Hardware Archive

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"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.

SGI hopes by 2018 to build supercomputers 500 times faster than the most powerful today, using specially designed accelerator chips made by Intel. SGI hopes to bring a massive performance boost to its supercomputers through highly parallel processors based on Intel's MIC (many integrated cores) architecture.

HP's CEO Leo Aptheker is currently on stage at D9, answering questions from the audience. The thing hasn't concluded yet, but I think this one warrants its own item: Apotheker has revealed that HP is also licensing webOS to other hardware makers. "It's a great OS - why wouldn't we want to offer it to other companies? Why wouldn't they want to use webOS? Appliance makers could use it to connect up normal home devices. We'd like to make webOS available to these people - enterprises, SMBs, etc. Yes, webOS will be more than just a system that runs inside an HP product." When asked more directly if, for instance, HTC could build webOS phones, Apotheker answered: "We'd certainly have that conversation."

Having read the feedback resulting from my previous post on interrupts (itself resulting from an earlier OSnews Asks item on the subject), I've had a look at the way interrupts work on PowerPC v2.02, SPARC v9, Alpha and IA-64 (Itanium), and contribute this back to anyone who's interested (or willing to report any blatant flaw found in my posts). I've also tried to rework a bit my interrupt handling model to make it significantly clearer and have it look more like a design doc and less like a code draft.

HP scientists have made a small breakthrough in the development of a next-generation memory technology called memristors, which some see as a potential replacement for today's widely used flash and DRAM technologies. In a paper to be published Monday in the journal "Nanotechnology," scientists report that they have mapped out the basic chemistry and structure of what happens inside a memristor during its electrical operation.

Well-known game developer David Braben is a little bit fed up with the state of computer science education these days, which seems to have shifted away from learning programming to some sort of computer-oriented "life skills" class. As the father of eleven and nine year-old boys, I can attest that so far, despite a massive investment on the part of their school in computer equipment, their computer education has consisted mostly of "play this math game" and "don't be victimized by cyber-perverts." Braben's idea to stem this tide: a very, very cheap computer that students can learn to program on.

Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets. The RISC-based processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications. The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, but is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU.

About one month ago, I've posted an OSnews Asks item asking for details on how interrupts work on various architectures. Since then, I've been reading the manuals and comments, and have extracted what I found to be a summary of the specifics of each architecture. I've then written my first attempt at a portable interrupt handling model based on this data for my pet OS. Now I contribute this back to OSnews, so that these resources get more exposure for those who are interested.

Half the notebook computers and a growing number of desktops shipped in 2011 will run on graphics-enabled microprocessors as designers Intel and AMD increase competition for the units that raise multimedia speeds without add-ons. Processors with built-in graphics capabilities will be installed this year on 115 million notebooks, half of total shipments, and 63 million desktop PCs, or 45 percent of the total, according to analysts.