Semiconductors are building blocks of Technology and gadgets and the limiting factor of Silicon chips has always been heat dissipation: More efficiently we can remove heat from semiconductor chips, higher clock they can run on.

LASERs are here to save the future, as they pave way to building most effective, efficient means of cooling Semiconductors.

How LASER Cooling works

Ironically, cooling is observed by actually heating the material. Using lasers, researchers cooled membrane fluctuations to minus 269 degrees C with fractions of energy utilization.

“In experiments, we succeeded in achieving a new and efficient cooling of a solid material by using lasers. We have produced a semiconductor membrane with a thickness of 160 nanometers and an unprecedented surface area of 1 by 1 millimeter,” explained Koji Usami, associate professor at Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute. “In the experiments, we let the membrane interact with the laser light in such a way that its mechanical movements affected the light that hit it. We carefully examined the physics and discovered that a certain oscillation mode of the membrane cooled from room temperature down to minus 269 degrees C, which was a result of the complex and fascinating interplay between the movement of the membrane, the properties of the semiconductor and the optical resonances.

What is worth noting here is that even though the membrane is getting a little bit warmer overall, the membrane is cooled at a certain oscillation and the cooling can be controlled with laser light. So it is cooling by warming! Laser cooling of atoms has been work in progress for years in the institute and they have successfully cooled gas clouds of cesium atoms down to near absolute zero i.e. minus 273 degrees C – using focused lasers – while creating entanglement between two atomic systems.

This is like rocket science, but they make it sound so easy.

What it means for Science & Computing

It Opens entirely new possibilities for a new field of Science called Optomechanics, which is the interaction between light, and a mechanical motion. Optomechanics could pave the way for cooling components in quantum computers, computers of the Future.

This invention could also lead to the development of new sensors for electric current and mechanical forces. Such cooling in some cases could replace expensive cryogenic cooling, which is used today and could result in extremely sensitive sensors that are only limited by quantum fluctuations. The possibilities are endless, you could hold a supercomputer  without melting your hands in the future, thanks to Laser cooling.

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Intel has introduced a new segment of Laptops that would make notebooks, netbooks things of the past. Ultrabooks is a new segment that would bring portability to laptops without sacrificing performance. Ultrabooks would be powered by dual core i5 and even upto quad core Cire i7 processors with performing GPUs, which can give enough throttle to your Ultrabook to play graphics rich games.
Lets take a look at the best Ultrabooks that caught limelight at CES 2012.<

Acer’s S5-shaped
Acer S5 weighs merely three-pound and has a 13.3-inch display that turns on instantly. The body is sleek onyx black magnesium-alloy cover. Its all-metal chassis still feels solid, and we continue to be wary of that shallow keyboard. That 15mm-thick chassis is as impressive as ever — maybe even more so, now that we know half of this year’s Ultrabooks are likely to be larger. But man, is this thing even more beautiful in the light.

AMD bulldozer has achieved insane 8.58Ghz using liquid nitrogen, hitting a world record. But 5.6Ghz is the best we’ve reached with Core i7. The work is done by professional overclocker Hicookie who overclocked his Core i7 3930K to 5.6GHz.

His setup was actually amazing, he used aforementioned Dippin’ Dots refrigerant. Hicookie used an Gigabyte X79 motherboard for making it possible. Gigabyte X79 is first such board to reach a multiplier of 57. Check out the video after a break:

don’t forget, we warned you about the poor video quality

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The new 16-core processors from AMD are targeting enterprise servers for better performance with great power efficiency. AMD Opteron 6200 family of processors code-named Interlagos give enterprises as much as 84 percent better performance, 73 percent better memory bandwidth, and better power efficiency with half the power per core. They save about two-thirds on floor space and two-thirds on platform costs.

The five 6200 chips — 6262 HE, 6272, 6274, 6276 and 6282 SE — run at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 2.6GHz, and are priced between US$523 and $1,019. The chips draw between 85 watts and 140 watts of power and will plug into existing server sockets to replace older 12-core chips.

This is a great deal for SMB companies that are getting their businesses into cloud computing with more agility and efficiency. The new Opteron chips use AMD’s Bulldozer computing cores.

The Bulldozer architecture mixes the CPU with integer units and a shared floating point unit so more operations can be executed per clock cycle while drawing lower power. Other chip improvements include Turbo Core technology, which can increase clock speed by up to 500MHz across all cores and up to 1GHz on some cores depending on the performance required.

AMD is also introducing the AMD Opteron 4200 series, formerly code-named Valencia, which will come with between six and eight cores. The chips operate at clock speeds between 1.6GHz and 3.0GHz, and are priced between $125 and $377. The 4200 processors are for dense server environments with low-power consumption. The chips draw between 35 watts and 95 watts of power, and as low as 4.3 watts per core

AMD is already workign the server OEMs like HP, Acer, dell to get these new 16-core chips to market, as early as possible.

