Hardware Archive

In the future people may interact with computers via a touchscreen or voice commands, but presently, keyboards are still one of the major ways to interact with a computer. The Tech Report has acquired a modern buckling spring keyboard, the Das Keyboard Professional, for review. Being a hardware review site, they have to compare the Das Keyboard Professional against something, so Cyril pits it against his personal Model M.

At the end of 2008, the OSNews team made a short list of the tech-related things they would like to see in 2009. On my list was the hope that we'd see more competition in the netbook market, which is now dominated by Intel's Atom platform, resulting in manufacturers all releasing essentially the same machine, but with a different badge and case colour. Where are Intel's competitors? We know AMD is on its way, we know that the Chinese are producing some noteworthy chips, and that the ARM chip is jumping up and down screaming for attention - but where is Via's Nano platform? Shouldn't it be here already?

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), often called parallel SCSI, is almost 30 years old and can hardly keep up with the demands of today's IT environment. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was developed to address the limitations inherent in SCSI. This article highlights the differences between these two interfaces and points out the attributes that account for the increasing popularity of SAS.

The One Laptop Per Child project announced Wednesday that it plans to downsize half of its staff and reduce the salary of the remaining employees. OLPC will also halt its development of the open source Sugar environment and focus on building its next-generation hardware device. These plans are part of a major restructuring effort that has been necessitated by the financial downturn and the organization's dwindling resources.

It seems that after Intel, just about every chip maker wants a piece of the netbook pie. AMD is an obvious competitor, but VIA is also eyeing the little notebooks. However, more exotic options like the Chinese Loongson chips and ARM's Cortex A-8 and A-9 chips are also among the contenders. We can now add a new contender: Freescale.

At this year's 25th Chaos Communication Congress, an annual four day conference with the slogan "Nothing to hide" reveals everything about the Commodore 64, in 64 minutes. Across 256 slides. The video is now available to download via BitTorrent or FTP. The Commodore 64 is the greatest selling computer of all time; learn how it got there with its quirky hardware, loved by hackers worldwide.

There might be a lot of companies stating that netbooks are just a fad, and that the whole thing will pass (Sony, Apple), but that isn't stopping several chip companies from putting serious effort into improving the performance of these small netbooks. NVIDIA, AMD, and VIA are all hard at work at improving several aspects of netbook computing.

There has been some concern among enthusiasts that the emerging netbook market is nothing but a fad - it's fun and interesting now, but it will die out soon enough. Intel and AMD sure seem to be very careful about the netbook market, but according to figures from DisplaySearch, the market for small notebooks has exploded over the course of a year.

Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.

The private computer museum of Max Burnet has every bit of computing nostalgia imaginable, ranging from the first UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, a string of old Apple's including the Apple Lisa, a Spectrum Sinclair (doh!) ZX81, Bill Gates' personal favorite the MITS Altair 8800, a DEC VT100 terminal, and a range of IBM mainframe consoles from the 1960s and 1970s. If you have never seen what this old stuff looks like, this slideshow offers a snapshot of the past. And if you thought PCs became fashionable with the Apple iMac, then you haven't seen the lime green or powder blue consoles of some of DEC's machines from the 1970s.

What's after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The EE Times has a more detailed write up as well as WebIndia, TopNews.in, Eureka Alert, and Small Times.

Nvidia and partners are offering new "personal supercomputers" for under $10,000. Nvidia, working with several partners, has developed the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, powered by a graphics processing unit based on Nvidia's Cuda parallel computing architecture. Computers using the Tesla C1060 GPU processor will have 250 times the processing power of a typical PC workstation, enabling researchers to run complicated simulations, experiments and number crunching without sharing a supercomputing cluster.

It's no secret that SSDs suffer from performance penalties when it comes to small random writes. Even though more modern SSD try to solve some of these issues hardware-wise, software can also play a major role. Instead of resorting to things like delaying all writes until shutdown and storing them in RAM, SanDisk claims it has a better option. At WinHEC yesterday, the company introduced its Extreme FFS, which it claims will improve write performance on SSDs by a factor of 100.

Real World Technologies has posted a code level dissection of the Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 and an AMD Athlon FX-62. While rather dated, the two processors were state of the art in 2006, the article does an excellent job of detailing why the processors behave the way they do. Many publications will say, "Game X runs better on processor Z, so processor Z wins", but that does not tell the reader why. This Real World Technologies article, on the other hand, explains why. For instance, they used the game Prey to test the CPUs and found "Prey tends to favor more complex x86 instructions that likely either use 3 inputs, or have 2 output."