Hardware Archive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.