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“The idea is that at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half” which will shape the future of mobile computing in all forms.

Koomey’s law is more consumer centric, which says that Energy efficiency and thus, battery life is becoming more of a concern than the raw power of new devices thanks to the continuing rise of smartphones, tablets and notebooks. Till very recently, both Moore’s law and Koomey’s law had been valid, but Moore’s law had been invalidated according to several scientists.

Typically, performance improvement can be achieved by either overclocking the chipset ( by delivering more power to the transistors) thus generating more heat, or by simply adding more transistors to meet the new performance requirements. Both the problems of performance and energy efficiency have been answered thus far with a single solution: reducing the size of transistors. This allows for more of them to be placed on a chipset and reduces each transistor’s energy and heat mitigation requirements. e.g. a 45nm chip is more power hungry than a 22nm chip, and so on; Size difference is obvious.

Energy efficiency of transistors is a better concept and benchmark to measure improvements over years.

“This is a fundamental characteristic of information technology that uses electrons for switching… It’s not just a function of the components on a chip”. It stands to reason then, that future technologies will likely be based on this same premise, and thus conform to the theory.

Physicist Richard Feynman tells us Koomey’s theory would hold true for decades to come. In 1985, Richard analyzed the electrical requirements of computers and estimated that the technology could theoretically improve by a factor of one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) beforeit reaches the limit. So far,  we’ve only seen an improvement of around a factor of forty thousand (40,000). Whatever may happen, both Moore and Koomey believe that a technology that efficiently delivered boundless processing power would be magical indeed. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

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You can get started with a Arduino project with a easy to setup USB-based development board like Teensy. Other than being good at programming, you would have to tinker a couple of solders to get connections for peripherals which may not be handy for all.

Teagueduino is an open source electronic board and interface that allows you to realize creative ideas without soldering or knowing how to code, while teaching you the ropes of programming and embedded development (like arduino). Teagueduino is designed to help you discover your inner techno-geek and embrace the awesomeness of making things in realtime — even if you’ve only ever programmed your VCR.

Teagueduino can prevent all the soldering trouble, replacing intimidating code with simple drop-down menus, which you can adjust in realtime, giving you instant feedback as you make adjustments to your ‘coding’ handiwork. Teagueduino board includes snap-enabled inputs and outputs.

Teaguedino is a protoype as of the time of writing but  would be available soon for  $160 to get a fully assembled kit, and the second mode with extra I/O ports for $260. As of now they are catching up their funding goals and once done, they would be available in November.

Game example:

Related: Arduino Alternative : Android based DIY projects

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Although with AI (Artificial Intelligence), computers can learn, they are not smart enough to make independent decisions, they don’t think beyond what they are told and even this artifical thinking can be slow at times when its a cpu intensive operation. For instance, Face recognition is something human brain can do much faster than a household computer, but, when compared to mathematical operations, computers beat humans collectively. Its a challenge when we try training a computer to behave like a human brain.

Researchers at IBM have made a key step towards Cognitive computing, a methodology that let computer think like humans. IBM has built two chips that process data more like how humans. Its a new CPU architecture, that surpasses the current Intels and AMD (von Neumann architecture).

These chips, like human brain, are extremely efficient, to prove the point, these chips run at 10Hz and still beat most modern computers. 10Hz is roughly the same as the frequency of human brain.

The chips represent a significant milestone in a six-year-long project that has involved 100 researchers and some $41 million in funding from the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IBM has also committed an undisclosed amount of money.

No Neurons or Bio-parts inside, yet
These are no biological chips but silicon chips inspired by human brain. They work as a human brain would. As IBM calls it, they are “neurobiology to make up what is referred to as a ‘neurosynaptic core’ with integrated memory (replicated synapses), computation (replicated neurons), and communication (replicated axons)”.

IBM demoed steering a simulated car through a maze, playing Pong using these chips. The chips’ ability to adapt to types of information that it wasn’t specifically programmed to expect is a key feature.

Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said the new chips have parts that behave like digital “neurons” and “synapses” that make them different than other chips. Each “core,” or processing engine, has computing, communication and memory functions.

“You have to throw out virtually everything we know about how these chips are designed. The key, key, key difference really is the memory and the processor are very closely brought together. There’s a massive, massive amount of parallelism.”

The project is part of the same research that led to IBM‘s announcement in 2009 that it had simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. Using progressively bigger supercomputers, IBM had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse’s brain in 2006, a rat’s full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human’s cerebral cortex in 2009. A computer with the power of the human brain is not yet near.

Also Read: Simulate Human Brain

We are still a decade away from a computer that would beat human brain, its just a good start that we see now, first step is taken.

