Hardware Archive

Sony will ship its Vaio UX UMPC on 27 May, the consumer electronics giant said today. The successor to the company's U series of handheld mini PCs will ship as the retail-oriented UX-50 and as the Sony-sold UX-90S and UX-90PS. As expected, the UX-50 will contain a 1.06GHz ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo U1300 processor backed by 512MB of 400MHz SDRAM and a 30GB, 4,200rpm hard disk. The unit's display is a 4.5in, 1,024 x 600 panel driven by Intel's integrated GMA950 GPU - the chipset's a 945GMS. The handheld PC runs Windows XP Home Edition. Connectivity comes courtesy of Bluetooth 2 and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. There's an integrated webcam and a fingerprint sensor.

Despite the advent of lower-power designs from Intel and AMD recently, today's processors are still power-hungry beasties. One company says it has a solution to the problem, which may lead to the kind of clock speed increases we used to see back in the heyday of Intel's 'it's all about CPU speed' fixation.

"Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs. The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC."

PCMag reviews the first Origami PC by Samsung, and concludes: "Samsung plans on avoiding retail shelves with the pricey Q1 and selling at BestBuy online and CDW only. I appreciate the design, and the technologies that can be had in such a small unit, but the practicality of this device escapes me. For $1099, you're better off with a more capable - and keyboard-equipped-convertible tablet."

ColorWare, a company which offers pre-coloured (my apologies for using that abomination of an English word) notebooks and desktops using a special coating process, has added the MacBook Pro to their product line up. If you find Apple's standard grey too boring, maybe a red or a black MacBook Pro is your game. They also offer coloured Mac Minis, iBooks, iMacs, Alienware computers, and more. You can also send in hardware you already own. They say they have some magical Wonderland procedure to paint the computers, but whether or not the process creates a tough layer of paint remains to be seen from customer testimonies.

"A Chinese company called YellowSheepRiver wants to make affordable budget computing a reality with its new $150 Linux Municator, a highly compact and innovative PC built with inexpensive Chinese hardware components. Although MIT's much touted $100 Linux laptop has yet to transcend its status as vaporware, YellowSheepRiver already has a working product which could potentially be available for purchase within the next three months." It runs on a custom 64 bit processor, derived from the MIPS processor, and as a result won't run Windows.

"IDC has released its first quarter PC market share figures, and for the first time in recent memory, it's not smooth sailing for Dell. Overall, it was a good quarter. PC shipments rose 12.9 percent from the same quarter in 2005, with the growth occurring worldwide. The big winners for the quarter were HP and Gateway. HP's gains are to be expected, given that it has been battling Dell for the number one market share position for the last several years. Gateway is a bigger surprise."

SilentPCReview tries to answer an important question: what is the best power efficiency achievable with currently available AMD and Intel processors that can be used on a desktop PC? The answer: "Our focus on thermals, power and energy efficiency led to mostly predictable results: mobile processors are best, followed by AMD desktop processor in general, and then Intel desktop processors. The power efficiency of AMD Athlon 64 single and dual core processors is excellent, even for their highest performance models. The Intel desktop processors suffer from inefficiency, even on the 65nm die. The Core Duo is a delightful exception in Intel's camp, with probably the highest performance-per-watt ratio of all the processors in our survey."

As expected processor licensor ARM Holdings and Handshake Solutions NV, a Royal Philips Electronics subsidiary, have developed an asynchronous processor based on the ARM9 core. The ARM996HS is thought to be the first commercial clockless processor and is being described as particular suited to use as an automotive microcontroller. Because clockless processors consume zero dynamic power when there is no activity, they can significantly extend battery life compared with clocked equivalents.

Ars reviews the Alienware Sentia m3200, a 12" laptop which is not unlike Apple's iBook in case of features. Ars concludes: "The Sentia m3200 is small, light and fast enough to be a very good machine for many tasks. It's not built to handle the latest 3-D games, as it uses onboard graphics, but it makes up for that by being a well-rounded multimedia machine and the fact that it runs cool is a nice plus. When the kinks are ironed out of PowerCinema, the Instant-On feature will make more sense."

While the X86 world hops from one to two processing cores, startup Azul Systems plans to integrate 48 cores on its second-generation Vega chip, expected next year. The first-generation Vega processor it designed has 24 cores but the firm expects to double that level of integration in systems generally available next year with the Vega 2, built on TSMC's 90nm process and squeezing in 812 million transistors. The progress means that Azul's Compute Appliances will offer up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing.

Dell has announced it has acquired Alienware, a well-known digital solitaire machines maker. "Dell said Alienware will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary following completion of the transaction and will maintain its own product development, product marketing, sales, technical support and other operations as well as brand. The management and founders of Alienware will continue to operate the company as a standalone unit of Dell."