Hardware Archive

IDC's newest survey of server vendors shows boxes running every kind of operating system -- except Unix -- sold more during the last three months of 2010. Sales of Linux servers rose 29 percent; Windows rose 16.8 percent, but most surprisingly, sales of mainframes shot up 69 percent – the highest growth rate IDC ever found on mainframes.

This is a situation where I need the help of you OSnews readers who are experienced with low-level development on ARM, SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, and other hardware architectures we have on computers nowadays. The issue is that I'm currently designing the part of my hobby kernel which takes care of interrupts. Although I mostly work on x86 at the moment, I'd like to keep this code portable to other hardware architectures in the future. To do that, I have to know how interrupt handling works on as much HW architectures as possible.

"Yesterday, Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the organization behind several display interfaces, has refreshed the DisplayPort Embedded standard, also known as eDP for short. The updated standard now includes a new Panel Self-Refresh feature that was developed to save system power and further extend battery life in portable PC systems. This was detailed to us during CES when we visited the DisplayPort booth at CES."

"NVIDIA took the wraps off its first quad-core Tegra processor design at the Mobile World Conference today and it's a sight to behold. Dubbed Kal-El, the new chip will be capable of outputting 1440P video content and offer 300 DPI on devices with a 10.1" display."

And, of course, just as I decide to leave the live blogging to play a game of Left 4 Dead 2, HP drops the big bombshell right at the end of their press event: webOS is coming to PCs!

"Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the 'cores' on a computer chip communicate with each other."

"Researchers in the field of microprocessors are always looking to the future to see what new materials are available as our chips get ever smaller, faster, and closer to the limits of current component manufacturing. While graphene is seen as a material of the future, it has recently been revealed that it may not be a suitable replacement for silicon in CPUs. This is due to graphene having a very small energy state gap, meaning when it is used as a transistor it cannot be turned off. There could be ways around such a limitation that haven’t been formulated yet, but we may not need graphene for processor manufacture after all. EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) has discovered that molybdenite (MoS2) may be the perfect replacement for silicon."

"Processor design company ARM has today unveiled two new updates to its Cortex-R range of processors: the Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore. While the Cortex-A processors can be found in mainstream consumer products such as cell phones and tablet devices, the Cortex-R chips are meant for deeply-embedded and system-on-a-chip duties. Notably you can find the last generation Cortex-R4 in hard disk drive controllers, wireless baseband processors, and automotive systems."

Thinking that HP's memristors can't arrive early enough on the market? Here's competition already! A team at North Carolina State University, led by Dr Paul Franzon, has unveiled the "double floating-gate field effect transistor", a component based on the same principles as flash memory which would allow to store data for "a couple of years" in around 15 nanoseconds.

Over the last three years, we've seen a lot of impressive demonstrations of what the material graphene (a single-atom wide sheet of carbon with the atoms spread in an hexagonal mesh) can do. However, according to IBM, graphene does not have an energy gap, which means that graphene transistors can't be "switched on and off", and thus that they are unsuitable for use inside of microprocessors.

"Rumors and potential tablet applications have been quietly circulating for a while now that Nokia will ship a tablet based on its MeeGo OS. Although those rumors haven't been solidly confirmed, photos of what could be a recent prototype (which may or may not have made an appearance in TRON Legacy) emerged over the weekend."

"Although the Tegra 2 chip with integrated dual-core processor has recently been released, NVIDIA is already poised to announce its successor at the Mobile World Congress next month. According to Mike Rayfield of NVIDIA, Tegra 3 may incorporate a quad-core processor with main focus of supporting Android smartphones and tablet PCs."

"We've seen IBM and ARM team up before, but this week both companies announced a new joint initiative to develop 14nm chip processing technology. That's significantly smaller than the 20nm SoC technology ARM hopes to create in partnership with TSMC, and makes the company's previous work with IBM on 32nm semiconductors look like a cake walk."

This looks really strange, but it seems there's now a project to convert x86-64 processors into working as 32-bit! The author of this post claims that on x86-64 programs claim too much memory and they can work more efficiently by going back to 32-bit.