Hardware Archive

NVIDIA's aspirations to enter the general purpose processor market may never have been clearly spelled out by the company before, but it was getting more and more obvious as each week passed by. Now, it's pretty much official: NVIDIA says it's not a question of "if", but "when".

Long-time OSNews reader Kaiwai has written down his experiences with his Acer Aspire One, Linux, and Windows. He concludes: "After a hectic few weeks trying to get Linux to work, I am back to square one again - a netbook running Windows XP SP3 as it was provided by Acer when I purchased it. I gave three different distributions a chance to prove themselves. I expected all three distributions to wipe the floor with Windows XP - after all, these are the latest and greatest distributions the Linux world have to offer. There has been at least 7 years since the release of Windows XP for Linux to catch up to Windows XP and from my experience with Linux on this said device - it has failed to step up to the plate when it was needed."

Like so many other manufacturers, Dell has entered the 10" netbook market this week with the launch of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10. Despite the machine being fairly standard in its hardware specifications, it does make a few peculiar choices - especially when it comes to its resolution.

We already knew netbooks were popular, but according to new data by research firm IDC, they are even more popular in Europe than we anticipated. The firm says that in 2008, netbooks sales accounted for 30% of total consumer portable sales in Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa. A big contributing factor are the telecommunication providers in Europe who subsidise netbooks.

It's not as if nVidia really needs Microsoft's stamp of approval to go ahead and sell their upcoming Ion-based PCs as people would certainly buy them anyway, but it certainly helps for us to know that they are tested to be certified for Windows Vista. Of course, we can't exactly trust just because a computer is "certified" for Windows Vista that it'll be a pleasant experience after previous events involving the system's specifications. However, the small form factor Ion-based machines showcased in the videos on Hot Hardware are rather impressive (if you're willing to wait through an annoying 'online scuba lessons' ad), playing 1080p HD video fullscreen without any dropframes, running Vista without hiccups, and even playing 3D games with equivalence to a mid-tower, mid-range quality. These little buggers are expected to roll out Summer of 2009, the cheapest of the lot reaching a delicious low of $299.

In a classic case of kicking in open doors, research firm Gartner has concluded that software will not be able to keep up with the ever-increasing number of cores in modern processors. "By Gartner's reckoning, the doubling of core or thread counts every two years or so - and for some architectures, the thread growth is even larger with each jump - will affect all layers of the software stack. Operating systems, middleware, virtualization hypervisors, and applications riding atop this code all have their own limitations when it comes to exploiting threads and cores, and Gartner is warning IT shops to look carefully at their software before knee-jerking a purchase order to get the latest server as a means of boosting performance for their applications."