For those unfamiliar, Moore’s Law pertains to computer hardware, stating that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit board can be doubled roughly every two years. You’ve probably alternately heard of an 18-month time frame tossed around. This modified cycle can be credited to Intel executive David House, not Moore. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says that in about 10 years, silicon power will be exhausted. Intel has already admitted that Moore’s Law is slowing down using silicon which is one of the reasons that we are seeing Tri-Gate transistors used in Ivy Bridge CPUs – an effort to try and extend the effective life of silicon. The problem, Kaku says, is two-fold: heat and leakage. Today’s Intel processors have a layer that is almost down to 20 atoms across. When this layer is shrunk down to around five atoms across, “it’s all over.” At this point, the heat that is generated will be so intense that the chip will melt. The other concern is leakage, meaning we simply wouldn’t know where the electron is anymore. So what’s in store for computing in the post-silicon era? Multiple proposals have been laid out, including but not limited to optical computers, protein computers, DNA computers, molecular computers and quantum computers. The latter two solutions seem to be the most commonly accepted “future computers” but both solutions still present enormous challenges that must be conquered. Molecular computers already exist but mass production and wiring up the tiny molecules remains an issue. Quantum computing is even more finicky with the world record for a quantum computing calculation being: 3 x 5 = 15. As Kaku explains, it doesn’t sound very impressive until you realize it was proven using only five atoms. Wrapping it all up, Kaku predicts that scientists will tweak Moore’s Law in the next 10 years to extend its life. After that, molecular computers will likely take over followed by quantum computers later in the 21st century.

Source: Techspot

It has been revealed by Andrew Gibson aka Gibbo (OCUK Owner/Manager) that NVIDIA won’t be launching the Mid-Range GeForce GTX 660Ti till Q3 2012. When asked about the availability of NVIDIA’s upcoming GTX 670 and GTX 660Ti graphic cards, Gibbo unveiled that the 660Ti is approximately 6 months away from launch whereas the 670 launches this month. GeForce GTX 660Ti which would be a third GK104 based SKU would be an extremely trimmed down version with a whole GPC disabled, That means the card would be featuring 1152 Cores, 96 TMU’s, 24 ROPs and also a 1536MB 192-bit wide memory interface. Such specifications would also allow the card to use lower power an would only need a single 6 Pin connector to power it on a much shorter PCB design. The GTX 670 launches on May 7th, Gibson pointed out that the card would cost well over £300 or $399 as suggested by us earlier, Factory Overclocked models would cost a bit extra such as the earlier revealed MSI’s GTX 670 OC Edition. While the 670 seems a great addition to the NVIDIA lineup, No mid-range product for the next six months seems bad for business when there are a wide range of mid-end cards from competitor AMD.

Source: wccftech

A glare free, self-cleaning, hydrophobic, non-reflective glass has been developed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The technology is based on a nano sized scale, and its special properties come from a microscopic landscape of conical spikes.  These cones make the special glass resistant to fogging, glare and reflection. Additionally, they make the glass hydrophobic, meaning it repels water. It is so hydrophobic, in fact, that MIT released a video showing water droplets bouncing off the glass like beach balls. The water resistant properties of this material cause it to be self-cleaning. Water, naturally rolling down the glass’s surface, collects and carries away dirt and dust particles, leaving a clean and shining screen. Kyoo-Chul Park, co-author of the paper describing the new technology, explains that the glass will aid in increasing the efficiency of photovoltaic panels by reducing the amount of sunlight lost in reflection. In addition, researchers hope that the technology will help to improve other optical devices, including consumer electronics like cell phones and computer monitors. From a consumer’s standpoint, the addition of this technology to the market would mean a vastly improved end experience. With a huge market for screen covers and other protection accessories to keep cell phones and other devices clean and glare free, this new glass could eliminate hassle and expense from the life of an average electronics user. Consumers, however, may have to wait for some time before having access to such impeccable glass. The microscopic nature of the technology leaves its efficiency in question. More testing must be done to ensure that the glass is not too fragile to withstand the conditions of practical applications.