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As Intel calims:

With these upgrades, customers will enjoy:

• Better performance for photo, video, and music tasks.
• Better responsiveness for everyday PC activities.
• Better responsiveness for PC productivity at work or at home.

Wait a minute, how is that even possible?

Truth be told, the hardware was already capable of doing more but looks like it was not unlocked out of the box. Intel had disabled HyperThreading technology, more L3 cache for applications on some of the Core i3 processors, and Intel Pentiums, which will be unlocked via this software upgrade. Intel is selling these as $50 upgrade cards.

Pentium 2.8GHz G6951 is sold with 3MB of L3 cache and has HyperThreading disabled. By purchasing and activating the $50 upgrade card, a full 4MB of L3 cache is enabled along with HyperThreading.

Compatible processors:

Intel® Core™ i3-2102 Processor
Intel® Pentium® G622 Processor
Intel® Core™ i3-2312M Processor
Intel® Pentium® G6951 Processor

As with all forms of DRM and software unlocks, it’s only a matter of time before modders/hackers find a way to circumvent Intel’s $50 upgrade card.

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Qualcomm is claiming that its next generation of Snapdragon chips would beat current generation of processors used in gaming consoles like PS3. That’s a big claim, but noting the facts laid out by Sony PS Vita, these look real.

S4 codenamed ‘Krait’ devices would launched by end of the year. S4 would be first 28nm quad core processors and run Adreno 225 GPU – Quad core cpu + Adreno 225 aim to blow away the fluidity of PS3 graphics.

Qualcomm S

There are four new tiers of processor, named S1 to S4. That “S” stands for “System”, with the number referring to how powerful the chip is.

S1 includes standard handsets such as the HTC Droid Incredible and Sony Ericsson X10i, S2 is featured in more powerful phones like the HTC Thunderbolt and LG Revolution, and S3 powers uberphones and tablets such as the HTC Sensation and HP TouchPad.

Portable Gaming & Future

Portable gaming is going to pave the way to future. Already Android and iPhone has together eaten the major percentage of mobile market and they would start interfering with consoles next year. Imagine this – plug your mobile to a TV and use it like a console or wirelessly stream video. If not in a year, you would see this in practice 2 years from now.

2012 is the year of Quad cores. Nvidia Tegra 3, Snapdragon S4, and Intel is jumping in too. Apple isn’t holding back either, iPad 3 (or iPad 4) and iPhone 4 are going to be A6 quad core too.

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VAIO Z measures 13-inch and is thinner and lighter than the current Apple Macbook Air, but will cost almost twice the price; £2,699. However, Asus UX21 is the nearest competitor by being the thinnest Core i7 Laptop.

Sony VAIO Z just weighs 1.18 kg (compared to 1.32 kg for Air and 1.1kg for ASUS UX21) and be just 16.65mm thin (compared to 17mm of MBA). Full dimensions are 210 x 16.65 x 330mm. Vaio Z comes with a backlit keyboard, ‘button-less’ touchpad.

The laptop packs in huge number of pixels in small 13” display. With resolutions of upto 1600×900, VAIO Z is among the highest pixel density laptops. The display has an anti-reflective coating that cuts glare.

VAIO Z Specs

• CPU: Intel Core i7-2620M 2.70GHz (with Turbo Boost up to 3.40GHz),
• RAM: 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM,
• Hard disk: 256GB SSD RAID storage (4 SSDs)
• Display: 13.1” 1600×900 or 1920×1080 HD display
• Quick Boot that cuts down boot time to half
• Embedded VAIO ‘everywair’ 3G WWAN on selected models connects via your mobile broadband operator.
• biometric sensor to log in and unlock.
• Power media Dock: a “monolithic expansion module” an brings with it Thunderbolt connectivity (Light Peak), HDMI and VGA connectivity to connect up to four displays, and 1GB of RAM extra graphics courtesy of AMD to boost overall graphics performance. It also comes with a DVD / Blu-ray drive.
• Battery: 7 hours  + 7 hours sheet battery (14 hours total)
• HD web camera powered by Exmor technology

Availability & Pricing: Sony VAIO Z would be available in late July 2011 and cost nearly $3000.

Related: http://geeknizer.com/thinnest-core-i7-laptop/

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The company believes that Intel’s x86 architecture is built to work for generic applications that are mostly limited to single cores and few threads, they cannot scale well beyond to levels where Intel cannot. Tilera Gx family targets high-throughput applications.

Tile Gx family has 3 flavors 36-core Gx3036, the 64-core GX3064 and the 100-core Gx3100. All of them target high performance multi-core computing designed for high-end web servers & applicatons including vast databases and heavy frameworks.

