Hardware Archive

In a bid to simplify its product lines and get an edge on competitors, Cray plans a multi-year strategy to unify four different supercomputing technologies into a single, versatile machine. The company plans to announce the concept Monday with its multi-year, three-phase "adaptive supercomputing" plan, said Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy.

"Every so often there comes a genre-bending product, and Tyan has one of those on its stand at CeBIT this year. It is called the Typhoon PSC or Person Super Computer, and is aimed at the scientific and HPC set. Typhoon PSCs come either Opteron or P4/PD flavors, and brushed aluminium or black finish. The point of this box is not to make an ultimate gaming rig, it is meant to take what used to be the domain of a data centre and move it to under the desktop." That's 4 dual-socket blades (either P-IV or Opteron) in a stylish case with wheels and handles. Now that's one machine I'd like to play Solitare on.

Asus has shelved plans to develop the PC of the future - literally. The Taiwanese vendor's Green PC concept computer, shown to Reg Hardware this week, is just that: a shelf. And some clever wireless connectivity and non-contact inductive power source.

"John Mashey is known in computing circles for a whole raft of things, among them are his work on the design of the original MIPS architecture, his work at SGI, and a long history of in-depth posts in the newsgroup comp.arch. David Kanter of Realworldtech has taken one of Mashey's posts and, with the author's permission, fleshed it out with more data and graphs for posting as a multipart series. Part I of the series is now available, with Part II on the way. One of the things that really struck me in reading the retrospective was just how prominent a role completely non-architectural factors play in the stories of the successes and failures of various processors."

"In February 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were about to unveil, for the first time, an electronic computer to the world. Their ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, could churn 5000 addition problems in one second, far faster than any device yet invented. The scientists knew that they had created something that would change history, but they weren't sure how to convey their breakthrough to the public. So they painted numbers on some light bulbs and screwed the resulting 'translucent spheres' into ENIAC's panels. Dynamic, flashy lights would thereafter be associated with the computer in the public mind." Yes boys and girls, 60 years ago the groundwork was laid for that grey thing hooked up to that thing you're staring at right now.

Intel and AMD once again are angling for leadership in virtualization, technology that increases a computer's efficiency by letting it run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Intel is expected to declare this week that its Virtualization Technology is mature enough for testing and about three months away from prime time. But AMD, whose rival "Pacifica" technology won't debut in processors until midway through this year, is trying to set its own technology as a standard for virtualization of computer communications, an element not present in Intel's VT.

ATI Technologies said Friday it had employed technologies originally designed to reduce energy consumption of graphics processors for notebooks to trim power hunger of high-end desktop graphics cards, such as Radeon X1800 or more advanced.When X-bit labs originally measured power consumption of high-end Radeon X1800 XT graphics card back in September, 2005, it was about 112W under maximum recently, the absolute maximum for that time. However, when the measurements were carried out later, the power consumption dropped to slightly below 103W on the same graphics card with the same BIOS version, but on a newer driver.

PC firmware, a murky world of interwoven software code that dates back to the original IBM PC and its clones, is about to be modernized. In a move that experts say promises to lead to fewer headaches for IT staff by creating more stable and manageable desktops and notebooks, the PC industry has begun transitioning to the United Extensible Firmware Interface. Dubbed UEFI, the interface offers a standardized way for a PC's firmware, the underlying software that controls its hardware, to interact with the operating system. The new interface offers a standard method for loading an operating system, as well as running pre-boot applications.

It's official: Dell doesn't have an exclusive deal with Intel, and has an open mind on using AMD processors in its products. So said company chairman Michael Dell last week when cornered by a Reuters reporter at the World Economic Forum event in Davos, Switzerland. "Sure," he said when asked if the company might offer Opteron and/or Athlon-based machines. "We do not have an exclusive relationship with Intel."

"If you have to travel, whether its out of your cubicle, out of your home, or out of the country, you should do your best to make your new surroundings as comfortable as possible. While so many things are out of your hands, one thing you can do to make your travels easier is to bring your favorite programs with you. To do this, all the things you will need are: a USB flash drive (practically any size) and a few minutes. When you get to your destination you will simply need a Windows computer, something which can be found in almost any library, office, hotel, or internet cafe anywhere in the world."

Laptops with fully integrated mobile phone connectivity will soon take off in the UK, a senior Dell executive said on Wednesday. According to Eric Greffier, director of client marketing for Dell in Europe, Dell has ambitious plans for mobile phone-enabled laptops. "The difference is that these will be fully integrated within the laptop and they will support all the standards for mobile communications," he told ZDNet UK.

A Dutch company has released an Alpha emulator for Windows XP (what's with the buzz around Alpha lately, people?). From their website: "The PersonalAlpha software lets you run your Alpha/OpenVMS software on a standard Personal Computer. Imagine running your VMS- programs on your office PC, notebook or computer at home. Develop, test and run Alpha/OpenVMS applications wherever you are. This product proves that Alpha-virtualization in software is possible and commercially available. PersonalAlpha is the 32-bit prelude to a suite of 64-bit VirtualAlpha software products that Emulators International soon will release. These solutions allow you to replace your Alpha computers without changing the applications."

"To the outside observer, improvements in PC architecture are evolutionary but logical. Processors advance inevitably in speed and performance, in happy accordance with Moore's Law. For Nebojsa Novakovic, a consultant in high-end computing systems, that's hardly the case. The demise of the DEC Alpha processor is a case in point. A performance leader was killed off by corporate whim."

Hewlett-Packard executives are mulling plans to improve over the next 18 months the technology the company uses to manage its direct sales, while it continues with commercial printing efforts and acquisitions of software companies. Two weeks ago, HP CEO Mark Hurd, the company's board of directors and senior executives gathered at the computer giant's annual management retreat to discuss long-term strategies.