Hardware Archive

Researchers at Imperial College London claim to have developed technology that would enable the creation of three-dimensional microchips, which will dramatically increase their memory capacity. According to their press release: "by using nanotechnology it is possible to reproduce the key functions of semiconductor electronics in microchips using only the 'spin' of electrons, which is responsible for magnetism, rather than the more conventional 'charge' that traditional microchips use."

Intel, AMD, IBM and all other chipmakers are doomed. In any case, that's the case if you were to believe the claims made by the Atom Chip Corporation, "which maintains it will show off a 2TB diskless notebook based on a 6.8GHz 'quantum-optical' microprocessor at next January's Consumer Electronics Show." Pictures of the notebook and various parts are available. Whether these claims hold truth is of course under debate, "but Gendlin (creator) has his patent - and more pending, apparently - and so we look forward to seeing Atom Chip's kit in the flesh at CES."

Many companies backing Intel's Itanium processor are planning to announce a new alliance in September to try to make it easier for customers to adopt systems using the high-end chip. The group, called the Itanium Solutions Alliance, has several plans to make Itanium more useful, said a source involved with the outfit.

The three companies behind the PowerPC CPU known as "Cell", have released details about the CPU in order to try and shake the image that it's only good for gaming.

The challenger has called for a "shoot-out" over whose dual-core chip performs better. Question is, can it shake Intel's corporate dominance?

ExtremeTech explains how to build a rendering farm out of old computers. "At its core, a render farm is pretty simple: Seven or so machines on a network, a network-accessible storage location, a rendering app, and a queue manager. Putting it all together should be equally simple, right?"

"I had been looking for some time to find a way to get the same type of Software RAID support under Windows that is available under Linux for my multiple USB-2 and Firewire drives. Then, I found the coLinux project, and discovered a way to have my Windows and my software RAID too."

The same principals that brought the Linux operating system to the computer world are helping to propagate a new generation of computer hardware. Numerous processor designs are now being made open for anyone to modify and use. Examples are organizations such as Power.org, OpenCores.org and SPARC International.

6 months ago N. Blachford wrote an article based on the 2002 Cell processor patent application. Since that original document, the Cell evolved considerably in both hardware and software. This new version has been rewritten to cover those changes. New sections have also been added to cover Cell software development and the design of the architecture.

It's only a matter of time before Sun Microsystems starts helping AMD enhance the Opteron chip, at least according to Sun. David Yen, executive vice president of the scalable systems group at Sun, said that the collaboration between the two will lead to cooperative efforts on AMD's flagship processor.

More on the University of Texas grid project's mission to integrate numerous, diverse resources into a comprehensive campus cyber-infrastructure for research and education. This article examines the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources to provide this aggregate power for compute-intensive work.

Scientists at Hewlett-Packard said that they had developed a new strategy for designing a quantum computer composed of switches of light beams that could be vastly more powerful than today's digital electronic computers, which are constructed from transistors.

Looking forward to getting your hands on a Cell workstation? We were too -- until we talked to Linux for Cell kernel maintainer Arnd Bergmann. Learn about programming for Cell in general and for Linux for Cell in particular, and why the "workstation" that has been described in the press is more of a prototype Blade board, and a bit of a misunderstanding, in this Q & A session.

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.