If the company Tilera is to be believed, the Gx family is at least 10 times power efficient, per-watt. With 100 cores on a single die, the processor consumes less than 48 watts, which is way lower than Sandybridge. Each core rated at less than 0.5 watt is the among the most efficeient processors ever designed for servers.

Tile Gx Family Specs:

• An array of 16 to 100 general-purpose processor cores (tiles)
• 64-bit VLIW processors with a 64-bit instruction bundle
• Three-way pipeline with up to three instructions per cycle
• 32K L1i cache, 32K L1d cache, 256K L2 cache per tile
• Up to 750 billion operations per second (BOPS)
• Up to 200 Tbps of on-chip mesh interconnect
• Over 500 Gbps memory bandwidth with four 64-bit DDR3 controllers

Sandy bridge consumes upto 95W, and Xeon goes upto 130W.

Tilera goes further in criticizing Intel’s upcoming architecture “Knights Ferry n 2012”. They argue that

“an x86 is an x86, whether it’s Atom cores, Pentium cores — the overhead that you’re carrying is the same. You need to carry the overhead to be binary compatible,” Bishara said. “What [Intel] do, even with Atom, is lower the frequency to get lower power and to get more cores in the same chip.”

Tilera’s Gx3036 would become available around July, followed by Gx3064 and Gx3100 in Q1 2012 and stratton 28nm chip in 2012 going upto 200 cores. With the big plans on its line, its already in talks with big cloud players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

Tilera is non-x86, but Dev Toolchain would be available

Gx chips are compatible with 2.6.36 kernel release of Linux showing love for CentOS. The applications can be written in any of the popular languages: C and C++, Java, PHP, Perl and Python, which are implemented via a GCC compiler that has been ported to Tilera’s architecture.

Tilera’s Architecture – The secret recipe

The DNA of the multicore super-performance is the way it communicated among multiple-cores. Gx chips pass information between cores via a mesh network, which distributes the cache throughout the processor and allows for multiple connections between individual cores. Applications can access the on-chip network, and can fully use it to communicate between cores, the result is a superior throughput in the IO among the chips, and better cache management as compared to sandybridge.

We do believe that Tilera is bringing some breakthrough improvements in the CPU architecture especially on the server sides. The ultimate question that still remains unanswered is “Will the customers (big cloud players) port apps to a new architecture?, would it be easy enough?”

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ASUS X21 ultrathin laptop packs Core i7 in under 17mm thickness at its thickest end. The entire body is built from an aluminum alloy that makes it weigh freaking low at 1.1kg. It also features fast resume capability with resumes from sleep as fast as 2 seconds.

Other specs includes a SATA III SSD, USB 3.0 connectivity, a glass trackpad and a metallic keyboard keys. UX21 is coming in September 2011, stay tuned.

image credit: engadget

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The upgrade beings significant jump in gaming performance making iMacs capable of handling all the lastest games smoothly. The 21.5” iMac comes in AMD 6750M and 6770M, while the 27” model adds a 6970M GPU. 27” iMac can push out 2560×1440 resolution display.

Here are some benchmarks which would give you some idea of the capabilities of these Apple desktops. Checkout raw specs of the AMD Radeon 6750M, 6770M and 6970M GPUs.

iMac 2011 Benchmark

Gaming Performance

If you are a hard core Gamer, don’t look out for 6750M or 6770M.  But the Radeon 6970M with 2GB of DDR5 RAM, handles almost any games quite easily. However, if you play them in 2560×1400 resolution, performance would suffer. If you stick the upper limit to 1920×1080, you would be happy with the performance even with high detail in just about any modern game.

Radeon 6750M

The weakest of these Radeon GPUs is best suited to running games with basic OpenGL games. If you plan to play latest games, you would have to stick with low detail settings. At 1280×800, StarCraft II and FIFA 2011 can give out 100 fps. With High settings most games deliver below 30fps at 1920×1080 with 16x anti-aliasing. Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 each slow to a 12fps crawl on ultra settings.

Radeon 6770M

With the higher clock speeds, it can deliver better performance than 6750M. At a resolution of 1360×768, several games like  StarCraft II, DIRT 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare are playable at near 120fps.

Radeon 6970M

This is the one you want if you are serious about graphics. The 6970M sports double GDDR5 RAM at 2GB and stream processors at 960. At 1920×1080, Ultra settings, it was capable of give out 35fps in Crysis 2, 70fps in Black Ops and 58fps in StarCraft II. All these are decentnumber for a Core i7 Sandybridge.

Video Encoding Benchmark iMac 2011 vs 2010

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IOIO (pronounced yoyo) is capable of doing almost everything that a Arduino could, including a retro-style alarm clock that can ring when you get messages.

And there’s a Wall Printer which uses seven Sharpie-style market pens hooked up to servos for an old-school printer effect controlled by an Android phone.

