Hardware Archive

"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.

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."

"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."

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).

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.

"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."

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.

What laptop does Richard Stallman use? A Dell, HP, maybe even an Apple? No - RMS uses a rather odd laptop, a netbook powered by the Chinese Loongson processor: the Yeeloong, a completely Free laptop. From BIOS to operating system, this machine is completely open source. Wired is running a very interesting article on the Loongson processor effort.

OSNews reviews the Litl Webbook, an Atom mini-notebook with an innovative convertible form-factor and a custom, web-centric Linux-based OS. (Includes video review). Update: Turns out that Havoc Pennington, proponent of the Gnome Online Desktop, now works at Litl. No coincidence.

"Adobe's Open Screen Project, which puts Flash acceleration support on a variety of platforms, has killed Intel's 'full Internet' rationale for mobile x86. But the same project has also brought HD YouTube and Hulu to Intel's Pine Trail platform, which hurts the case for NVIDIA's Ion."

Gizmodo has compiled a rogues' gallery of buggy, disappointing, and just plain pointless gadgets that all made their mark during the 2000s. If you've been following computing news over the past ten years, you probably remember lots of them, and may have been personally disappointed by some of them. Some highlights: Segway, wearable PC, n-Gage, Rokr.

On a number of occasions, Apple has stated that it cannot design a laptop at around 400-500 USD that isn't total crap. This seems like a reasonable point to make - but why, then, is Dell - of all companies - seemingly able to do so? Dell just launched the Dell Vostro V13 (official press release), and it looks pretty good.

We've seen a lot of reports going back and forth about whether or not Linux is doing well in the netbook space. As it turns out, research firm ABI Research as well as Dell say about one third of their machines ship with Linux pre-installed - which is pretty darn impressive.