Hardware Archive

In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard "thin clients" of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices.

Roomba manufacturer iRobot has released a new, programmable vacuuming robot with a "virtual walls" feature to keep the little guy penned in to a particular area. A $60 software/hardware upgrade is also available to late-model Roomba owners. Also from iRobot comes PackBot, a small reconnaissance robot for military use.

Are sub $300 PCs the wave of the future or is this just another fad? Flexbeta examines the effects cheap PCs may have on Microsoft, hardware vendors and the rest of the computing industry.

VIA issued a press release on Friday announcing their new C7 Processor. Noteworthy PVR related features include its low power consumption (2.0GHz at 20W, idle at 0.1W) and support for SSE2 and SSE3 (in addition to existing MMX and SSE support). In the crypto department, they've expanded their PadLock™ hardware crypto/security suite with this CPU by adding in full hardware SHA-1 and SHA-256 (20BGps), hardware assisted RSA (hardware Montgomery Multiplier), a beefed up RNG that feeds directly into the SHA units, and the NX bit.

We got in a new loaner from LinuxCertified.com, the brand new LC2210D model: a Centrino 1.80 GHz CPU, 512 MBs of RAM, Intel Extreme gfx card, 40 GB drive and a 14" XGA TFT screen. The laptop comes with the latest Ubuntu installed and sells for $1249. Read more for our review.

In a world of serial and parallel, it would not be simple for a new device connection to make its mark. Follow the USB standards success story to witness how this meritorious technology carved a place for itself. USB provides many benefits to users and vendors, but also see where it missed the boat.

"While the theoretical speed advantage and expanded resources of 64-bit computing are enticing to those in need of maximum performance, the road to a perfect AMD64 desktop, workstation or server machine is long and treacherous. What operating system will you use? Is there enough 64-bit software available? In this article we'll explore some of the advantages and pitfalls of going totally 64-bit in a 32-bit world." Read more at NewsForge.

Motorola AltiVec can dramatically improve the performance of many tasks, even tasks that you might initially think are too linear to get much advantage from parallelizing. This article looks at some real-world code that processors might spend a serious amount of time running, and shows how to tweak it to get extra performance.

Do you use a 64bit CPU in your main computer? Come in and vote, let's see what the OSNews readers are running. If yes, leave a comment if you are using a clean 64bit OS with it too.

What is your main monitor's resolution? Take our poll inside!

Slashdot posted yesterday a news item about some people which try to create a laptop that would sell for less than one hundred bucks. To me, an x86 such laptop this seems like a dream that can't come true with today's OEM prices. However, there might be a way to achieve this, if the "laptop" in question will not really be a laptop, but a handtop, a hybrid between a laptop and a PDA.

Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. This article takes a look at where all the precious processor time and memory are going.

Floating point provides a convenient, approximate representation of real numbers that can greatly simplify scientific and engineering algorithms. This article gives an overview of two floating point formats used in the z990 architecture and discusses key FPU issues that system architects should consider in new designs.

What happens when two coalitions within a standard come into conflict, and it doesn't get resolved quickly? The ultrawideband technology standard shows you.