Hardware Archive

"BIOS giant Phoenix, the company responsible for the pieces of code saved on flash memory and which initialize our computers and interfaces to the hardware at the low level - even before the OS loads, is giving us plenty of reasons to support the case of an open source BIOS."

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.

"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.

"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.

"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?"

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.

"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."

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."

"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."

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.

Yesterday, we reported on an article about the demise of the Alpha. That article was the first part in a series about the future of processor design. Today, part II has been published: "In terms of the architecture itself, AMD's Athlon 64 platform, at the stage it is at right now, does not offer that much of a performance advantage, and AMD should not be resting on its laurels. This is because on the desktop, interconnects as such play less of a role. It's on servers and multi-processing systems that you can take advantage of scaling, and that's where interconnects such as HyperTransport have a role. But when you talk about a single-chip desktop system, whether it's one, two or four cores, the efficiency of the chipset still plays a very important role."

"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."

"Your friend the traditional hard drive may be undergoing changes soon. No, we're not talking about the threat that flash storage poses to the dominant storage medium, though that's an emerging player on the scene. No, our favorite plattered friend may be reorienting itself in a literal sense. Perpendicular storage is coming to a computer near you, perhaps sooner than you think. What is it? We'll break it down for you as Seagate comes to market with the first fruits of a promising technology." Update: People, you just got to watch the flash animation... It's... Really, just go see it.

"In this article, I'm going to be dealing in hard facts, coupled with a little bit of conjecture and speculation as to the future of mobile computing in 2006. When we look back on 2005 we can see it as primarily a year of transition. Since the debut of Intel's Centrino platform, coupled with ATI's release of the Mobility Radeon 9600, notebooks have been maturing as a competitive computing platform at an alarming rate. While I don't really think 2005 will be remembered necessarily as a banner year in new technologies, I think it was a strong transitional period. Mobile technology is maturing at an alarming rate; in 2006, we're going to see some major milestones."