The Raspberry Pi Foundation announces an upgrade to the low-cost credit card-sized micro PC-- the Raspberry Pi Model B+, featuring a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) allowing for further expansion.

The first Raspberry Pi features a 26-pin GPIO. The first 26 pins on the Model B+ are identical to the original, allowing for backwards compatibility.

Further enhancements on the Model B+ include 4 USB 2.0 ports (the original features 2), better hotplug and overcorrect behaviour, a "nicer" push-push microSD card socket and switching regulators promising to reduce power consumptions to 600mA.

Also improved are the audio (via dedicated low-noise power supply) and the overall form factor with the addition of 4 squarely-placed mounting holes and the movement of composite video onto the 3.5mm jack.

According to IDC the EMEA PC market shows "positive" results in Q2 2014, as enterprise renewals fueled by the end of Windows XP support drive growth while consumer shipments improve, at least in W. Europe.

On the other hand emerging markets remain constrained by weak demand and political instability the analyst continues.

On a global basis Q2 2014 PC shipments are down by -1.7% Y-o-Y, an improvement over IDC projections of -7.1% declines. The analyst says this is the smallest decline since Q2 2012, when the drop in mini notebooks and surge in tablets disrupted the market.

Windows XP migrations appear to be going strong and enterprise desktop shipments appear to be "stronger than expected," as are consumer PC and Chromebook shipments.

IDC does not give specific numbers, but says Europe shows the strongest growth together with the US and Canada. In contrast, as mentioned earlier emerging regions are in decline due to weak economies and political issues.

ECS claims the smallest Windows-based mini-PC in the world with the Liva, a self-assembling 118 x 70 x 56mm package offering "all the features of much larger PCs."

It carries a 2GHz Intel Bay Trail-M dual-core CPU on a BAT-MINI motherboard together with 2GB RAM, 32GB SSD and connectivity via wifi, Bluetooth and ethernet.

Ports include HDMI, VGA and x2 USB, while power comes through 5V/15W micro USB port allowing operation using a smartphone battery pack.

German PC maker SilentPower presents what it claims is "the smallest high-end PC in the world"-- a small-form (15 x 13 x 7cm) chassis packing desktop-class components cooled entirely by copper foam.

According to the company the copper foam offers a 500-fold increase in surface area over traditional heatsinks, and combined with air microcirculation it provides passive cooling efficient enough to keep outside surface temperatures below 50 degrees Celsius.

The SilentPower PC also features interesting component placement-- the CPU and GPU are on the top surface of the case, while the motherboard, RAM and storage are on the bottom. These include an Intel Core i7-4785T CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 GPU, 8 or 16GB RAM and 800GB or 1TB SSD storage.

In a bid to reduce energy consumptions across the EU the European Commission brings into force "ecodesign" regulations forcing PC vendors to adhere to minimum energy efficiency requirements.

Vendors selling PCs in the EU must also provide customers with energy-consumption information, including annual power usage and power demand in modes such as "sleep" and "off".

The regulation (specifically Commission Regulation no. 617.2013 implementing directive 2009/125/EC) was announced on June 2013, and comes in full force on 1 July 2014 before gradually becoming stricter by 2016 following review by end 2017.

It covers desktops, thin clients, workstations, mobile workstations, small-scale servers and servers in the EU, but not games consoles, docking stations, multi-node server and blade systems and components.

Back in the the 1940s and 50s computers ran on vacuum tubes, but following the invention of the solid-state transistor the industry never looked back-- at least until now, as NASA researchers are swapping silicon for vacuum tubes in a so-called "vacuum-channel transistor."

The vacuum-channel transistor is, essentially, a nano-scale vacuum tube. Like conventional MOSFETs it has a source and a drain, yet instead of a gate electrode it has… nothing. Electrons from the source to the drain when current is applied to the gate via "field emission," a process allowing for faster movements of electrons.

NASA says test vacuum-channel transistors reach speeds of up to 460GHz, 10 times faster than conventional silicon transistors and comparable to the speeds of graphene transistors. It also promises to operate at the "tetraherz gap", allowing for applications such as the hazardous material detection or secure high-speed telecommunications.

At the last day of E3 a mystery team announced a rather unusual take on the so-called Steam Machines-- the SteamBoy Machine, a SteamOS-powered PC crammed inside a Playstation Vita-style handheld format.

Judging from images and a snippet of video, the SteamBoy Machine looks a bit like the prototype Steam Controller, if with the addition of a display. It features two touchpads, 8 face buttons, 4 triggers and 2 additional buttons on the back.

"SteamBoy is the first device that allows to play Steam games on the go," the announcement press release says. "You will keep playing your favorite games at the bus, the office, the school or the doctor's waiting room."

The future of computing has been a long time coming, but HP might actually bring it about-- at its Discover 2014 conference the company unveils "The Machine," an ominously titled processing architecture designed to handle vast amounts of data.

In a few words, The Machine consists of clusters of special-purpose cores, with silicon photonics (ie lasers) replacing traditional copper wires. Serving as both memory and storage are memristors, a futuristic technology as fast as RAM yet also able to store data permanently, while tying all together is a new HP-designed Machine OS.

The result is a computer able to handle vast amounts of data while using much less power. How much so? According to HP a Machine server can crunch 160 petabytes of data in 250 nanoseconds while consuming 80% less energy than the data centers we know and love. In fact, The Machine can crunch so much data it requires the use of new terms, such as "brontobyte" (1000 yottabytes), and will possibly allow for impossibly large-scale computing concepts.