These are just some early samples, the potential is huge.

Why Android instead of regular Arduino?

• High cost.
• Complicated. Especially so for complete beginners.
• High latency.
• Low bandwidth.
• Required replacement of the Android device OS.
• Large physical size.

Definitely worth considering if you’re into Android and electronics; you can pre-order the IOIO for Android here, for $49.95.

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We’ve tried explaining mechanism of LCD displays in the past but nothing actually beats a video that teardowns the LCD display and talks about in detail step by step.

Bill Hammack, a self-appointed Engineer Guy, takes us from the LED arrays that provide the light for most current LCDs, through all the filters and diffusers designed to make that light uniform, and into the ways thin film transistors make it possible for us to show moving color images of cats diving into boxes on such displays. It’s exciting, deeply nerdy stuff, and it awaits your audience after the break.

Watch the video and immerse yourself to LCD display technology:

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Smart Cover has grabbed everyone’s attraction with those easy snap-on magnets. We knew it worked with magnets, but exactly how?
It was expected that Apple might have used magnets with special properties — correlated magnets. Correlated magnets have multiple poles that could be contributing to the unique functionality of the cover. But in practice there were plenty of bipolar magnets, non were correlated.

Here are some takeways from the Teardown:

There are a total of 31 magnets within the iPad 2 and Smart Cover: 10 magnets in the iPad 2, and a whopping 21 magnets inside the Smart Cover. Magnetic viewing film has special properties that allow it to react to a magnet’s poles, and it worked wonders in showing the magnets hidden beneath the Smart Cover and iPad 2. Magnets are arrayed in such a way that made clamping the Smart Cover to the iPad 2 quite easy. The Smart Cover has one dedicated magnet that turns off the iPad 2′s screen. The rest are used to either clamp to the iPad on the right side (the far-right column of magnets).

The alternating polarity (+ – + -) of the magnets in the iPad 2 was complemented by the opposite alternating polarity of the magnets in the Smart Cover (- + – +), ensuring that the Smart Cover always sits in the same orientation on the iPad 2.

It turns out that the Smart Cover doesn’t work nearly as well once you remove the magnets, steel plate, and plastic structural supports.

How iPad 2 Smart Cover Works

Explanation 1: Proximity Sensors:

The proximity sensor can detect how far or how close an object is to the iPad like the iPhone which shuts of the display when held against a face. When the iPad’s screen is covered, the device enters sleep mode and locks. Once the cover is removed, the iPad wakes. Using proximity sensors would allow the iPad to recognize when the Smart Cover is open or closed. It’s likely Apple incorporated 3 proximity sensors to prevent users from accidentally locking their iPad when holding it. Three sensors — one on the top, bottom and right side — would prevent accidentally locking the iPad’s screen yet allow the device to sleep when a Smart Cover blocks all three sensors.

Explanation 2: Magnetic Field:

As per the teardown, all locking and unlocking is based on the magnetism. When iPad smart cover is applie, iPad detects these strong bipolar magnets, and locks the device. When the cover is removed, magnetic field is absent, iPad 2 detects that its time to wakeup. Since Magnetic circuits are much lesser powered (~3mA) than proximity sensors, its quiet possible that Explanation 2 is more realistic.

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The AMD HD 6980 is the world’s fastest dual-chip graphics card for screaming-fast gamer PCs, which can be added to a computer and power as many as five displays at full resolution.

AMD had recently launched few new APU (application processor unit) which is a FUSION of CPU & GPU on a single chip.

AMD claims that the new dual-card graphics card can run 1.4 to 1.8 times faster than a card with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics chip. AMD claims you can achieve resolution upto 7680×1600 and still get outstanding speeds. And if you want more, put two of these graphics card ( equals four chips) you can double the performance.

There is a difference in strategy among the two companies: Nvidia typically has the fastest desktop graphics chip, while AMD can take the crown for the fastest graphics card with two chips in it. Its hard to say which one is a better strategy but gamers do get a choice.

AMD HD6990 graphics card, code-name Antilles, has two settings to make overclocking a child’s play. The card drains 450 watts of power, which is substantial but as far as the heat generation is concerned, the design enables each chip to dissipate the same amount of heat.

The total performance of HD 6990  exceeds 5.4 teraflops with each graphics chip having 2.64 billion transistors. It has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory and runs at 830 Mhz (overclockable to 880 megahertz). It has 3,072 stream processors.

AMD is also offering updates to its Gaming Evolved program, which supports open standards for gaming technologies, out of which main one is “Open Stereo 3D“,

AMD has now shipped more than 35 million graphics cards that are compatible with Microsoft’s DX11 graphics standard.

Dirt 2, a DX11 Game:

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If you know about HDMI, USB 3.0, you might actually feel the inferiority of those technologies, as LightPeak takes over.