Source: Vr-zone

Remember Larrabee, Intel's big time attempt to get into the discrete GPU business? Well, it may have failed in this respect, but the core architecture was transplanted to another market segment that would welcome its approach - high performance computing. After all, the idea of using a simplified - in this case, Pentium like - core as a front end to a big, wide SIMD FP engine, and multiplying that by over 50 times on a single die with a high bandwidth interconnect between the cores, and also high bandwidth external memory connection alike that on GPUs, does make sense for a number of technical and scientific computing jobs. And, why not, top end gaming physics too... Intel call this family of products MIC - Many Integrated Core, chips, or 'Knights' line. The first MIC to be offered to the discerning public, in a limited quantity for a sort of pilot introduction, is 'Knights Corner', basically a GPU-like PCIe accelerator card with a 22-nm process MIC chip that integrates some 50 cores for roughly 1 TFLOPs DP FP performance, or nearly 6 times that of the Xeon E5 top processor bin right now, within a similar power budget - a critical point required to get to, say, Petaflop within 10 racks now, or Exaflop level performance within a single datacentre size and power budget in 2018. The thing that differentiates MIC from ATI or Nvidia GPGPUs is that it's front end is a X86 core, therefore the same programming model can apply for both the main CPU and the accelerator, rather than resorting to OpenCL or CUDA. On the other hand, the first MIC cores are based on a 64-bit enhanced version of the 16 year old Pentium that fronts a very wide SIMD FP unit, whose dual-issue in-order instruction approach limits the maximum achievable FP rates. Intel will surely fix that in the next round, but using the X86 as a front end, with all the associated baggage, remains a double-edged sword. What's the only major problem, besides of course having to re-compile your apps code to get the best performance? Well, everytime you get away from the on-board memory via the PCIe bus to retrieve stuff from the system memory, the performance will - just like in GPUs - drop dramatically, even several times. Intel may solve a part of that by using a much faster, simpler sub protocol for rapid data transfer over PCIe, since there's no QPI based MIC as of yet. In fact, Intel might decide never to make a QPI based one, if they succeed in allowing the future MIC chips to be, in a way, normal CPUs that can boot an OS - of course not Windows, I guess - on their own, without requiring a Xeon CPU front end. However, if Xeon E5 or E7 nodes are still kept as the front end, then linking a bunch of MIC chips on board via QPI to all of them as a sort of coprocessor makes much more sense from system memory sharing point of view too. Now, the newest Nvidia and AMD GPUs, the top end versions of Kepler and Southern Islands, can boot a custom OS actually, and run as standalone CPUs of a sort if need be. Of course, their highly custom instruction set architectures would require a custom OS environment, but that can also change. Then, the MIPS, Alpha and SPARC derivatives of Chinese CPUs are all expected to have very wide, high core count SIMD FP versions with multi-teraflop performance per chip by 2014 too. Even if they are a process generation behind still by that time, the much simpler, more efficient RISC front ends would likely make their overall performance quite competitive. In summary, Intel MIC is a flagship representative of the new family of devices that evolved the GPU Compute into the Supercompute, with higher performance per socket leading to less sockets required - especially as we hit the physical scaling limits of aggregating tens of thousands of multi-core CPUs to reach multi-petaflop and exaflop computing levels. The immense per-chip double-precision FP performance and easier programmability due to the common X86 front end help too, however the competition from several other vendors, including the GPU and CPU makers, will have very competitive solutions of their own.

