Hardware Archive

Coming soon to a mall near you: advertisements that block the walkway that you must acknoledge and walk through on your way to The Gap. A Finnish company has developed technology that allows for a high quality image to be projected on a dry fog cascading from the ceiling. Very cool.

The Supercomputer industry is alive and thriving, as researchers design simulations and other processor-intensive tasks to drive demand. A recent ZDNet article covers some of the latest advances in supercomputing application.

The next generation of desktop computers is coming, and here's why it matters. New processors coming soon from Advanced Micro Devices and Apple suggest 64-bit computing will make its way to a desktop near you this year. But what does that really mean for you?

eCosCentric today announced their partnership with SuperH Inc to deliver the eCos real-time operating system and RedBoot firmware on SuperH RISC CPU cores. The partnership will extend the existing eCos coverage of SuperH embedded development boards to include the SH-4 MicroDev Platform. On other embedded CPU news, both QNX and MontaVista Linux said that will support the new Motorola MPC5200 CPU while Samsung says it has developed the world's fastest mobile CPU, which runs at a speed of 533MHz, and outpaces Intel's CPU. Get similar news on our sister site, NewMobileComputing.

"Can Macintosh software run on an Intel machine at speeds that approach the same performance as on Apple hardware, or visa versa? Not yet, but that day may be closer if a Los Gatos start-up gets its product off the ground, and it could have implications for chip makers." Read the rest at siliconvalley.com.

Three tech allies demonstrated a new storage technology that they believe will keep a venerable hard drive standard safe from extinction.

The latest "SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux Beta" now provides plug-and-play support for more than 100 of the most popular chipsets, full 2D acceleration, and is certified by SciTech to be compatible with nearly a dozen different Linux distributions.

Back on June 9 2003, OSNews posted an article by Joshua Boyles entitled "The Edge Computing System". In that article Joshua lays out his vision, "of a new and very unique computing system". In this new article, an attempt will be made to further build on Jonathan's ideas through what can be termed, "Open Peripheral Hardware Connectivity".

eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, working in conjunction with the eCos maintainers, today announced the release of eCos 2.0, the latest version of the eCos real-time operating system.

Andrew Bloo from SciTech Software sent us in a clarification to our yesterday's story: "The SciTech SNAP drivers are not actually XFree86 specific at all, but rather the XFree86 driver is just a small module that interfaces to SciTech SNAP. Once SciTech SNAP is installed on the system, developers can actually code directly to the SciTech SNAP API's via the SDK, and bypass X entirely.

Within the next year, PC makers are expected to start selling a powerful new generation of home computers that run on 64-bit microchips. But consumers might initially find little extra value in these PCs, despite their exponentially more powerful features. Read the rest of the article at Reuters.

An NEC server with 32 of Intel's Itanium 2 6M processors and running the Windows Server 2003 takes the top spot in a widely watched performance measurement by displacing a Unix server. NEC is top of the heap right now, but HP has aggressive plans for Itanium. It will release 64-processor Superdome systems initially, then through a technology code-named Hondo that plugs two Itanium processors into a single socket, will sell 128-processor Itanium systems. HP supports three operating systems on its Itanium systems today--Windows, Linux and HP-UX Unix--and will add support for OpenVMS next year.

The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association is working on a replacement for its PC Card/Cardbus form factor. In addition to being smaller, faster, and cheaper, the PCMCIA is working with other standards bodies to assure that the new format is compatible with USB 2.0 and PCI Express serial input/output technologies. The new standard is primarily for laptops, but this article in PC World mentions that it is also being intended for desktop use.

Andrew from SciTech writes: "SciTech SNAP Graphics now supports 180 different graphic chipsets. With that said we have been hearing that we now support too many different cards. So OSNews faithful, how many graphics cards should we support and which cards should make the cut in the next release?" And to add to this question, which OSes SciTech should add support for?