Hardware Archive

Chip designer Arm is unveiling the latest generation of processors that will power future mobile phones. Processors built with the Cortex A8 design will have more than one billion transistors on board and will be many times more powerful than current ones.

After having a look at a very low-end camera two weeks ago, I've stepped a bit up in the range to have a look at a 5 megapixel model, a Kodak CX7530, which can currently be bought a Geeks.com for $175. Just like I found that the CX7220 was able to produce good 4x6 prints, I was surprised to see that CX7530 is capable of very good letter-size prints.

The $100 (E 83,-) laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant. Among the key specs: A 500-megahertz processor by AMD and flash memory instead of a hard drive with moving parts. To save on software costs, the laptops would run the freely available Linux operating system instead of Windows.

Two interesting newsbits from the PPC world. Firstly, Genesi has announced that it will develop a dual 970MP (dual-core G5) server, named Open Server Workstation, following their Open Desktop Workstation. Secondly, Freescale has said that their dual-core G4 processors have been delayed until the second half of 2006. Update: "Libfreevec is a free (LGPL) library with hand-optimized replacement routines for GLIBC, such as memcpy(), strlen(), etc. These routines have been written specifically to take advantage of the AltiVec, and will only work on processors that include this unit."

As a photographer, with some high-end equipment, I used to look down on point-and-shoot digicams, putting them in the same category as camera phone, i.e. not capable of taking any picture worth keeping. I was wrong. My experience with a Kodak CX7220 (sells for about $70), graciously provided by Geeks.com, turned out to be unexpectedly positive.

Toshiba said today it would offer Cell-based hardware development kits in April 2006. The reference platform comprises Cell and support chips and is geared toward "digital consumer products and communication equipment that draw on the powerful broadband capabilities of the Cell microprocessor" and its "unsurpassed multi-tasking and real-time processing functions", as Toshiba put it.

"VIA is beginning to ramp up production on the successors to their C3 part, the C7 and C7-M CPU's. Keith Kowal, marketing manager for VIA's chipset platform group, took some time on his promotional tour to talk with us about the new platform."

The recent Blade.org announcement heralds that IBM and Intel are looking to standardize blade hardware designs, allowing blade systems from multiple vendors to work together. It's no surprise that Intel is interested in this -- its own ATX standard has been a massive success. This article looks at the history of ATX and some of the lessons learned about power supply and chassis standardization.

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."

Over the past few years SATA has become a standard interface on hard drives and is starting to show up in many peripheral devices. Today we're taking a look at two similar hard drives to see if there's a performance difference between SATA and the older Parallel IDE standard.

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.

What is Cell? The Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA, or, informally, "Cell") defines a new processor structure based upon the 64-bit Power Architecture technology, but with unique features directed toward distributed processing and media-rich applications. This article provides a concise view inside the Cell's architecture.

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?"

What is slewing? Agere Systems Engineer Sean Schultz demonstrates the LCK4013 clocking device to implement flexible processor-slewing algorithms in a PowerPC 970 environment.