Hardware Archive

You have these products and/or technologies that everybody expects to go mainstream, yet never really do. You know, things like desktop Linux (+14 troll), ARM-based netbooks, and... PixelQi screens. Yes, these wonder displays are supposed to take over the world, yet, we've only ever seen them on demonstration devices - never on shipping products we can, you know, buy. At Computex, PixelQi once again showed off its display technology on demonstration devices.

Ah, NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang. This guy is usually to the point, and doesn't sugar-coat his words, so interviews with him are generally good stuff to read. This time around, he had Intel and Apple down his sights. The iPad's A4 processor doesn't measure up to his company's Tegra 2, and Intel's Z6 Moorestown is not competitive in any way. At least, that's what he claims.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. A really annoying overused catchphrase which sadly happens to be an adequate description of a story which appeared on Fortune's website, in which a Morgan Stanley report is quoted as saying that the introduction of tablet computers - the iPad specifically - have caused netbook sales to plummet. It seems like the researcher in question, however, needs to learn how to read her own graphs.

In 2009 ARM showed off prototype netbooks "capable of driving HD content, can surf the web for 8 hours, and will cost round and about 250 USD". Yet still, none have made it to the market. Why do you think this is so? Because ARM signed a deal with Adobe in 2008 to bring Flash and AIR to the ARM architecture, a promise they will finally deliver later this year. And you wonder why Apple won't have Flash on the iPhone when it can hold back an entire product category for two years.

So, we have Microsoft slowly but surely trying to be a better citizen in the computing world - with the emphasis on trying. After years of dragging their feet, the company is finally implementing web standards in Internet Explorer, there's a boatload of interoperability information now, that sort of stuff. And then, just when you think they're starting to get it - they go behind our backs to do something incredibly insipid. It's small, you'll barely notice it, but dear lord, it's really, really annoying.

In the past few months, especially after CES in January, there were some stories about a number of new display technologies for colour e-books. IEEE Spectrum ran this thorough article that explains it all.

Swedish company People of Lava has announced an Android-based internet-connected television. Say what you will about this particular product, but I personally think this is a very good idea that is a long time coming. I don't really care that much about having a TV that can do things. I use a TV as a glorified monitor, hooking it up to various boxes like DVRs that do the heavy lifting. But what I do care about is having electronics that don't suck. And I think I can make a blanket pronouncement here: by and large, the software that consumer electronics firms make for their hardware is very, very bad.

I'm posting this one day late, because I didn't want it to get lost in all the April 1 nonsense. We've been in the computer age for a while now, and while that gives us the privilege of dealing with some truly great products and innovations, it sadly also means that we are starting to lose the pioneers that defined this industry. Yesterday, Ed Roberts shuffled out of life due to pneumonia. Dr. Henry Edward Roberts developed the Altair 8800, considered to be the first personal computer.

This is interesting: an 85 USD smartbook running Windows CE. "Inside the little guy packs a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 processor, 2GB of flash storage and runs Windows CE which all should be good enough for some light Web browsing and e-mail writing. There was actually a YouTube shortcut on the desktop, but the NBPC722 wasn't connected to try it out. Apparently this inexpensive laptop should be making its way stateside this spring."

I just have to make mention of this. ACube, the company behind the sam440ep PowerPC motherboard, has finally made available the backplates for sam motherboards. As mentioned in my review, they shipped the sams without backplates, which over time kind of became a running joke in the Amiga world. Sam440 owners can now contact their dealers, or ACube directly, for a free backplate.

"People confused and frustrated by computers can now turn to a laptop called Alex built just for them. Based on Linux, the laptop comes with simplified e-mail, web browsing, image editing and office software. Those who sign up for Alex pay GBP 39.95 a month for telephone support, software updates and broadband access. Its creators hope the laptop and its simple suite of software proves to be a popular alternative to the Windows and Mac operating systems."

OSNews recently linked to several articles on the two remaining big iron RISC based platforms still alive and kicking, something of great interest to myself both in a professional capacity and for personal reasons (I wouldn't be an avid OSNews reader and poster if I wasn't into non mainstream architectures).

"In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves. In this short article, I'll walk you through the floorplan of two chips with similar transistor counts - the Sun's Niagara 3 and IBM's POWER7."

Ah, the ARM chip. ARM is a hugely successful architecture, and can be found in just about every cell phone or other small device out there. ARM, however, wants more, and for a long time now we've been hearing predictions about an upcoming massive rise in ARM netbooks - so far, this hasn't materialised. Warren East, ARM's CEO, said in an interview with PC Pro that netbooks could one day make up 90% of the laptop market - preferably powered by ARM processors of course.