Hardware Archive

A journey through the CPU pipeline

Guest post by MOS6510 2013-05-17 Hardware 25 Comments

"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."

Review: high-PPI Toshiba Kirabook

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-15 Hardware 20 Comments

"We're sure that more high-density Windows laptops are on the way, but the Kirabook is the first to make it to market. The laptop raises some natural questions: Does a computer that is both thinner and lighter than the Pixel and the Pros skimp on battery life to achieve these feats? Is the Kirabook good enough to justify its jaw-dropping $1,599.99 starting price? Most importantly, can Windows support high-density displays as well as OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and others can?" Great laptop, great screen, decent battery life - but Windows' scaling is a terrible mess. Metro is fine, but the proper desktop is a disaster.

Sony bans 1366×768 from notebook lineup

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-07 Hardware 66 Comments

News of the year in the technology industry. "The Fit's most important spec its display, with a nod to Sony's TV division: they come with 1600x900 or 1920x1080 touchscreens and nothing else. 'We're not going to offer 1366x768," reps said. 'We've killed that.'" This is Sony's new, simplified entry-level notebook line. Very, very welcome news in a world where even a supposedly "Pro" laptop that costs $1199 ships with... A 1280x800 resolution. This bottom-of-the-barrel crap needs to be eradicated, and good on Sony for taking this step.

NeXT Computer

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-04 Hardware 64 Comments

"NeXT Computer (the original 68030 cube) was a high end workstation that was manufactured between 1988 - 1990. Back then it was a very expensive machine as a complete system would start at $6500 (in 1988 dollars). The machine is a 1 foot cube magnesium case that houses the computer. At the time, its performance was impressive, with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, a dedicated floating point CPU, and a digital signal processor built into the system. NeXT cubes featured a magneto-optical drive that stored a whopping 256 Megabytes (by comparison, high end Mac systems at the time might have featured a 20 Megabyte hard drive.) In its day, this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems!" No new information for the average OSNews reader, but lots of beautiful photos for a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

IDC: Android now leads the tablet market with a 56.5% share

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-01 Hardware 42 Comments

"The Q1 2013 numbers from IDC, a technology and telecommunications research firm who keeps track of this sort of thing, show that Android tablets now lead the market with a 56.5-percent share. The 27,800,000 units shipped in the quarter is a 247-percent improvement from this time last year, when just 8,000,000 units were shipped. It's important to note that this increase doesn't come at the expense of Apple, who shipped 65.3-percent more tablets in Q1 2013 than they did in Q1 2012 - it shows the market is growing, and the lions share of new purchases are Android." While Android's market share growth scares me, it's good that it's not really harming the competition. Also, maybe this will be the carrot for developers to improve Android tablet applications.

Guest post by MOS6510 2013-04-27 Hardware 30 Comments

"One of the things that will never fail to make me happy: seeing people stuck in time explain what modern day technology is. Kim Komando hosted an educational series about computer and explains the basics of its hardware, DOS, Microsoft Windows, Writeand more."

Connecting an iPad Retina LCD to a PC

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-22 Hardware 12 Comments

"What is great about this panel (except its resolution) is that it has an eDisplayPort interface (which is supposed to replace LVDS in the near future), and as this hack proves it is compatible with traditional DisplayPort outputs found on all modern video cards. The panel is also surprisingly cheap - I got mine on ebay for $55, shipped from China. Hoping that eDisplayPort is compatible with regular DisplayPort (I couldn't find conclusive proof of this), I went on to interface the panel with a DP cable." Cool.

Ancient computers in use today

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-17 Hardware 42 Comments

"While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn't been updated for decades." Back when I still worked at a hardware and plumbing store - up until about 4-5 years ago - we used MS-DOS cash registers. They are still in use today. If it works, it works.

A file system all its own

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-14 Hardware 36 Comments

"In the past five years, flash memory has progressed from a promising accelerator, whose place in the data center was still uncertain, to an established enterprise component for storing performance-critical data. It's rise to prominence followed its proliferation in the consumer world and the volume economics that followed. With SSDs, flash arrived in a form optimized for compatibility - just replace a hard drive with an SSD for radically better performance. But the properties of the NAND flash memory used by SSDs differ significantly from those of the magnetic media in the hard drives they often displace. While SSDs have become more pervasive in a variety of uses, the industry has only just started to design storage systems that embrace the nuances of flash memory. As it escapes the confines of compatibility, significant improvements in performance, reliability, and cost are possible."

Alienware unveils Ubuntu gaming PC

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-05 Hardware 41 Comments

AlienWare (so Dell) has just unveiled a gaming PC running Ubuntu and Steam, designed to be hooked up to a TV - essentially a Steambox. "With over 25 gaming titles available and more being added, users can access Steam For Linux to play online games, including your favorite titles like Team Fortress 2 and Serious Sam 3." Everything starts out small, but with Valve going full throttle with this, expect this library to grow.

