http://phys.org/electronics-news/hardware/ en-us Phys.Org provides the latest news on consumer electronic hardware, electronic gadgets, hardware and electronics. A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a US machine which now ranks second. http://phys.org/news290671269.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:01:16 EST news290671269 (Phys.org) —How is this for bragging rights in the always-on title grab for the world's fastest supercomputer: China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, aka Milkyway-2, recently measured at speeds of 31 petaflops (30.65) out of a theoretical peak of 49.19. The kicker is that it was not even running at full capacity. The fastest result was only using 90 percent of the machine. The stats come from a five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 nodes and 50 GB of memory of each node. (The Linpack benchmark is a measure of a computer's floating-point rate of execution. It is determined by running a computer program that solves a system of linear equations.) The numbers were revealed by University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who introduced the Linpack benchmarks, and who helps compile the biannual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. http://phys.org/news290067415.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 10 Jun 2013 07:40:01 EST news290067415 Intel Corp. unveiled its fourth generation processors in Taipei on Tuesday in a bid to give personal computers a new lease of life amid stiff competition from smartphones and tablets. http://phys.org/news289556934.html Electronics - Hardware Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:29:02 EST news289556934 (Phys.org) —A recent press release by 3M announcing that its partnership with Nanosys, Inc. is about to bear fruit appears to be a sign that LCD's with quantum dot technology are close to fulfilling the promise of much more colorful displays. Not to be outdone, Sony recently began shipping its quantum dot enabled Triluminos television sets to stores, garnering rave reviews in the process. http://phys.org/news289033511.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 29 May 2013 08:50:01 EST news289033511 (Phys.org) —One key selling point in laptops is battery life and Intel earlier this week had good news on that very front. Its upcoming Haswell processors will give users 50 percent more battery life than Ivy Bridge. http://phys.org/news288705840.html Electronics - Hardware Sat, 25 May 2013 13:04:20 EST news288705840 (Phys.org) —What better place to use the "new vintage" computing theme than in Napa Valley where the Cray User Group meeting took place on Tuesday, The tie-in this year is Cray's new vintage of supercomputers for a business segment that Cray calls the "technical enterprise." In brief, Cray has seen an opportunity to accommodate the need for complex computing simulations of supercomputers but engineered (in the form of economized packaging, networking, cooling and power options) at a price that businesses can entertain. Cray used the Tuesday event to announce a lower-priced version of a Cray XC30 system, for business customers. The new supercomputer is the XC30-AC, shipping with Intel Xeon processors, which will sell as a low-cost model priced from $500,000 on up. http://phys.org/news287245203.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 08 May 2013 15:20:19 EST news287245203 Intel Corp. on Monday unveiled a new line of computer chips as part of the tech giant's efforts to gain traction in the fast-growing mobile sector. http://phys.org/news287072141.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 06 May 2013 15:15:48 EST news287072141 (Phys.org) —The semiconductor technology company Adapteva earlier this month featured its parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputingts at a major Linux event, and the board is targeted to ship this summer. The board will be going out to those who pledged money in last year's Adapteva Kickstarter campaign and to other customers. Not a minute too soon. To hear the story of computing as Adapteva tells it, the future of computing is parallel. Big-data and other demands pose a processor challenge and Adapteva recognizes a problem in energy efficiency that is calling for action. Adapteva is on a mission to "democratize" access to parallel computing. http://phys.org/news285872009.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:20:02 EST news285872009 Google announced Friday a $600 million expansion of its Lenoir data center, bringing the company's total investment in North Carolina to $1.2 billion. The announcement came little more than six years after the California-based Internet search giant broke ground at its 215-acre site in the North Carolina foothills. At the time, the company said it hoped to expand on its initial $600 million investment. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and other officials on hand for Friday's groundbreaking said the construction of a third building on the campus underscores Google's long-term commitment to western N.C. http://phys.org/news285844774.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:50:01 EST news285844774 (Phys.org) —Officials at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have announced the selection of the Spider II data storage and retrieval system from DataDirect Networks (DDN) to replace the existing system on the Titan supercomputer. They say it will give Titan the fastest such system in the world. http://phys.org/news285408062.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:01:25 EST news285408062 Buzz is building over Intel's secretive TV set-top box due out later this year, which the chipmaker claims will provide live and other content via the Internet, is easy to use, and boasts face-recognition technology so it can tell whose watching it and recommend programs they like. http://phys.org/news284919337.html Electronics - Hardware Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:50:01 EST news284919337 Hewlett-Packard on Monday launched a Moonshot system that uses smartphone-style chips to power compact, efficient data center servers. http://phys.org/news284658342.