Source: Vr-zone

NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 690, the world’s fastest consumer graphics card – with a bold industrial design to match. Powered by dual Kepler architecture-based GeForce GPUs, the GTX 690 is meticulously designed — inside and out — to deliver the most refined, elegant and smooth PC gaming experience possible. The surprise announcement was made by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang during his keynote address at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, which is being attended by more than 6,000 gamers from across China. Engineered to reach a new threshold in gaming performance, the GTX 690 also looks the part. Its array of innovative technologies is complemented by sleek materials that contribute to the exotic design of the card, including:

- An exterior frame made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, providing excellent strength and durability
- A fan housing made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening
- High-efficiency power delivery with less resistance, lower power and less heat generated using a 10-phase, heavy-duty power supply with a 10-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board
- Efficient cooling using dual vapor chambers, a nickel-plated finstack and center-mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles
- Low-profile components and ducted baseplate channels for unobstructed airflow, minimizing turbulence and improving acoustic quality

The GTX 690 is powered by a total of 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores, all working to deliver awesome gaming performance for ultimate gaming setups. Designed for the discriminating gamer and ultra-high-resolution, multimonitor NVIDIA Surround configurations, the GTX 690 delivers close to double the frame rates of the closest single GPU product, the GTX 680. Plus, it is more power efficient and quieter when compared to systems equipped with two GTX 680 cards2 running in NVIDIA SLI® configuration.

“The GTX 690 is truly a work of art — gorgeous on the outside with amazing performance on the inside,” said Brian Kelleher, senior vice president of GPU engineering at NVIDIA. “Gamers will love playing on multiple screens at high resolutions with all the eye candy turned on. And they’ll relish showing their friends how beautiful the cards look inside their systems.”

The GTX 690 graphics card is designed using GeForce GPUs based on NVIDIA’s 28-nanometer Kepler architecture, following the introduction late last month of the GTX 680. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 GPU will be available in limited quantities starting May 3, 2012, with wider availability by May 7, 2012 from NVIDIA’s add-in card partners, including ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit and Zotac. Expected pricing is $999.

GlobalFoundries has announced that it has installed speciality production tools at its New York plant capable of 3D stacking 20nm chips. The tools help the company to create Through-Silicon Vias (TSVs), which allows customers to stack multiple chips on top of each other. Basically the technology will allow manufacturers to stack memory chips right on top of the processor, which would drastically improve performance and lead to reduced power consumption. Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer of GlobalFoundries, said the technology can deliver cost and time savings, and reduce technical risk associated with developing new technologies. The technology is seen as the next logical progression for manufacturers instead of simply scaling upwards at the transistor level. While it is logical, it is the same method used by Intel on the current Ivy Bridge processors which cuts power consumption by around 20 per cent, while allowing performance improvements.

Source: fudzilla

Forget TVs. Want something more whimsical and lo-fi than Instagram? This is a digital camera made of cardboard that Ikea included with its press kit at this year's Milan Design Week. It runs on two AA batteries (Ikea-branded, natch) and features a swing-out USB plug, viewfinder cutout, shutter key and paperclip-friendly erase button. While there are no details on the sensor, lens or storage capacity, the camera holds up to 40 pictures. It's expected to land in Ikea stores at some point but exact pricing and availability are still a mystery. No matter -- this camera is sure to impress hipsters everywhere (and yes, that includes us).

Source: Engadget

Cooler Master presents the HAF XM, a mid-tower version of the HAF X that will be sold for $99.

HAF XM - a "mid tower" version of the HAF X, which comes with full tower features for PC enthusiasts. The side window panel offers the best inner view for built system. It supports up to four 200mm fans to keep constant cooling while housing high-end components, such as AMD Radeon HD 7970 and NVIDIA GTX 680. It also supports up to 9 HDDs and 8+1 expansion slots for 3-Way SLI/CF. The smart design of latch on side panel and sliding PSU cable cover ensures the convenience and neatness of system building. The two USB 3.0 Super Speed ports are located on front panel for faster data transfer and easy access.