A strange computer promises great speed

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-22 Hardware 49 Comments

"But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between - all at the same time. Now, Lockheed Martin - which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago - is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business." I always get a bit skeptical whenever I hear the words 'quantum computing', but according to NewScientist, this is pretty legit.

Submitted by Laurence 2013-03-05 Hardware 16 Comments

Steve Mann on his 35-year history building and wearing computerised eyewear. "Was it blind luck (pardon the expression) that I was wearing this vision-enhancing system at the time of the accident? Not at all: I have been designing, building, and wearing some form of this gear for more than 35 years." Glass has the potential to have a huge impact on the world - and just like with the advent of the mobile phone, people are afraid, cynical, and unable to see the possibly huge benefits of systems like this.

Submitted by MOS6510 2013-02-11 Hardware No Comments

"The story of how the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park aided the allied code-cracking effort during World War II is becoming well known. Its claim to be a forerunner of modern-day computers is also well established. What is much less well known is the tale of how Colossus's story came to be told in the first place. It is a tale of how one man's dogged efforts overcame official secrets and official indifference to rewrite computer history. Computer scientist Brian Randell was the man who started uncovering the history of Colossus."

Submitted by Nth_Man 2013-02-10 Hardware 18 Comments

" bricked a Samsung laptop today. Unlike most of the reported cases of Samsung laptops refusing to boot, I never booted Linux on it - all experimentation was performed under Windows. It seems that the bug we've been seeing is simultaneously simpler in some ways and more complicated in others than we'd previously realised." On a related note, the Linux Foundation's UEFI secure boot system has been released.

Dell goes private

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-05 Hardware 30 Comments

"Dell today announced it has signed a definitive merger agreement under which Michael Dell, Dell's Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, in partnership with global technology investment firm Silver Lake, will acquire Dell." So, Dell has gone private, and Microsoft has contributed a $2 billion loan to the deal.

Guest post by Radio 2013-02-01 Hardware 30 Comments

The title is pretty much self-explanatory - oh UEFI. "You can read more of what is known at H-Online, but the short summary is this: Samsung's UEFI implementation appears to be faulty. It was most likely tested with Windows only and found to work, but thorough testing with other operating systems doesn't appear to have been a priority - or perhaps a consideration at all. At present, the bug appears to affect Samsung 530U3C, 300E5C, NP700Z5C, NP700Z7C, and NP900X4C series laptops; if you have one of those laptops, we recommend you exercise extreme caution if you have a need to boot into a Linux environment."

A proposal for honest hard drive space disclosure

Thom Holwerda 2013-01-30 Hardware 62 Comments

Marco Arment: "Everyone should play by the same rules. A proposal: storage capacities referenced or implied in the names or advertisements for personal computers, tablets, and smartphones should not exceed the amount of space available for end-user installation of third-party applications and data, after enough software has been installed to enable all commonly advertised functionality. With today's OSes, iPads could advertise capacities no larger than 12, 28, 60, and 124 GB and the Surface Pros could be named 23 and 83 GB." Wholly agreed. When I buy a box of 100 staples, I expect it to contain ~100 staples - not 50 because the other 50 are holding the box together.

Inside the ALU of the 8085 microprocessor

Thom Holwerda 2013-01-29 Hardware 9 Comments

"The arithmetic-logic unit is a fundamental part of any computer, performing addition, subtraction, and logic operations, but how it works is a mystery to many people. I've reverse-engineered the ALU circuit from the 8085 microprocessor and explain how it works. The 8085's ALU is a surprisingly complex circuit that at first looks like a mysterious jumble of gates, but it can be understood if you don't mind diving into some Boolean logic."

Acer sees success in Chrome; Windows fails to drive sales

Thom Holwerda 2013-01-28 Hardware 61 Comments

"Acer, the Taiwanese computer maker that's suffered two consecutive annual losses, posted strong sales of notebooks using Google's Chrome platform after the release of Microsoft's Windows 8 failed to ignite the market. Chrome-based models accounted for 5 percent to 10 percent of Acer's U.S. shipments since being released there in November, President Jim Wong said in an interview at the Taipei-based company's headquarters. That ratio is expected to be sustainable in the long term and the company is considering offering Chrome models in other developed markets, he said." HP is also planning a Chrome OS laptop, and it's been at the top of Amazon's charts (whatever that means) for a while now. In case you haven't noticed - the desktop world, too, is changing. Nobody wants Windows 8 (touch or no), so OEMs are finally looking elsewhere. We're finally getting what we wanted 13 years ago.

Lenovo launches Chromebook

Thom Holwerda 2013-01-17 Hardware 65 Comments

"Meet the new ThinkPad X131e Chromebook: A fast booting, highly customizable laptop PC built with rugged features for the daily rigors of K-12 education. The ThinkPad X131e Chromebook simplifies software and security management for school administrators and provides students and teachers with quick access to thousands of apps, education resources and storage." Lenovo is the third OEM to jump into ChromeOS. Chromebooks have been doing well on Amazon, apparently, too. Android tablets, iPads, the Mac, and now Chromebooks - it must be rainy in Redmond.