Electronics Design

Comparing old and new processors

Phoronix celebrated their 11th birthday by comparing modern CPUs to old Socket 478 CPUs with the NetBurst Celeron and Pentium 4C on an Intel 875P+ICH5R motherboard. These old NetBurst processors were compared to modern Core and Atom processors. The comparison results can be foudn at Comparing Today’s Modern CPUs To Intel’s Socket 478 Celeron & →

Cable Tracers

Cable tracers are used for tracking and troubleshooting cables quickly. They are suitable for identification and maintenance of telephony networks and also for testing any kind of lines not-connected to the mains. Suitable applications are wiring test for computer Local Area Networks (LAN) and telephony extensions. There are countless cable tracers on the market, but →

SSD Prices In A Free Fall?

Solid State Drives have become the standard for computing in the last few years. With the prices of solid-state drives expected to reach parity with hard-disk drives next year, are HDDs doomed? SSD Prices In A Free Fall article tells that the hard-disk drive vendors point to the higher price of solid-state drives as a →

RISC vs CISC still relevant?

There has been long time discussion on if RISC or CISC processor architecture is more efficient. CISC (Complex instruction set computing) was the most popular architecture before RISC became popular. According to Wikipedia before the RISC philosophy became prominent, many computer architects tried to bridge the so-called semantic gap, i.e. to design instruction sets that →

Wifi to power IoT

When you want to spead IoT devices around, there is challenge of powering them. You need to provide power to them or be prepared to change batteries in then very now and then. Great things are expected of the Internet of things but only if engineers can solve one potential show-stopper of a question: how →

Friday Fun: Frying an Egg on a CPU

High power CPUs run very hot. But can you cook an egg on it? Search online and you can find videos of people attempting to cook on their processors, but how effective as a cooling solution is this? Frying an Egg on a CPU article makes on an analysis can you throw away your conventional →

The creation of the modern laptop

Here is some reading if you are interested in computer hardware and how it developed as you see it today. Sebastian Anthony / Ars Technica: How lithium-ion batteries, industrial design and Moore’s law created modern laptops article takes a look at the creation of the modern laptop: An in-depth look at lithium-ion batteries, industrial design, →