Features

    Enthusiast case with the support for four 200mm fans
    Latch on 90° rotated side panel for easy system access
    Side window panel offers the best inner view for system
    Rich I/O panel with two USB 3.0 super speed ports
    8+1 expansion slots for NVIDIA 3-way SLI™ and AMD CrossFireX™
    Supports up to 9 HDDs, including two X-Dock slots and one behind the motherboard tray
    Sliding PSU cable cover for improved cable management
    Top compartment with rubber pad for placing personal belongings
    Mesh on front panel, top cover; vents on side panel and bottom for excellent cooling

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., announced today its new slim external DVD writer, the SE-218BB optical disc drive (ODD) that sets the industry standard for ultra portable drives. Built to accompany a new generation of ultrabook and slim laptop designs, the SE-218BB features a compact size that is 18% thinner than conventional DVD writers and is the world's thinnest external optical disc drive with a 14 mm height.

The drive is 8% lighter than Samsung's conventional DVD writer and built to accommodate today's mobile lifestyle. "With its ultra small footprint, consumers will appreciate the SE-218BB sleek drive as an ideal companion for ultrabook users that quickly connects and is USB powered to access content wherever they are," said Maverick Choi, ODD senior manager, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. "Through its AV connectivity mode, the drive is also ideal for Tablet PC users that want to view or hear content from a disc." Using Smart Power technology, SE-218BB connects through its single USB port to power the drive and provide AV connectivity to PCs and notebook computers. For Tablet PCs with a built-in USB port and supporting Android Honeycomb OS 3.1 or above, the SE-218BB allows users on-the-go to watch DVD content on their tablets. The SE-218BB DVD writer is engineered to be compatible with all major operating systems, including Win7 and Mac OS. Featuring Buffer Under Run technology, the drive works to prevent errors that result from writing speeds that can exceed data transfer speeds, while also enabling PC multi-tasking. The SE-218BB DVD writer is an eco-friendly product, manufactured with lead-free soldering technology that eliminates harmful materials such as Pb, cd, cr+6, Hg, PBBs and PBDE. The external DVD drive is capable of reading and writing files at a variety of speeds across different data media types including: 24X CD-ROM, 24X CD-RW, 8X DVD±R recording, 5X DVD-RAM recording, 6X DVD+R Dual Layer recording, 6X DVD-R Dual Layer recording, 8X DVD+RW recording and 6X DVD-RW recording. The SE-218BB is available now worldwide at online retail outlets with a MSRP of US$ 59.99.

We all know that OLED technology is taking ages to become mainstream technology and it is still not there yet. However, Panasonic is investing up to $370 million (S$416M) to build the sixth generation pilot and 8.5 generation of OLED R&D manufacturing lines. Over the past couple of months, we've seen more activity around OLED technology than ever before. For example, Samsung Electronics recently spun off its LCD and Plasma making business into a separate business unit (Samsung Display), but kept OLED R&D and manufacturing lines close to its chest. Not to be undone, we've seen reports that Panasonic is investing between 245-370 million US dollars (S$305-416 million) in building sixth generation OLED TV production line in Himeji, Japan. This is an extension of an already large facility in Himeji, which manufactures majority of LCD panels for Panasonic. To make matters more interesting, Himeji is also home to a pilot Gen-8.5 R&D line, which is deemed to be the first OLED generation for true mass-manufacturing. Panasonic is working closely with the largest suppliers of OLED materials; Japanese Mitsubishi Chemicals and American DuPont. Besides consumer products such as the Eluga smartphone, TV and PC displays, Panasonic also sees a large business opportunity in OLED lighting. It is unclear which of the manufacturing generations will end up being used for OLED lighting business, and which for consumer products. According to a Panasonic representative, OLED panels will come to market in 2013, and we should see OLED dominating the smartphone and PC space by 2015. OLED technology (i.e. Organic Light Emitting Diode) is considered as a cornerstone technology for development of big screen compute devices. The development of technology started back in 1950s, with the first organic diode coming to life in 1987, thanks to Eastman Kodak. Current OLED technology is available as AMOLED and OLED, and powers the most attractive smartphones on the market, such as Samsung Galaxy SII and its successor, SIII. Key advantages of the OLED technology are true black, better color reproduction, less lighting bleed and of course, the ever-important power consumption.

Source: vr-zone