Hardware Archive

GlobalFoundries, the former manufacturing arm of AMD, has announced they will have a 28-nanometer high-k metal gate process available in the second half of 2010. GlobalFoundries developed the 28nm process in conjunction with IBM, Chartered Semiconductors, Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics, and STMicroelectronics as part of the IBM Technology Alliance. According to The Tech Report, the new process will reportedly enable "40% better performance, over 20% lower power consumption, and 50% smaller die areas" versus the current 45nm process, but it was not mentioned what kind of performance numbers the 28nm process will have compared to the upcoming 32nm process.

A sexy 12" capacitive touchscreen tablet, runs Linux, boots straight into a WebKit-based browser, for 300 USD. We all want that, right? Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch fame, figured last year that we indeed all want something like this, and he started working on actually developing such a device. We've seen a few prototypes already, but the "leaked" photos published of the latest prototype are nothing short of stunning.

Western Digital, a leading maker of the traditional hard drive, supposedly felt a little out of the loop as they still hadn't really caught on to the solid-state disk bandwagon. Instead of playing a long game of catch-up, they simply forked out $65 million in cold cash and bought the technology they needed in the form of the aptly-named SiliconSystems, Inc. SiliconSystems has been making millions of SSDs for embedded systems for the past several years and will find a nice new home after integrating into the Western Digital Empire, henceforth being known as the "WD Solid-State Storage business unit." Since they're combining forces "immediately," here's to bigger and better SSDs in the near future.

Techradar had a day touring Samsung's European forum and had the chance to interview Samsung's Head of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Kyu Uhm. During the session, Uhm mentioned that future Samsung netbooks will undoubtedly include Windows 7, but having a full version as opposed to the sorry Starter Edition was iffy. It was also mentioned that future Samsung netbooks installed with a Linux distribution was a slight possibility if enough customers truly wanted it.

I'm not often wowed by a computer's design, probably because most of them appear to be designed by people with no sense of style and class whatsoever. The only (relatively) recent examples of decent design that I personally find to have a "wow factor" are Apple's MacBook Air and the PowerMac Cube from the same company. Yesterday, however, I was wowed again by a product from a company you wouldn't expect it from: Dell.

One Laptop Per Child is planning to end the production of its XO-1 laptop as well as drop AMD's x86 Geode processor. OLPC intends to replace these with a low-powered ARM alternative in the XO-2 laptop, which is slated for release in about 18 months. Even though the current XO-1 model consumes a mere five watts, OLPC feels thats the biggest problem. "We're seeing some very impressive system-on-chip designs that provide both fundamentally low-power demands and the kind of fine-grained power management ... in the XO-1," said Ed McNierney, chief technology officer at OLPC. Though using ARM architecture will reduce power consumption, it puts using the full-fledged Windows OS on their laptops in jeopardy. The company is currently wrestling Microsoft in order to try to get them to develop a full version of Windows to be able to run on ARM processors. It's not likely Microsoft will budge on the subject as ingrained as x86 is and how seemingly little there is in it for them, but we've been surprised before.