Hardware Archive

Father of the Altair 8800, Ed Roberts, Passes Away

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-02 Hardware 19 Comments

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.

MIT Researchers Enable Self-Assembling of Chips

Thom Holwerda 2010-03-17 Hardware 2 Comments

"Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have released research detailing how molecules in chips can self-assemble, potentially reducing manufacturing costs. The researchers have developed a technique in which polymers automatically fall into place to create an integrated circuit." Uhm people, have we learned nothing?

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-03-03 Hardware 11 Comments

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."

Sam440ep Backplates Available

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-27 Hardware 1 Comment

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.

On MicroSD Problems

Kroc 2010-02-24 Hardware 10 Comments

"Normally, the story would end there; you'd RMA the material, get an exchange for the lot, and move on. Except there were a couple of problems. So I kicked into forensic mode. Very low serial numbers are a hallmark of the "ghost shift", i.e. the shift that happens very late at night when a rouge worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off the books." A fascinating in-depth peek into the grey-market of China.

Submitted by SReilly 2010-02-22 Hardware 2 Comments

"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."

Guest post by SReilly 2010-02-18 Hardware 49 Comments

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).

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-02-17 Hardware 3 Comments

"NEC Corporation and NEC Electronics Corporation announced today the development and successful demonstration of LSI technology for next-generation high-speed serial communication interfaces. This new technology allows inter-chip communication that is three times faster than modern communication interface standards, such as USB 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0, without using complicated transmission modes like multilevel transmission."

Submitted by SReilly 2010-02-10 Hardware 18 Comments

"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."

ARM CEO: ARM Netbooks To Sell with or Without Windows

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-03 Hardware 45 Comments

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.

Apple’s A4: ARM CPU, GPU

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-28 Hardware 80 Comments

And yet another item on the iPad? Are we serious? Yes, we are, since this one is about something that even geeks who aren't interested in the iPad itself should find intriguing. Steve Jobs said yesterday that the iPad is powered by an Apple A4 processor, but contrary to what many seem to think - it wasn't designed in-house at all.

Submitted by wanker90210 2010-01-18 Hardware 51 Comments

ACM's latest journal had an interesting article about RAID which suggested it might be time for triple parity raid. "How much longer will current RAID techniques persevere? The RAID levels were codified in the late 1980s; double-parity RAID, known as RAID-6, is the current standard for high-availability, space-efficient storage. The incredible growth of hard-drive capacities, however, could impose serious limitations on the reliability even of RAID-6 systems. Recent trends in hard drives show that triple-parity RAID must soon become pervasive."

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-01-18 Hardware 4 Comments

"DisplayPort v1.2 is now all official and it comes with an impressive tally of numbers to get your attention. Doubling the data throughput of v1.1a (from 10.8Gbps to 21.6Gbps), the latest version will be able to support multiple monitors via only a single output cable, allowing you to daisy-chain up to four 1920x1200 monitors, for example. It can also perform bi-directional data transfer, which will permit USB hubs, webcams, and touchscreen panels integrated into displays to communicate over the same cable as the video signal. Backwards compatibility with older peripherals is assured, but you'll naturally need a v1.2-capable computer to exploit all this newfound goodness."

A Short History of the Tablet Computer

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-15 Hardware 30 Comments

In an article about the supposed upcoming Apple tablet, Paul Thorrot made a jab at the hype that has developed, arguing that Microsoft was first with its tablet PC initiative in the early 2000s. Daring Fireball's John Gruber disagrees with Thurrot, and claims that Apple's Newton was the first tablet. In rushing to defend their pet companies, I say both are wrong. Apple nor Microsoft have anything to do with the conceptualisation or realisation of the tablet computer.

PC Market Sees Strongest Growth in Seven Years

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-14 Hardware 10 Comments

It's that time of the quarter again: research firms IDC and Gartner published their PC market share figures for the past quarter, the fourth and last quarter of 2009. Coincidentally, it means I get to break out the chart tools in Word and Excel! Fun (and I'm serious).

Lenovo Alters ThinkPad Keyboards, Removes SysReq

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-14 Hardware 73 Comments

It's funny how while software changes so fast, and many hardware components evolve at ridiculously fast paces (processors, memory, hard drives), the keyboard has remained largely unchanged over the years - until recently, that is. Even Lenovo has now buckled under the pressure, switching to a chiclet-style keyboard for ThinkPads - while also removing the SysReq key.

Intel’s Home Dashboard Research Project

David Adams 2010-01-12 Hardware 2 Comments

Intel has created a web site for its Intelligent Home Energy Management Proof of Concept. In its current incarnation, the device is a beautiful, wall-mounted Atom-based device that allows a homeowner to view and control various home-tech-related displays and dashboards. It's being promoted as primarily a home energy monitoring tool, with real time and historical reports on energy usage. Even the clock feature has an in-line graph displaying current home energy usage. Being a home automation enthusiast, though, I'm more excited about this device's potential as the interface to the home's nerve center.

Submitted by PLan 2010-01-11 Hardware 18 Comments

"Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology cliches to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living."

Intel Atom vs ARM Cortex-A9

David Adams 2010-01-07 Hardware 91 Comments

Quite a bit of enthusiasm seems to be building for ARM's upcoming processor for netbooks and other lightweight computing devices. The Cortex-A9 is promised to have substantially better performance than the current crop of AMD processors, and a video released by ~~AMD~~ ARM gives a pretty convincing picture that the Cortex-A9 will have comparable performance to the Atom. Watch the video after the jump.

CES Roundup: ARM, Netbooks, Tablets

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-06 Hardware 23 Comments

Even though CES hasn't even officially started yet, the gadget news is already coming in at a very steady stream. We can't report on all of them, obviously, but we can make a selection of the most interesting ones we've seen so far.

Hardware Archive

Father of the Altair 8800, Ed Roberts, Passes Away

MIT Researchers Enable Self-Assembling of Chips

Coby USD 85 Smartbook Feels Like a Hundred Bucks

Sam440ep Backplates Available

On MicroSD Problems

Laptop Launched to Aid Computer Novices

The End of Proprietary Big Iron ISA?

NEC Develops New Communication Interface Technology

Two Billion-Transistor Beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3