LightPeak is Intel proprietary Optical cable interface to connect peripheral bus giving throughputs upto 10Gigabit/s and have a potential of extending to 100Gb/s over a period of next few years.  At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds. Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible. Light Peak also has the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as peripherals, displays, disk drives, docking stations, and more.

A typical computer system involves a large number of interfaces namely SATA, SCSI, USB, Firewire, PCI Express – each one dedicated to its scope with limited bandwidth capabilities. LightPeak would clear of this mess by providing one unified interface to connect almost anything – whether it’s a Display panel/Monitor or a external/internal harddrive, they all work on LightPeak, and they work much faster than before.

Apart from unifying communications, it would make interfaces cheaper Light Peak, unlike most fiber ICs, was designed to be lithographically created directly on a CMOS IC, which can reduce size and manufacturing costs. However, the LightPeak will not replace existing HDMI, DisplayPort technologies immediately, it would be gradual.

The Light Peak cable contains a pair of optical fibers (each 62.5 micron wide) that are used for upstream and downstream traffic. This means that Light Peak offers a maximum of 10 Gbit/s in each direction at the same time i.e. 10Gbps Full duplex. The maximum length of the cable can run upto 100meters, requiring repeaters beyond that.

Since LightPeak cables has decent max length, they have also been looked as 10Gigabit Ethernet killers. 10Gigabit ethernet is way more costly, but its hard to actually transition all future networks to a new physical layer.

Apple’s Thunderbolt Technology

Apple is doing a rebranding for the LightPeak technology to Thunderbolt High Speed I/O. The rumor gears are really starting to churn with regard Apple’s upcoming MacBook Pro refresh and now we have a purported leak of the upcoming spec sheet for the new 13-inch model. The Thunderbolt port would look much like the Mini DisplayPort but has a tidy little lightning logo next to it.

Update: Apple has announced new MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt technology.

“The new MacBook Pro brings next generation dual and quad Core processors, high performance graphics, Thunderbolt technology and FaceTime HD to the great design loved by our pro customers,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Thunderbolt is a revolutionary new I/O technology that delivers an amazing 10 gigabits per second and can support every important I/O standard which is ideal for the new MacBook Pro.”

Imagine accessing multiple streams of uncompressed HD video — from your notebook — at speeds that let you edit an HD feature film in real time. That’s how Thunderbolt technology will connect the next generation of high-performance peripherals to the next generation of computers — starting with MacBook Pro. Ultrafast and ultraflexible, the Thunderbolt pipeline is more than 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and it offers unprecedented expansion capabilities. It changes what you can do on a notebook.

The Thunderbolt port will give you plug-and-play performance with a whole new world of Thunderbolt peripherals, as well as with the Apple LED Cinema Display and other Mini DisplayPort peripherals. You can daisy-chain as many as six devices, including your display. And with support for video and eight-channel audio, it’s easy to connect HDMI-compatible devices — like your TV and home stereo — using the HDMI adapter you already have. Current VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort adapters are also supported.

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Just that you are aware, Texas Instruments’ OMAP3 processor powers Motorola Droid Pro, Droid 2, Palm Pre 2, etc. and OMAP4 powers the BlackBerry Playbook. Now the future is held by Texas Instruments while they raise curtain on OMAP5, with 2Ghz Quad core.

The 28 nanometer OMAP 5 applications processors carry on the OMAP family tradition of delivering significant increases in performance and functionality, while lowering power consumption compared to their predecessors. Specifically, they offer up to 3x processing performance and five-fold 3D graphics improvement, yet provide a nearly 60 percent average power reduction compared to a sample user experience on the OMAP 4 platform. Additionally, the OMAP 5 platform’s software is designed for maximum reuse to ease migration from the OMAP 4 platform.

OMAP5 Specs & facts:

• Core Clock speeds up to 2Ghz Quad core — 2 ARM Cortex-A15 cores capable of speeds up to 2 Ghz, and 2 Cortex-M4 cores
• Lower Power consumption: TI promises processing performance 3x that of OMAP4, all while decreasing average power consumption by 60%.
• TI claims it can support 3 QSXGA displays running at the same time. QSXGA is a resolution of 2560×2048.
• Multiple simultaneous cameras – Ideal for 3D video
• Delivery 2011: mid 2011 production, hits the market around the mid-point of 2012.

via TI

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Nvidia has plans of leaping the current gen smartphone processors Tegra 2. Within few months, the graphics giant will launch Tegra 2 3D, a 3D version of Tegra 2 with high performance 1.2Ghz dual core processor and 3D display.

At CES 2011 we learned that existing Tegra 2 chips will power flagship Android devices like the LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix 4G smartphones, as well as Motorola’s Xoom tablet.

