Hardware

My desktop isn't the only computer I plan to replace in the next few months. I need a new laptop too, and my goal is simple: to find a 13" MacBook Air that isn't made by Apple.

It turns out that I'm not the only one wanting this mythical non-Apple MacBook Air. Intel wants them too—it calls them Ultrabooks. The chip company has been kicking the Ultrabook idea around for a few months now, and it has grand ambitions: by the end of next year, it wants 40 percent of PC laptops to be Ultrabooks.

The BlueGene/Q processors that will power the 20 petaflops Sequoia supercomputer being built by IBM for Lawrence Livermore National Labs will be the first commercial processors to include hardware support for transactional memory. Transactional memory could prove to be a versatile solution to many of the issues that currently make highly scalable parallel programming a difficult task. Most research so far has been done on software-based transactional memory implementations. The BlueGene/Q-powered supercomputer will allow a much more extensive real-world testing of the technology and concepts. The inclusion of the feature was revealed at Hot Chips last week.

BlueGene/Q itself is a multicore 64-bit PowerPC-based system-on-chip based on IBM's multicore-oriented, 4-way multithreaded PowerPC A2 design. Each 1.47 billion transistor chip includes 18 cores. Sixteen will be used for running actual computations, one will be used for running the operating system, and the final core will be used to improve chip reliability. For BlueGene/Q, a quad floating point unit, capable of up to four double-precision floating point operations at a time, has been added to every A2 core. At the intended 1.6GHz clock speed, each chip will be capable of a total of 204.8 GFLOPS within a 55 W power envelope. The chips also include memory controllers and I/O connectivity.

Not content with making bold claims about the performance and efficiency of future iterations of its Atom processor line, Intel used its investor relations day to point out just how much better Windows would be on Intel than on ARM.

Intel Senior Vice President Renée James said that Windows on ARM would offer no backwards compatibility at all with existing x86. Instead, James said that Windows on ARM processors would exclusively offer a new, mobile-oriented, touch-friendly interface. In contrast, x86 versions would include both the new interface and a "legacy" interface suitable for conventional laptops and desktops. x86 systems would, therefore, offer the best of both worlds: a new interface for new tablet form factors, and a conventional interface for the enormous body of existing x86 Windows software. The chance of ARM ever running such software? In James' words, "Not now. Not ever."

Mohamed Hassan had just installed anti-malware software on his new Samsung laptop when, much to his surprise, the software alerted him to the presence of a keystroke logger. A brand-new machine, and it was apparently already recording every password and username he typed. He returned the computer for an unrelated reason, and bought a second Samsung laptop to replace it. Lo and behold, the same keylogger was apparently found on this new machine.

Naturally, he asked Samsung about this, only to receive a range of confused answers. Initially the support person he talked to denied any Samsung involvement, claiming "all Samsung did was to manufacture the hardware." On escalating the issue, supervisor claimed to have no idea how the software might have got onto his PC; Hassan was then told that Samsung installed the software so that it could "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. It's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then we'll turn to the community for your take. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Question: How much of a difference do "green" drives actually make in a system build? Do you save enough power for it to be worthwhile, or is it just a marketing gimmick?

When a drive is "green," the designation usually just means that it runs on the slower side—5400 rotations per minute, as opposed to the more ubiquitous 7200 RPM. But in some cases, this slowdown can translate to drives that are quieter, cooler, and less power-hungry. We're not talking the same power savings as, say, switching to fluorescent light-bulbs from incandescent ones. But there are a few watts to be saved here, which makes green drives a decent choice for a platform that will see a lot of use, but doesn't necessarily need to be high-performance. (If you're really looking for power savings above all else, though, the absolute best option is a solid-state drive.)

The three features that are touted the most often by manufacturers of green drives, as we said, are their relatively quiet and cool operation and their lower power consumption. These specs are measured in decibels, degrees Celsius, and watts, respectively, and can usually be found on fact sheets for various drive models on the manufacturer's website (here's a Western Digital sampling) or from third-party benchmarks, if you don't trust Big Data Storage.

Welcome to the re-launch of Ask Ars, brought to you by CDW! 

Re-launch, you ask? Why, yes! Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. Ask Ars is all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then comes the best part: we turn to the community for your take.

To launch, we reached out to some of our geekiest friends to solicit their burning questions. Without further ado, let's dive into our first question. Don't forget to send us your questions, too! To submit your question, see our helpful tips page.

Let's get started with a question that was unthinkable in 1998!

Q: I've heard that some SSD controllers do "garbage collection" while others don't. Is this really that big of a deal, and if so, which controllers should I be on the lookout for?

To begin with, an SSD that doesn't do garbage collection would be like an elevator that only goes up—that is, it would never delete anything. However, some drives are able to do it more quickly than others, and some engage in a process called "idle garbage collection" that distributes the workload across periods of inactivity. But before we get into that, we'll take a minute to describe how and why an SSD does garbage collection, and why a drive that does only that would be a weak one indeed.

Solid state drives have two hangups that force them to deal with data differently than hard disk drives do: they can only erase data in larger chunks than they can write it, and their storage cells can only be written a certain number of times (10,000 is standard) before they start to fail. This makes tasks like modifying files much harder for SSDs than HDDs.

Intel is about to experiment with a new concept in mass-market processors with its forthcoming Pentium G6951 CPU: upgradability. The chips will be upgradable by end users via a purchased code that is punched in to a special program. Previews of the processor quietly hit the Web last month, and with Engadget's post of the retail packaging, people took notice with reactions ranging from surprise to outright disgust.

The Pentium G6951 is a low-end processor. Dual core, 2.8GHz, 3 MB cache, and expected to be around $90 each when bought in bulk—identical to the already-shipping Pentium G6950. The special part is the software unlock. Buy an unlock code for around $50, run the software downloaded from Intel's site, and your processor will get two new features: hyperthreading will be enabled, and another 1 MB of cache will be unlocked, giving the chip a specification just short of Intel's lowest Core i3-branded processor, the 2.93 GHz Core i3-530. Once unlocked, the G6951 becomes a G6952.

A DARPA-funded processor start-up has made bold claims about a new kind of processor that computes using probabilities, rather than the traditional ones and zeroes of conventional processors. Lyric Semiconductor, an MIT spin-off, claims that its probabilistic processors could speed up some kinds of computation by a factor of a thousand, allowing racks of servers to be replaced with small processing appliances.

Calculations involving probabilities have a wide range of applications. Many spam filters, for example, work on the basis of probability; if an e-mail contains the word "Viagra" it's more likely to be spam than one which doesn't, and with enough of these likely-to-be-spam words, the filter can flag the mail as being spam with a high degree of confidence. Probabilities are represented as numbers between 0, impossible, and 1, certain. A fair coin toss has a probability of 0.5 of coming up heads.