Hardware Archive

Review: Alienware Sentia m3200

Hardware 8 Comments
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."
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Azul To Go 48-Core with Vega 2

Hardware 16 Comments
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.
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Dell Acquires Alienware

  Submitted by kaiwai Hardware 33 Comments
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."
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Dell, Alienware Equip Products with PhysX Processors

Hardware 25 Comments
The much-talked about PhysX processor by Ageia is now finally obtainable for consumers-- sort of. Dell has launched the XPS 600 Renegade: a limited edition computer with four GeForce 7900 cards connected via SLI, Intel Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition (overclocked to 4.26 Ghz), and 2GB of GDDR3 memory, and of course the PhysX processor. That's a $10000 gamer's wet dream. Alienware couldn't watch silently by the sideline of course, and it also equipped some of its digital solitare machines with the PhysX processor.
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Cray’s Future: Out of Many, One

Hardware 3 Comments
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.
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Tyan Brings Supercomputing to the Desktop

Hardware 8 Comments
"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.
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VAX and the Economics of Microprocessors

Hardware 7 Comments
"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."
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Genesi Selects Tundra Tsi109TM for PPC High Density Blade Server

Hardware 23 Comments
"Tundra Semiconductor Corporation today announced the Tundra Tsi109 Host Bridge, the industry's highest performing host bridge for PowerPC, will be integrated into the Genesi High Density Blade Server, demonstrating the Company's rapidly strengthened position as the industry's leading supplier of host bridges for PowerPC." A lot of chit-chat press-release nonsense, but the bottom line might be that Genesi is trying to fill the PowerPC void left by Apple's move to Intel.
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ENIAC – Monster and Marvel – Debuted 60 Years Ago

Hardware 25 Comments
"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.
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Intel, AMD Spar Over Virtualization

  Submitted by anonymous Hardware 9 Comments
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.
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Flash Memory Then and Now: How Far Have We Come?

  Submitted by anonymous Hardware 2 Comments
"Around the same time as Kodak was introducing its Advantix APS film system, a fairly new company called SanDisk had just IPOed, and was promoting a new standard for portable digital storage known as CompactFlash. When I set out recently to do a CF card round-up, I found in my collection a nice old relic: a 24MB Delkin Devices CompactFlash card, circa 1998. Unlike sports cars or fancy dishwashers, CF cards all tend to look almost identical. Therefs no easy way to judge their speed just by examining their exterior. So, instead of doing a standard round-up, I figured, why not test the relic against some of the newer cards across the temporal gamut?"
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ATI Trims Power Consumption of High-End Graphics Cards

Hardware 12 Comments
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.
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PC Industry Looks to Transform Firmware

Hardware 39 Comments
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.
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Power.org at the One-Year Crossroads

  Submitted by anonymous Hardware 2 Comments
"As Power.org celebrates its first birthday, take a look at what happened in year one and what's ahead. MacLaren Harris interviews Marketing Programs Manager for Power.org Jesse Stein and discovers what is working and what needs work; how Power.org has grown and what has been achieved; and how individual developers can participate."
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Setting up Your Portable Office

  Submitted by anonymous Hardware 7 Comments
"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."
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Errata Articles Are the Current Rage

Hardware 12 Comments
"Recently, there have been a couple of articles on errata making the rounds, the first on Intel, the second on AMD. They both make my head hurt. A lot. No, not the errata, but the explanations, and lack of understanding of some simple concepts. When the first one, Intel, came out, I was teetering on the verge of breaking out the cluestick, but thought the better of it. When the conspiracy theory second article came out, well time to spring into action, two days late as usual."
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