That’s just a taste of things to come in the near future. Think new breed of portable devices incorporating glass-less 3D displays, Blu-ray support and enhanced graphics, paving the way for stereoscopic 3D gaming, exciting user interfaces and other perks.

Going further, there will be Tegra 3 Quad core Cortex A9 1.5 Ghz CPU with 3x faster graphics, BluRay video, 1900×1200 display. Something of that config is a true desktop replacement.

The ULP designation on this listing stands for Ultra Low Power in NVIDIA parlance, which would indicate an aggressively tuned power management system — the only way we can envision a quad-core anything operating within a tablet. Fall 2011 is when we should know for sure.

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Accelerometers were once the sole way of sensing smartphone’s orientation, motion. iPhone 4 changed the trend, making Gyroscope eternal part of today’s smartphones. Accelerometers work great in its own domain, but it doesnt address enough “degrees of freedom” to sense a Full 360 degree motion, orientation.

The explanation of “How Gyroscopes work” isnt that easy and this is the reason why most online tutorials have failed to explain the real behavior. When I first leant about it, the more I read, the more I was confused. Here is some basic explanation of how it works, its meant to be easy if you know basic Physics.

How Gyroscopes Work:

Gyroscope can balance on almost on any surface with single contact: It can be a finger or even a string. They can resist motion about the spin axis in very odd ways; but the most interesting effect is that gravity-defying part which is called Precession.

Newton’s first law of motion states that “a body on motion continues to move at constant speed, along a straight line, unless acted upon by an external/unbalanced force”. A rotating object has angular momentum that tends to rotate the object continuously. So Once the wheel of a gyroscope starts rotating, it resists any change in its axis of rotation (due to angular momentum). If we apply an external force that tries to change it, there is an opposite reaction (Newton’s 3rd law) that pushes it in the opposite direction. This force is always tangential (perpendicular), and because this point of the wheel is rotating, the force tends to balance itself in a circular motion, which also holds the gyroscope spinning against gravity with a single point of contact.

Here is a video that would make every bit of the above explanation clear:

iPhone’s Digital Gyroscope:

Of course, Gadgets cant afford to have a spinning wheel, it would be way too powerhog and huge. Smartphones employ a electronic stripped down version which essentially works on the same concepts, but in a slimmer, meaner packages.

A microelectromechanical system (MEMS) is an embedded system that integrates electronic and mechanical components at a very small scale. A basic MEMS device consists of an ASIC and a micro-machined silicon sensor. The AGD1 2022 FP6AQ chip found in the iPhone 4 is a MEMS gyroscope, designed by STMicroelectronics.

MEMS gyroscope found inside the iPhone 4 is nearly identical to an off-the-shelf STMicroelectronics L3G4200D gyroscope.  It comprises of of a plate, called the “proof mass,” that vibrates (oscillates) when a drive signal is applied to set of drive capacitor plates. When a user rotates the phone, the proof mass gets displaced in the X, Y, and Z directions by Coriolis forces. An ASIC processor senses the proof mass’ displacement through capacitor plates located underneath the proof mass, as well as finger capacitors at the edges of the package.

The V654A ASIC die converts the tiny capacitive signals from the GK10A MEMS die into a digital signal which is fed into the iPhone 4. Then this data is used to steer the wheel of the car in the Game, etc.

Its complex in implementation, the design involves high precision design & electronics.

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The new Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, will come in 29 new flavors with Integrated graphics options. The new Core processor range is an upgrade from existing Westmere 32nm processor, essentially falling into Intel’s “Tock” development phase in which they improve the performance, features, efficiency on the existing Chip fabrication technique i.e. 32nm.

Whats New in Core 2011 Processors

The new family of processors are all based on Intel’s 32nm microarchitecture and are the first to put the processor, memory controller, and graphics on the same die. This means you will have a smaller package and parts get to take advantage of each other better, e.g. by dynamically clocking both the CPU cores and graphics to match whatever workload you throw at it, and giving them up to 1MB of shared cache. Speaking of those graphics, while they may still not be on par with a discrete video card, they’re more powerful than ever before. According to Intel, the new HD 2000 and 3000 processor graphics provide 2x the performance of Capella-based systems.

Intel has improved its Turbo Boost and Hyper-threading technologies such that the new chips enable higher levels of CPU performance as well — up to a 60 percent improvement with quad-core mobile CPUs.

The performance is not at the cost of efficiency. The new integrated chips reduce power consumption by using a smaller integrated package and can actually switch off components its not using , to improve battery life.

The processor details

Intel is this time looking to satisfy Overclockers with a set of specially-marked overclockable ‘K’ series processors which lets them individually set the clockspeed ratios for each individual core, provided they run on a premium P67 Express motherboard.

