Hardware

Ahead of Friday's iPad Air release, performance analytics firm Primate Labs is starting to see data trickle in from its Geekbench Browser, with the tablet's A7 system on a chip showing huge performance gains over last year's iPad.

Primate Labs founder John Poole compiled the results from iPads Airs running the Geekbench 3 benchmark, and compared them to all iOS 7-compatible tablets, which includes the iPad 2, third- and fourth-generation iPad and iPad mini.

Intel’s Galileo open-source computer for the hacker and do-it-yourself crowd can now be ordered for $69.90, and is scheduled to ship at the end of November.

The Galileo computer is an unenclosed circuit board that’s a little larger than a credit card, and uses Intel’s extremely low-power Quark processor. The board is a competitor to the popular $25 Raspberry Pi open-source PC, and is targeted at the community of makers and enthusiasts who make computing devices ranging from robots and health monitors to home media centers and PCs.

A new supercomputer being deployed this month in the U.S. is using solid-state drive storage as an alternative to DRAM and hard drives, which could help speed up internal data transfers.

The supercomputer, called Catalyst, will be deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Built by the U.S. Department of Energy, Cray and Intel, the supercomputer delivers a peak performance of 150 teraflops and will be available for use starting later this month.

Western Digital has been emailing customers and warning them about hard drives “experiencing data loss when updating to Apple’s OS X Mavericks.” The problem seems to effect multiple kinds of drives, including the company’s popular MyBook lineup.

According to Western Digital, the incompatibility with Mavericks isn’t a hardware-level issue, but something to do with the software that is shipped with the drives it sells.

The Surface RT, as it was then known, was Microsoft's first attempt to build a tablet computer.

On the upside, it was a well-built tablet with an attractive screen. It was also a bit more than a tablet—an integrated kickstand was handy for watching streaming video and the like. When paired with one of Microsoft's keyboard accessories, it became a good option for homework, e-mailing, light work, and more thanks to the bundled Office 2013 apps.

The Nokia smartphone name is dead, but it may live on as a German zombie. A team of German hackers want to revive the Nokia N900. They want to tear out its motherboard and give it a new, more powerful, and more open-source one instead. They’re calling it Neo900.

By our count, the massive Ultimate FAQ that Sony posted today regarding the PS4 answers 191 questions about the system, ranging from the essential (“When does PS4 come out in different countries and regions?”) to the trivial (“Does PS4’s graphical user interface have a name like the PS3 system’s ‘Cross Media Bar’?”)

A number of Dell users have complained that their Latitude 6430u Ultrabooks "smell of cat urine". Dell engineers have ruled out biological contamination, and said the smell was not a health hazard.

The problem lay in the manufacturing process, which has now been changed, the company said. Users affected by the issue should send their laptop back for replacement parts.

It’s not time to say goodbye to the old storage network quite yet, but a new combination of cloud, networking, and storage technology might mark the beginning of the end for SANs—Seagate has introduced a new storage architecture that puts Ethernet directly on the disk drive.

 Security firm Malwarebytes has designed a USB stick that can plug into any PC to automate the process of finding, logging, and cleaning up a range of malware.

Called Techbench, the product is a key-shaped USB flash drive designed to get around the need to install software on every system being inspected for malware. Simply plugging in the drive starts the scanning process which can be left to complete on its own before a log file is saved.