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:45:52 EST news284658342 (Phys.org) —Nebula has announced its first product, Nebula One. The new entry is defined in a promotional video (with symphonic, celestial music and a British voiceover for gravitas) as the world's first cloud computer. The product combines a hardware controller integrated with software for an all in one storage, compute, and networked services system. To hear Nebula's team describe it, the Nebula One is a product that can reinvent cloud computing. http://phys.org/news284188375.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 03 Apr 2013 06:13:19 EST news284188375 (Phys.org) —Intel was not going to let an event like the Game Developers Conference from March 25 to March 29 in San Francisco, described on the conference site as the world's largest professionals-only game industry event, go by without talking up the merits of Intel's stepped-up graphics focus. Intel took advantage of the event's special audience to announce new capabilities through DirectX extensions for software developers. The extensions will speed up and ease game rendering. http://phys.org/news283940655.html Electronics - Hardware Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:20:01 EST news283940655 It's the end of the line for Roadrunner, a first-of-its-kind collection of processors that once reigned as the world's fastest supercomputer. The $121 million supercomputer, housed at one of the premier U.S. nuclear weapons research laboratories in northern New Mexico, will be decommissioned Sunday. http://phys.org/news283939619.html Electronics - Hardware Sun, 31 Mar 2013 09:07:08 EST news283939619 (Phys.org) —Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have performed record simulations using all 1,572,864 cores of Sequoia, the largest supercomputer in the world. Sequoia, based on IBM BlueGene/Q architecture, is the first machine to exceed one million computational cores. It also is No. 2 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, operating at 16.3 petaflops (16.3 quadrillion floating point operations per second). http://phys.org/news282923672.html Electronics - Hardware Tue, 19 Mar 2013 14:54:40 EST news282923672 (Phys.org) —Beyond reading body motions, Kinect is getting a workup by researchers at Microsoft, now showing substantial control additions. Microsoft Research this week showed how Microsoft Kinect for Windows may be used for picking up enhanced hand gestures. At this week's TechFest, the annual event revealing what Microsoft Research teams are up to, the Kinect capability for hand gesture recognition was unveiled. The presentation showed how Kinect for Windows allows more refined gestures that can translate on the computer screen as pinching, zooming, and panning around. http://phys.org/news281899891.html Electronics - Hardware Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:00:01 EST news281899891 (Phys.org)—News from Intel on Ivy Bridge microarchitecture involves the rollout of eight new SKUs (processor unique identifier part numbers) to Celeron and Pentium families as well as a new Core chip. Translation: Intel's latest processors has now arrived at a budget-friendly line. With the release of pricing and specs for three Celeron family CPUS, G1610, G1610T and G1620, four Pentiums, G2010, G2020 and G2020T and G2130 and a new Core i3-3210, available now. http://phys.org/news278076494.html Electronics - Hardware Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:50:01 EST news278076494 (Phys.org)—Call it the paper tablet. Or flexible e-paper touchscreen. Or an all in one computing experience made up of a cluster of papery, tablet screens, each behaving like an app. However you look at the PaperTab, it is difficult to avoid the word "revolutionary," and the prototype was Tuesday's talk at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. PaperTab is,a 10.7 inch, e-ink, flexible touchscreen display powered by an Intel Core i5 processor. The tablet looks and feels like a sheet of paper. Its "bendiness" delivers durability and also interactions, as by bending the sides, one can flip through pages. http://phys.org/news276942350.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 09 Jan 2013 08:26:08 EST news276942350 TV makers are trotting out sets with "Ultra HD" resolution at the International CES electronics trade show in Las Vegas this week. http://phys.org/news276841976.html Electronics - Hardware Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:33:05 EST news276841976 Toshiba Corporation today announced that it will launch a new 20-megapixel (MP) CMOS image sensor, the TCM5115CL, as the latest addition to its sensor line-up for digital still cameras. TCM5115CL offers the industry's highest resolution in the 1/2.3 inch optical format, using backside illumination technology (BSI) to improve sensitivity and imaging performance. http://phys.org/news275850584.html Electronics - Hardware Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:09:52 EST news275850584 (Phys.org)—Never content to fixate on the next signpost on Intel's roadmap, Intel watchers are talking about what is beyond the Haswell processors toward its successor architecture, Broadwell. They say that Broadwell will not be offered as a land grid array (LGA)-based product but instead will signal a shift to a ball grid array (BGA). What this further means is that future Intel CPUs may come soldered to motherboards. This would mark the end to user -replaceable CPUs. Broadwell desktop CPUs will need to be soldered directly to motherboards. That