New Features in Core 2011 Processors:

Geek part aside, these are the few features every user can understand:

• Intel Quick Sync Video -  Intel’s promising way faster video transcoding with it’s new integrated Quick Sync feature, which does encoding in hardware — it says it will be 17x faster than older generations of integrated graphics. Intel’s partnered with media software companies like CyberLink, Corel, and ArcSoft to enable this hardware-accelerated H.264 and MPEG-2 video conversion.

• Intel InTru 3D / Clear Video HD – 3D Blu-ray playback over HDMI 1.4? Not a problem for Intel’s Core 2011 platform. This doesn’t mean Intel’s providing the 3D technology for laptops or desktops, but it’s promising that you can play stereoscopic 3D and HD content on your TV using HDMI.

• WiDi 2.0 – Our biggest complaints about the original WiDi was the lack of support for 1080p. Well, Intel’s finally enabled streaming of full HD with its latest processors. There’s still lag and you will need to pick up a new TV receiver, most likely a new one from Netgear, to take advantage of the new full HD abilities. We’ve got more details on this and Intel’s new Insider video content service here.

Additional Details:

Related: BIOS death Nears with Sandybridge, UEFI is the Future

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Flash Player 10.2 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux in adobe labs.

Stage Video API — full hardware acceleration for videos

Stage Video API delivers best-in-class, high performance video playback across platforms. Flash Player 10.1 had support for hardware decoding of H.264 content, arguably the most taxing part of playing back video.
The new API uses the GPU rather than the CPU for even more stages (hence the name) of the video rendering pipeline, including color conversion, scaling and blitting. So how much CPU will it use now for playing 1080p HD videos? NIL. Yes, for most cases, when available is fairly good, you will have almost no processing on CPU.

However, to take the full advantage of the Stage API, Content providers have to update their video players. Just because Adobe has good partnership with Google, expect them to be rolling out soon on Youtube and Android. From what we’ve heard it is already available on Google TVs and under test with Youtube.

IE9 hardware acceleration support and multi-monitor support
The new beta also includes Internet Explorer 9 hardware acceleration support , enhanced text rendering, a native custom mouse cursors API and support for full screen playback with multiple monitors.
Flash Player will also use the GPU to render other graphic elements leading to a performance boost of up to 35 percent in some cases. Apart from that, users will be able to watch a full-screen flash content on multiple monitors.

Native custom mouse cursors

Flash developers looking to add more personality to their apps, or just to annoy their users, can now create native custom mouse cursors. This means that they’ll be able to create custom mouse themes which will then be handled natively by the operating system, a much better and faster way to the alternative, rendering a custom cursor inside Flash.

Sub-pixel Text Rendering:

S-pixel text rendering enhances the Font type faces, making them better looking regardless of the fonts or local scripts used. It makes the typography beautiful on just any device.

Flash Player 10.2 Beta for Windows, Linux, Mac is available for download here.

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These days, the most popular topic is the Xbox Kinect hacks and here we’ve a guide on How to Reverse engineer a USB.

USB is a very complex protocol, much more complicated than Serial or Parallel, SPI and even I2C. USB uses only two wires but they are not used as ‘receive’ and ‘transmit’ like serial, data is bidirectional and differential. What that means is that the data sent depends on the difference in voltage between the two data lines D+ and D-.

The fact that USB is also very structured makes it hackable, easy to reverse engineer —  Its easy to grab the format of packets agreed upon and you don’t have to bother about checksums, they are pretty much abstract. Since every computer now made has a USB host core, that does a lot of the tough work for you, and there are many software libraries to assist you in doing a lot with USB.

How to Reverse Engineer Xbox Kinect Motor:

First thing first, you will need a Linux or Mac machine to get your first hands on USB debugging. Both these unix environments has a powerful tool called lsusb.

For linux, run lsusb -vv (ultra verbose) for Mac, run system_profiler SPUSBDataType

First thing you will have to grab  is this PID, VID. Every type USB device must have a unique VID and PID. The VID is the manufacturer. In this case, 0x045e is the VID for Microsoft. All Microsoft products will have that VID. Each product has a different PID, so all Kinect Motors use PID 0x02b0 this doesn’t differ between two Kinects, they’ll both have the same PID.

Second thing that goes is the descriptor. A descriptor is a sort of ‘menu’ of what the device can do and how it likes to transfer data. In general, each device has one descriptor.

Learning in detail:

You can read the complete detailed guide at ladyada. It goes into depth on how USB works, how to record the communication, what to look for, how to deconstruct what you’ve found, and how to put it all to use. This is all done with real world data from the Kinect so you could easily follow along at home.  There is source code available so you can download example and see how to control the device as well.

This a great tutorial. I’m sure you can become a good usb hacker by the time you are done reading it.

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