Super Volatile

Nov 15, 2011 / 11:34pm

The Death Of The Spec

And such comparisons show just how clueless Consumer Reports has become. Last year, they milked “Antennagate” for the pageviews, not realizing that it could actually undermine their own credibility if the device still sold well. “Sold well” ended up being a major understatement. So in effect, they themselves highlighted that no one cares about Consumer Reports anymore. And why not? Because they Consumer Reports largely cares about specs. And consumers do not anymore.

Is Moore's Party Over?

A July 2008 Communications' article by Mark Oskin entitled "The Revolution Inside the Box" pointed out that the performance curve of microprocessors almost flattened in 2004, and concluded, "No longer is the road ahead clear for microprocessors." A May 2011 article "The Future of Microprocessors," by Shekhar Borkar and Andrew Chien, declared that "Energy efficiency is the new fundamental limiter of processor performance," and asserted that "Moore's Law continues but demands radical changes in architecture and software."

Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator

There are two possibilities, and for the briefest of moments, the circuit hovers between them. In a perfect world, it might linger like that forever. But in reality, even a small amount of thermal noise—random atomic vibrations—within the circuitry will send it racing toward one of its two stable states. It's the physically random properties of the thermal noise that determine the outcome of this otherwise indecisive circuit.

In this way, our simple digital circuit can easily harvest some of the ubiquitous randomness of nature. All we need to do is to connect those two extra transistors to a clock that regularly turns both of them on and off. Every time the clock cycles, the circuit generates one random bit.

How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries

Specifying battery life by the number of discharge cycles is not complete by itself; equally if not more important are temperature conditions and charging voltages. Lithium-ion suffers stress when exposed to heat and kept at a high charge voltage.

Chinese Magical Hard-Drive

Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives

I had always been disappointed that hybrid hard drives, drives that combine both flash memory and traditional magnetic platters, never came to fruition. It was either traditional or SSD and nothing in between. It seemed like such an obvious "best of both worlds" scenario to me. But I recently discovered that decent hybrid drives do finally exist -- though in a small and mostly unheralded way.

The Setup

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

hardware

The Death Of The Spec

Is Moore's Party Over?

Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator

How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries

Chinese Magical Hard-Drive

Revisiting Solid State Hard Drives

The Setup

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