Cray OS now works.

On the eve of LG's launch, I sat down with webOS's head of product management and design, Itai Vonshak, as well as Colin Zhao, director of product management for LG's Silicon Valley Lab. As they demoed LG's new interface to me, I was by turns intrigued, bemused, and doubtful that it was up to the task of convincing people that it would be worth buying a new TV for. Most of all, I was impressed by the clarity of vision behind the new interface. For better or worse, webOS has an opinion about how smart TVs should treat their users, and by all appearances that opinion is executed very, very well. LG is better known for pretty schizophrenic Android skins on its smartphones, so to see the company produce something this coherent was a shock.

The CDC6600 and its family members are part of the computer industry history. A decade before the Cray 1, the members of the CDC6000 family were not only expensive and the most powerful systems at the time of introduction. They were also lean and wonderful architectures ! The elegance was also conveyed in several publications (many by CDC), where all the necessary knowledge was explained from the ground up. All you needed to know was supplied, clearly laid out, not just hints for efficient programming. Basically, you could rebuild your own computer by reading these books. 50 years later, they are invaluable reminders and tools, we can see where the computer industry comes from and realise that it is not that hard to do it ourselves, too.

In 1984 the government allowed developers to create services for the Minitel. The government took a 30% cut and passed the rest on to developers (sound familiar?) creating the world's first app store. From a user's perspective using apps on the Minitel was frictionless - you were just billed for what you used through your phone bill.

How big was this app store? In the nineties it was pulling in over a billion USD a year! This is an astronomical sum when you consider France's population size. Though the crossover point is near, the Minitel in its lifetime paid out more to developers than Apple has to iOS developers to date. Companies would advertise their apps in the subway, on highway billboards, and on television.