New Florence. New Renaissance.

Souping up the Asus

"If you want a super-light laptop, you have to pay for it, and you have to use Windows. That’s been the (frustrating) conventional wisdom—at least until late last year, when the Taiwanese company Asus rolled out the Eee PC (pronounced as though it were a single long “e”), a two-pound, seven-inch laptop starting at a mere $300. The tradeoff: It comes with just two to eight gigabytes of flash memory instead of a conventional, larger hard drive, and a simplified Linux operating system that essentially is usable only for e-mail, Web browsing and typing.

But then the hackers got hold of it. Within days of the Eee’s release, forums on a fan site, eeeuser.com, were buzzing with homebrew upgrades to remedy its shortcomings—users discovered ways to solder extra memory inside, attach additional gadgets, and install other operating systems. If you’re willing to do a little tinkering, you’ll find that big things will come from its small package."

Popular Science Blog

Replacing wires between chips with laser beams

"Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact....

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today’s supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors."

NY Times

HP's Memristor breakthrough

"The existence of the memristor, short for 'memory resistor', was first suggested in 1971, but only now have researchers succeeded in creating a real, working example. They hope that the new components could revolutionize computing, promising an end to frustrating waits for your computer to boot up."

Nature

Photo credit - HP via USAToday

Mesh architecture for multicore chips

"Chips with multiple processing units, or "cores," are nothing new. But by allowing the cores to communicate directly with each other, Tilera has addressed a widespread concern about the viability of adding more cores to microprocessors."

MIT Technology Review