Hardware Archive

"Samsung knows a thing or two about designing notebooks. The Q35 Red that I recently reviewed created quite a stir every time I pulled it out of my bag at CES last month, and the ultra-slim Q30 won over many users who were looking for a machine that was ultra-thin and light. But now the Samsung design team has pushed the boat out and created the new Aura series of notebooks, which look set to go head to head with Apple's ultra-stylish MacBooks."

Dell has been asking for input from their (prospective) customers, via a Digg-style site called Dell 'Ideastorm'. It turns out that the top requested feature is for Dell to pre-install Linux (alongside Windows) as an option. The second most requested feature is Openoffice.org, either as an alternative to or alongside Microsoft Office.

The world’s first commercially viable quantum computer was unveiled and demonstrated today in Silicon Valley by D-Wave Systems, Inc., a privately-held Canadian firm headquartered near Vancouver. Quantum computing offers the potential to create value in areas where problems or requirements exceed the capability of digital computing, the company said. But D-Wave explains that its new device is intended as a complement to conventional computers, to augment existing machines and their market, not as a replacement for them.

A tiny, Linux-based gateway has won an award for hardware innovation at the 2007 Embedded World conference in Nuremberg this week. SSV Embedded Systems's 'Tux/Stick' interfaces between USB-enabled PCs and various industrial and embedded networks, including LANs, WiFi networks, wireless sensor networks, and in-car networks. The Tux/Stick looks like a typical USB memory stick. And, one end does plug into a USB port, just like a memory stick, drawing power from the host PC and booting a tiny ARM9-powered processor running Linux.

A Canadian start-up says it will demonstrate a working commercial quantum computer in Mountain View next week, years ahead of many experts' predictions. Venture capital-funded to the tune of USD 20m, Vancouver-based D-Wave says it has built a quantum computer with 16 qubits - the quantum world's version of a digital bit, but which simultaneously encodes 1 and 0, so can carry more information and solve problems more quickly.

Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.

Linux distributor Terra Soft, makers of the Fedora-based Yellow Dog Linux distribution for the PPC platform, recently announced plans to provide a complete Linux distribution for the TPPC64, a single-board computer developed by Themis. Terra Soft, which once specialized in Linux support for Apple computers, has found several new PPC Linux niches since Apple's unexpected transition to Intel processors.

In dueling announcements, Intel and IBM separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors as the technology shrinks to the atomic scale. Each company said it has devised a way to replace problematic but vital materials in the transistors of computer chips that have begun leaking too much electric current as the circuitry on those chips gets smaller. Technology experts said it is the most dramatic overhaul of transistor technology for computer chips since the 1960s and is crucial in allowing semiconductor companies to continue making ever-smaller devices that are also energy-efficient.

This article tries to explain why workstations are no longer an appropriate tool for the present working environment, what the alternatives are, and what consequences it has for the development of OSes.

Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday said it has invented a revolutionary computer chip that uses nanotechnology to achieve a significant performance boost. Researchers at the world's largest computer maker said the new approach can allow an eightfold increase in the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a variety of programmable chips, while bringing savings in energy consumption.

Hardware Widow Sony has taken the wraps off its spring laptop collection, darlings, touting not only the notebooks stylish looks but also the fact they'll all come bundled with Windows Vista. Desktop Vaios will ship with Microsoft's flash new operating system too, it said.

eSATA, an external version of the technology that's used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives. Great for storing photos, video and music.

"The first One Laptop Per Child hardware devices are still months from deployment, but you can sneak a peek at their Sugar desktop environment and bundled applications by running an OS image under an emulator. It's a great way to finally get some hands-on time with this long-anticipated project, even though it's not perfect."

Microsoft wants to make its Windows operating system available on the One Laptop per Child notebook computers, OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong on Saturday. "I have known Bill Gates his entire adult life. We talk, we meet one-on-one, we discuss this project," said Negroponte, vnunet.com can reveal. "We put in an SD slot in the machine just for Bill. We didn't need it but the OLPC machines are at Microsoft right now, getting Windows put on them."