places limits on users and system builders. http://phys.org/news273491703.html Electronics - Hardware Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:30:01 EST news273491703 (Phys.org)—China's new 8-core Godson processor will be a key point of interest at the San Francisco IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) from Feb. 17 to 21. The Godson processor to be discussed at the event is a homegrown chip, to be launched for PCs and servers. The processor is a departure from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel designs. Interest will be in the chip itself and its message that, in this era, China is not be dismissed as a producer that re-produces without innovation but as a China focused on building its own ecosystem that can support its IT industry. The 8-core Godson-3B1500 is made using the 32-nanometer process and has 1.14 billion transistors. http://phys.org/news273348659.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:11:18 EST news273348659 (Phys.org)—Recent announcements on the Raspberry Pi site had two items on the topic of cameras, with the November 23 announcement of a camera board demo of the upcoming Raspberry Pi camera module and on November 22 with announcements of who won the Foundation's summer coding contest. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer board that plugs into a TV and a keyboard, also described as a miniature ARM-based PC. The twenty-five dollar Raspberry PI camera board, which was shown at Electronica 2012 in Germany, is to be available early next year. RS Components performed the working demonstration of the camera board. The prototype was mounted to a sawed-off broom handle secured with tape to a Raspberry Pi housed inside a transparent plastic case. http://phys.org/news273130633.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 26 Nov 2012 06:00:01 EST news273130633 (Phys.org)—Samsung will turn heads at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February when it describes the first mobile applications processor to use ARM's big.LITTLE concept. This is an important opportunity and timing for Samsung, as the ISSCC is a major event for the semiconductor industry. The approach is expected to become widely used in smartphones. Samsung's processor is to use ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. This translates into a SoC built with a 28 nanometer manufacturing process, with one cluster tuned for sheer performance while the other cluster is optimized for battery life. These are two quad-core clusters, one for high performance applications such as video gaming and the other for energy efficiency. http://phys.org/news272736831.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:14:09 EST news272736831 A Cray supercomputer at the US government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named Monday the world's fastest, overtaking an IBM supercomputer at another American research center. http://phys.org/news271949526.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:32:20 EST news271949526 (Phys.org)—Intel will introduce two NUC barebone computer models for the general public by next month. These are tiny barebone PCs that will be available through online retailers. One of the two models, the DC3217BY, has had a once-over review and there are reports that online retailers such as Amazon will be selling the tiny 4"×4"×2" computing devices starting at about $300 to $320. The little NUC is no way to be confused with a notebook or ultralight. What you get out of the box is an Ivy Bridge processor and motherboard and chassis, and, for the rest, you're on your own. http://phys.org/news271868369.html Electronics - Hardware Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:30:04 EST news271868369 (Phys.org)—Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Monday announced its launch of 16-core Opteron 6300 server chips. This is its newest series in server processors based on the chip designer's Piledriver core architecture. The Opteron 6300 family has models with four, eight, 12 or 16 processor cores (up to 16 cores per socket for scaling in "thread-intensive" environments). AMD says the processors are designed for "virtualized server platforms that are central to private and public cloud deployments, big data systems and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters." This is a sequel to its 6200 series; the 6300 series "Piledriver" chips show better speed than the 6200 series. http://phys.org/news271358192.html Electronics - Hardware Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:16:46 EST news271358192 (Phys.org)—Japanese firm Ortus Technology Co., Ltd. has revealed its development of what the company is calling the world's smallest LCD display panel that meets the 4K standard. At just 9.6 inches with a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, the new display will be small enough for use in handheld devices. http://phys.org/news270459139.html Electronics - Hardware Fri, 26 Oct 2012 09:30:01 EST news270459139 (Phys.org)—Both scientific and vendor interest mounts toward The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a global collaboration of 20 countries that seeks to provide answers about the universe. Computing power of the highest order is going to be needed for the SKA radio telescope, 10,000 times more powerful than any other telescope. The project is to entail over 3,000 satellite dishes spread across land to allow scientists to see more than ten times further away than the most powerful radio telescopes now available. Potential explorations will include the nature of the first stars, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, theories of gravity and black holes, and the origin of cosmic magnetism. http://phys.org/news270298708.html Electronics - Hardware Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:59:22 EST news270298708