Hardware Archive

A quick visit to Frys Electronics last weekend left me with (yet another) webcam. But not an ordinary webcam: this is an utrla tiny cam, created specifically to mount on laptops!

The dmidecode project provides the means to learn exactly what claims your BIOS is making about your hardware. Strange as it might seem, it's useful information, even when it's not 100% reliable.

While it's nice to just look at the finished product itself, sometimes it's useful to go back and look at how it's made. Especially today in the silicon industry, where both major players in the x86 desktop market are having issues with their top end products. Another large member of the industry, IBM, is also finding the going at 90nanometer a lot harder than they predicted. Today on Sudhian, we'll take a look at just how a processor goes from essentially sand to a fully functioning integrated circuit, and all the steps in between.

A new type of material, called graphene, is a gigantic wafer-shaped single molocule the thickness of an atom. Graphene is a member of the fullerene molecule family, like buckyballs and nanotubes. It could make a great semiconductor material, allowing for ultra-fast, stable transistors. More at BBCNews.

Gumstix is something I've ran into during my ever-continuous search for high tech gadgets in the embedded world. I like staying up to date with Via Mini- and NanoITX boards, iPaq's running Linux and things like Sony Librie and their restrictive DRM. It is an ever changing world out there, especially with the recent rise of iTunes and the MS-music store. These too try new techniques for a good balance between security and piracy. But I wasn't going to go into this. Too deeply. To get back on the road I'll tell you a little secret.

AMD demonstrated a dual-core Opteron design a week before Intel was set to demo theirs. In other Opteron news Sun has become the first tier 1 vendor to offer Opteron workstations: the single CPU W1100z and the dual CPU W2100z. Update: AMD Athlon 64 3800 CPU Review.

After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.

Wondering what embedded processor or system-on-chip to use in your next Linux device? This exhaustive reference of Linux friendly CPUs lists more than 150 options across five major architectures, complete with brief descriptions and links for further information.

TiVo finally launched its High Definition-capable unit. Designed by TiVo for DirecTV, it sports a 250 GB Hard drive and four tuners for $999. But neat new products aside, TiVo faces some daunting challenges. It has not made inroads with cable companies, many of whom have commissioned cheap TiVo knock-offs from companies like Scientific Atlanta. Many owner of these off-brand DVRs don't even know that they aren't TiVos, and, having never used the real thing, don't know the difference.

NUMA is a memory architecture used in multiprocessors wherein apart from the common system memory each processor has its own local memory which can be used for the processor's own computations.

Personal computing is about to undergo a fundamental transformation, if industry cheerleaders are to be believed -- and to stunning effect. Rebounding basketballs or ricocheting bullets in today's computer games, shown only as rough approximations of reality, will become more true-to-life. Voice recognition, now so error-prone as to be scarcely usable, will morph into a dependable tool as computers become able to understand and execute complex verbal commands.

In an effort to determine what the true performance benefit of 64-bit computing is, TheJemReport designed this benchmarking project using FreeBSD. The article can be found here. The article compares the performance of three test cases (Intel P4 Prescott 3.2E and Athlon64 3200+ in 32-bit mode and 64-bit mode) using stopwatch tests, openssl, and two synthetic benchmarks from the Ports system.

This technical whitepaper by Rafael Kolic, a technology marketing manager in Intel's Corporate Technology Group, introduces Wireless USB (WUSB) and explains how it will impact device performance and mobility. The latest iteration of USB technology, WUSB will offer the same functionality as standard wired USB devices -- but without the cabling.

I am currently dual booting Windows XP and Fedora Core 1. I recently upgraded my PC, actually, I more or less bought a new PC. New processor, new motherboard, new graphics card, new memory and so on. Basically, only my soundcard, hard drive and DVD-Rom made the cut into the new PC.