Hardware Archive

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.

Phoenix Technologies is sounding the death knell for BIOS - the bread and butter of its current operations. While Phoenix is comparatively the "Microsoft" of the BIOS world, it has spent years endeavoring to modernize the aging standard. If all goes according to plan, a new product the company dubs Core System Software (CSS) will serve as the foundation of PC architecture.

Supercomputer maker Cray said Monday that it is planning to release a line of products based on the Advanced Micro Devices-powered Red Storm machine it is building for the Department of Energy.

In a recent conference presentation, Google's Craig Nevill-Manning notes that cheap and fast hardware is the key to Google's success. The software, he says, is written to assume that the hardware will fail, and work around that. That way, the company can use commodity PC hardware and not worry when it fails--just replace it.

Apple's decision to use IBM processors in its latest hardware may have been the final straw for Motorola's struggling semiconductor business. The parent company is going to see if it can operate more effectively as an independent entity.

Back in the 80's when the PC world made its change from 16 to 32 bit processors, people were excited. They were probably most excited about what the hot new 32 bit OS (IBM/Microsoft's OS/2) promised to do on the new 386 class of processors from Intel. But the jump to 32 bits scratched some real itches, like a need for advanced multitasking and vivid graphics. Now that we're on the cusp of moving to 64 bits, the incentive for making the switch isn't there. A ZDNet article has more.

SkyEye is a simulator for typical embedded computer systems. It can simulate Atmel AT91 based on the ARM7TDMI, EP7312 based on ARM720T, StrongARM SA1100/SA1110, and 8019as NIC, etc. Some operating systems, such as ARM Linux, uClinux, and uc/OS-II(ucos-ii), can run and be debugged and analyzed at the source level. This Skyeye snapshot version it can simulate the Xscale PXA 250 Lubbock developboard.

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.

If your computer is having persistent stability problems, it may be bad RAM. Now that Windows is a bit more stable than it was back in the bad old days, Microsoft would like to give users a way to point the finger back at their own hardware if their computer is acting up. It released a memory diagnostic utility yesterday.