On Monday, months ahead of schedule and six years after Intel broke the 100 megahertz mark with great fanfare, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced the release of the first one-gigahertz personal computer microprocessor. Although it had not planned to do so until the second half of this year, Intel responded to the challenge by releasing its own one-gigahertz Pentium III processor. These new...

An informative collection of articles on computer hardware and operation is presented by Ars Technica. Many of the more recent articles (July 2002 to February 2003) have shifted from focusing on specific technologies and platforms to explaining basic principles of computer architecture. This includes "pipelining and superscalar execution," bandwidth and latency, multithreading, and CPU caching....

The Hot Chips conference was held in August 2002, and the presentations from the event were recently released online. The symposium was centered on high performance processors and the technologies used to design them. Many presentations are from key industry representatives who described cutting-edge microarchitectures and implementations such as the Itanium 2, GeForce4, and more. Others are from...