Hardware Archive

How many Opteron or Nocona processors can a computer system support? Good question, and one that only AMD and Intel can answer. Since they're not saying, here are some system scalability facts you can draw upon when generating scalability guesstimates.

After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.

ARM Ltd. will unveil a unique multi-processor core technology, capable running Linux SMP, at this week's Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose, Calif. The "synthesizable multiprocessor" core -- a first for ARM -- is the result of a partnership with NEC Electronics announced last October, and is based on ARM's ARMv6 architecture. ARM's new "MPCore" multiprocessor core can be configured to contain between one and four processors delivering up to 2600 Dhrystone MIPS of aggregate performance, based on clock rates between 335 and 550 MHz.

TiVo finally launched its High Definition-capable unit. Designed by TiVo for DirecTV, it sports a 250 GB Hard drive and four tuners for $999. But neat new products aside, TiVo faces some daunting challenges. It has not made inroads with cable companies, many of whom have commissioned cheap TiVo knock-offs from companies like Scientific Atlanta. Many owner of these off-brand DVRs don't even know that they aren't TiVos, and, having never used the real thing, don't know the difference.

Faster clock speeds, smaller die sizes, and more cache are what we've come to expect each year from the major desktop CPU vendors—and 2003 didn't disappoint.

Personal computing is about to undergo a fundamental transformation, if industry cheerleaders are to be believed -- and to stunning effect. Rebounding basketballs or ricocheting bullets in today's computer games, shown only as rough approximations of reality, will become more true-to-life. Voice recognition, now so error-prone as to be scarcely usable, will morph into a dependable tool as computers become able to understand and execute complex verbal commands.

This very short summary will look at the "Future of Computing" from a more fundamental level, that being what researchers and research is being done in the area of Very Large Scale Integration. In particular, what is on the horizon, at least at the college research level, and why we must eventually change direction.

This technical whitepaper by Rafael Kolic, a technology marketing manager in Intel's Corporate Technology Group, introduces Wireless USB (WUSB) and explains how it will impact device performance and mobility. The latest iteration of USB technology, WUSB will offer the same functionality as standard wired USB devices -- but without the cabling.

A new version of the HyperTransport specification comes out Monday that will, ideally, boost performance in PCs and communications equipment over the next year.

Slashdot reports on an interesting article discussing how one might go about 'killing' x86. The article details a number of different technological solutions, from a clean 64-bit replacement (Alpha?), to a radically different VLIW approach (Itanium), and an evolutionary solution (Opteron). Another article by the same author covers hardware multi-threading and exploiting thread level parallelism, like Intel's Hyperthreading or IBM's POWER4 with its dual-cores on a die. These types of implementations can really pay off if the software supports it. In the case of servers, most applications tend to be multi-user, and so are parallel in nature.

Oye Oyediran has taken his car to the repair shop three times for software upgrades since he bought it last year. This is the future of driving. Cars, planes, household appliances and myriad other machines are increasingly relying on software to work. Manufacturers want the flexibility and innovation that programming code can bring. But software can also make machines accidentally stop working, something computer manufacturers know all too well.

Both Apple and Advanced Micro Devices are producing 64-bit processors for consumer PCs. Apple put its new PowerPC G5 chips into its latest line of Macintosh desktops, and AMD has several flavors of its Athlon 64 processor, which is found in computers from various manufacturers. Read the rest of the article at Houston Chronicle.

When your computer resides on another planet, service calls aren't an option. So when BAE Systems North America Inc. needed an extremely reliable operating system for the computational subsystem it was supplying for NASA's Mars rovers, it chose an industrial-strength, real-time operating system from Wind River Systems Inc., Alameda, Calif, VXWorks.

At Genesi we do more than just alternative computers, we also have interests in the field of Digital Media and Digital Television, you'll see products targeted to these segments arriving in the future. Most people appear to think that the future of Digital Media is convergence, that it is inevitable that TVs and Computers are going to converge and become a single device. Some people however think that this will not happen, they may have good reason for thinking so.