Another day, another new microprocessor architecture. There was a time in the
Nineties when everyone and his dog was designing a new processor. They were all
going to revolutionize the world, crush…
I’m sure Harald Gormsson (ca. 910–985) never saw this coming. The wireless
specification that bears his nom de guerre has been extended, amended, and
adapted to encompass all sorts of new applicati…
One of the first things we learn in Computer Science 101 is how to reduce and
simplify logic truth tables. If you’ve got a bunch of input bits feeding an
array of logical OR, AND, and XOR gates, th…
Clouds are ephemeral, passing quickly from sight, carried away on the lightest
of breezes. Apparently, so are cloud-based products. Consumer giant Samsung has
decided to deep-six its entire SmartT…
There’s an old salesman’s adage that “confused customers never buy.” That’s why
glossy sales brochures don’t have a lot of technical information, and why car
salesmen don’t delve too deeply into fe…
All modern x86 processors can handle task switching automatically in hardware.
That’s one of their nice features. That doesn’t prevent you from coding up your
own custom tasking mechanism – Microso…
It was the best of DRAM access times, it was the worst of DRAM access times… Do
hybrid devices combine the best of two technologies, or the worst? Is a Toyota
Prius a great leap forward, or just a…
At some point, the house of cards begins to topple over. It’s no secret that the
x86 processor architecture is almost aged enough to collect a pension. It is,
not to put too fine a point on it, a c…
I’m a digital logic designer by trade. In an ever-changing and increasingly
unreliable world, I find the certainty of Boolean equations to be extremely
reassuring. You know where you are with a Kar…
Sometimes it’s the little things. Call it small and cute, cheap and cheerful,
wee and wonderful, sometimes the inexpensive entry-level products can be the
most interesting. So it is with this week’…
They say there’s no such thing as “the cloud.” It’s just somebody else’s
computer. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that their computer is the same as
your computer. Today, most cloud datacenter se…
I keep waiting for hard disk drives to die off, but they just never do.
Individual drives fail all the time, but the whole category of spinning platter
storage has shown a remarkably resilient half…
Science fiction is all about “what if.” What if there were no gravity? What if
apes developed an advanced civilization after our own? What if we’re living in a
computer simulation? What if voice-a…
Boo! A scary new variation of the Spectre CPU bug has surfaced, and it may be
resistant to the fixes and countermeasures already deployed. Or maybe not. A
band of CS/EE students has published a pa…
Physics teaches us that distance is time. Light travels at a finite speed, so
looking at a faraway object is, in a sense, looking back in time. Even the
nearest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, i…
No less an authority than the United States Supreme Court just ruled that a
program’s application programming interface can be copied under the doctrine of
copyright “fair use.” Google copied thous…
In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a team of doctors and scientists gets
miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a human patient. They and
their yellow submarine navigate past heart valv…
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, if you publish it in the manual, right? AMD has
taken a “white hat” approach to a possible security risk in its newest Zen 3
processors by publishing a white paper t…
Silicon Valley is like Milan. One is the US center of high tech, the other is
the fashion capital of Italy. The Valley has its product rollouts and Milan has
its runway shows. Both are glamorous, s…
There are a lot of ways to do nonvolatile memory. I mean, a lot of ways. There’s
flash memory, of course, but also magneto-resistive memory, phase-change
memories, resistive RAM, ROMs, PROMs, EPROM…
As the helmsman of the Ever Given, currently recently stuck sideways in the Suez
Canal, can attest, turning a massive ship is no easy task. And there’s no bigger
vessel in our industry than the S.S…