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Hardware Archive

CPU Startup Combines CPU+DRAM – and a Whole Bunch of Crazy

"The CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. We spent some time earlier this fall discussing the new TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) with company CTO Russell Fish, but while the idea is interesting; its presentation is marred by crazy conceptualizing and deeply suspect analytics."

Raspberry Pi: “We’ve Started Manufacture!”

"Raspberry Pis started being made a couple of days ago, but I was forbidden to tell you about it until signed contracts and receipts for payment had arrived - it's been killing me, especially since I've had tens of you asking me when manufacturing would start every day for the last few weeks. I am not good at keeping secrets." No more secrets to keep, Liz! I can't wait to place my order.

Vizio Enters PC Market with Beautiful All-in-one, Laptop

The news I've seen coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show this year isn't particularly breathtaking or awe-inspiring. Phones, tablets, faster, thinner, yes, yes, we've all been here before. There is one piece of news, however, that stands out from the crowd. The best-selling TV maker in the US, Vizio, is entering the PC market. Stunning designs for both laptop and all-in-one - and buried deep within the press release lies the creamy nougaty centre that makes me want to buy one even more: a Windows 7 install optimised by Microsoft, free of crapware.

CPU IO Ports on Non-x86 Architectures

In the world of alternative OS development, portability across multiple architectures is a challenging goal. Sometimes, it may be intrinsically hard to come up with hardware abstractions that work well everywhere, but many times the core problem is one of missing information. Here, I aim at learning more about the way non-x86 architectures deal with CPU IO ports, and in particular how they prevent user-mode software from accessing them.

Dell, HP Respond to Secure Boot Issue

A big issue right now in the world of operating systems - especially Linux - is Microsoft's requirement that all Windows 8 machines ship with UEFI's secure boot enabled, with no requirement that OEMs implement it so users can turn it off. This has caused some concern in the Linux world, and considering Microsoft's past and current business practices and the incompetence of OEMs, that's not unwarranted. CNet's Ed Bott decided to pose the issue to OEMs. Dell stated is has plans to include the option to turn secure boot off, while HP was a bit more vague about the issue.

Cray Jaguar Is Getting a GPU Upgrade and a Name Change

According to physorg.com (via popsci), the Cray Inc. XT5-HE supercomputer (Jaguar) is getting updated. The Department of Energy's Jaguar computer will be renamed Titan. This reported $97 million upgrade will be using AMD CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and is claimed to "be at least twice as fast and three times as energy efficient as today's fastest supercomputer, which is located in Japan." Good news for gamers.

Raspberry Pi Playing 1080p Video

Remember the Raspberry Pi ARM board we talked about last week? Well, while running Quake III is all fine and dandy and illustrates the board is capable of something, it didn't really tell me anything since I'd guess few people are going to use such a board for gaming. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Raspberry Pi team posted another demo today - running 1080p video for eight hours straight. The chip was still cool to the touch. And just to reiterate: $25.

Raspberry Pi ARM Board Demonstrated Running Quake III

We all know platforms like the Beagleboard, which are cheap hardware platforms which can be used in all sorts of projects. A new entry into this market is Raspberry Pi, a British ARM board which is slated to be released in the fourth quarter of this year. For a mere $25, you'll have a fully-configured ARM-based 1080p-capable mini-motherboard. The device is still in development, and only a few days ago, the alpha version of the board was demonstrated running Quake III.

Razer Blade: Superthin, Innovative Gaming Laptop

The race to the bottom has wrecked havoc in the PC industry. The only PC maker with decent margins is Apple, and even they aren't doing anything particularly innovative. Razor, though, wants to buck the trend. After a ballsy marketing campaign, the company has unveiled the Razer Blade. The Razer Blade is what you get when you combine the team behind OQO, add some engineers from Dell, Apple, and others, and tell them to design the thinnest, most stylish gaming laptop - no questions asked. The result is striking.

Breaking: HP ‘Discontinues Operations for webOS Devices’

Major bombshell, and sorry, but this certainly requires a breaking tag as well: HP has announced it is discontinuing operations for webOS devices - effective immediately. Just like that... The TouchPad and Pre 3 are dead. Eh. Raise your hands if this brings back those painful memories of that infamous 'Focus Shift'. In addition, the company also announced its intention to sell its personal computer business.

Integrated Circuit That Doesn’t Require a Battery

Researchers at the Virginia Commonwleth University have come up with . . . a circuit that requires such little power all it needs is the ambient energy in an environment to run. In other words, it can run without need of a power lead or battery, relying instead on some energy constant in the environment in which it functions e.g. the human body. In order to create something that can run on such low, ambient energy, you need to use electronics that require next to no power to function. So instead of the typical charge-based electronic switches used today, the researchers turned to spin transport electronics, more commonly known as spintronics.

AMD Eschews Smartphones, Tiptoes Towards Tablets

Last week, Rick Bergman, general manager of AMD's Product Group, noted that while AMD was excited about the growth opportunities it saw within the tablet market, it had no plans to enter the smartphone space. Bergman's comments are a reassuring indication that the company hasn't concocted a harebrained scheme to charge off into a market it can't currently compete in. The emerging tablet market is a different matter.

Best Mini-ITX HTPC Board?

And yes, another item, right away. I'm on the hunt for a mini-ITX motherboard for use in a living room HTPC, and considering there's so much choice out there, I'm a little confused. Then I realised I have you people to help me out, and, well, one thing led to another.

Breakthrough in Quantum Computing: Resisting ‘Quantum Bug’

"Scientists have taken the next major step toward quantum computing, which will use quantum mechanics to revolutionize the way information is processed. Quantum computers will capitalize on the mind-bending properties of quantum particles to perform complex calculations that are impossible for today's traditional computers. Using high magnetic fields, Susumu Takahashi, assistant professor in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and his colleagues managed to suppress decoherence, which is one of the key stumbling blocks in quantum computing."

The Story of FCopy for the C-64

"Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. The C-64 would send commands to the drive which in turn would then execute them on its own, reading files, and such, then send the data to the C-64, all over a propriatory serial cable. The manual for the 1541 mentioned, besides the commands for reading and writing files, that one would read and write to its internal memory space. Even more exciting was that one could download 6502 code into the drive's memory and have it executed there. This got me hooked and I wanted to play with that - execute code on the drive. Of course, there was no documention on what code could be executed there, and which functions it could use." Very interesting. I'm most interested in how he describes others taking his work, and making it better. This would be impossible today, thanks to Microsoft, Apple, and other patent trolls.

IDC, Gartner: Worldwide PC Shipments Increase Modestly

Both IDC and Gartner have released their PC shipment analyses again, and as it turns out, worldwide PC sales are on the rise. Gartner: "Worldwide PC shipments surpassed 85.2 million units in the second quarter of 2011, a 2.3 percent increase from the same period last year, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. These results are below Gartner's earlier projection for 6.7 percent growth." IDC, too: "Worldwide PC shipments increased 2.6% in the second quarter of 2011 (2Q11), according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker." From large to small, the world's largest PC manufacturers are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, and Toshiba. Lenovo demonstrated the largest growth worldwide (+22% compared to Q2 2010). Apple did quite well in the US, but doesn't register on the worldwide scale.