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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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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Nexus 3 is coming out in next few months, but until recently the processor was unknown. But what was known for sure is that it would ship with Android 4.0 IceCream Sandwich.

But at NVIDIA’s earnings call yesterday, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang hinted at a possible partnership with Google for the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, saying:

… we’re working very closely with Google on Ice Cream Sandwich, and it’s a very important new generation of operating system based on starting from the Honeycomb base and I’m expecting it to be really terrific. And so we’re working very closely with the Google team, and Tegra will be surely be wonderful for Ice Cream when it comes.

We’re really excited about the work that they’re doing on Ice Cream. And I can’t comment too much more other than that, but we’re working very closely with their teams on the Ice Cream Sandwich. And as all of these products — they will come to the market when they’re great, and I’m certainly expecting them to be great on this year.

And Google already said at Google IO that Nexus 3 would be the first device to get IceCream sandwich. All rays of light form one beam: Nexus 3 is going to be powered by Tegra 3, a super processor for the smartphone.

Nvidia Tegra 3 Specs & facts:

• World’s first mobile quad-core CPU
• New 12-Core NVIDIA GPU with support for 3D stereo
• Resolutions upto 2560 x 1600.
• 5x faster than the Tegra 2

Qualcomm, TI aren’t going to rest, lets see what offerings would they come up with. Android is going to get a lot of traction.

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Update: Keynote Video now available (scroll to bottom)

Here’s a list of things that were announced:

1. Movie Rentals:

You can now rent and watch movies on any android device or via browser as low as $1.99. The rental is valid for 30 days and 24hours after starting the video first time. You can even download the whole movie, and watch it offline on your tablet or phone.

2. Android Honeycomb 3.1

• Full support for Google TV along with Tablets. Same UI, same apps. New Google TV PArtners: Samsung, Vizio in addition to Logitech, Sony.
• Resizable widgets on homescreen, plus other ui improvements.
• USB host mode that will let you connect any USB device with your Honeycomb device beit be  importing photos from your digital camera, or an Xbox 360 controller.
• Google’s new Movies app that will let you rent thousands of movies from the Android market, and it will be available on Google TVs as well
• New Apps: Books
• New graphical transitions, animations, more GPU powered (hardware accelerated), faster, better UI.
• Data storage encryption.

3. Google Music

• A free beta service for you to upload 20,000 songs to google’s cloud, free of cost
• Playback anywhere: Browser, any android phone, Tablet.
• Cached locally on phone/tablet.
• iTunes, Media player compatible desktop clients that syncs your playlists.
• “No wires, no painful syncing — it’s all just available instantly.”

4. Android IceCream Sandwich (Android 4.0)

• Unified for Smartphones + Tablets goodbye fragmentation
• New innovative features like face-tracking and camera focus shifting based on voice recognition.

5.  Guaranteed updates:

Manufacturers and carriers committed to making sure their Android devices receive the very latest updates. All four major US carriers (and Vodafone) as well as HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola are on board, and all will guarantee you timely upgrades to the latest version of Android for eighteen months after release, provided the hardware’s capable.

6.  Android Hardware accessory support:

• Use any external hardware/accessory with your Android device e.g. workout machine or a massage chair.
• Full sport for DIY Arduino based hardware projects using ADK.
• Several hardware accessories to be available soon.

7.  Android@Home

• Google wants to think of “every appliance in your home” as a potential accessory for your phone. this brings endless possibilities. You cna do nasty stuff like turning on and off based on calendar events, applications talking to washing machines, games automatically adjusting for mood lighting, and basically little green dudes taking care of all the menial duties in your house.
• One amazing demo was a concept, Android-powered device hub called Tungsten. Using NFC tag embedded into CD cases the device was able to detect the CD and add it to your library. Another touch and it started automatically.

Google has really taken a step further in Openness of Android, the excitement is sky high. Keynote video after a break!

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Till date, world’s thinnest smartphone was crowned to Samsung Galaxy SII, but the days are not far when such smartphones would go even thinner. The new contendor is flexible enough to fold like a paper.

The e-paper prototype PaperPhone sports a 3.75-inch thin-film display. Its s smartphone and hence can do everything you would expect it to do: make calls, Read books, and Play music. The rest of the phone’s hardware is situated alongside the non-bendablepart, which is also surprisingly thin.

Queen’s Human Media Lab director says, “This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years”.

However, the prototype is based on e-ink technology, the same technology that powers Amazon’s kindle ebook readers. It can be operated by bending the corners to turn a page, squeezing to make a call, and even written on with a pen. Were you expecting more ?

The research institute, Vertegaal along with MERG claims that the larger versions of the displays could eliminate paper and printers from offices. This is possible because E-ink displays require no power until the information on screen is refreshed.

So this is flexible, but how much would it cost?  It’s a $7,000 prototype, but the final product would be ultra affordable.

And yes, the prototype uses Android. Of course its not ready for the primetime, but we grab a fairly good idea of where we are heading.

Watch the thinnest bendable phone in action:

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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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The basic principle behind quantum computation is simple. Instead of silicon transistors, quantum properties are used to represent data and perform operations on these data. Bits  from current generation computers are replaced with two-state Qubits.

April 18th, 2011 would be considered the first remarkable achievement in the history of quantum computers. For years to come, this day would be recalled for making it possible to transfer a complex set of quantum data in light form. Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in quantum communications and computing using a teleporter and a paradoxical cat.The breakthrough is the first-ever transfer, or teleportation, of a particular complex set of quantum information from one point to another, opening the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via quantum communications networks.

Before this day, the data transmitted was slow and faced data losses.

Teleportation is the phenomena of transferring Quantum information from one location to another using traditional communication media like lasers over Optical fibers using the machine which is called “the teleporter“.

The research is a work of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), and University of Tokyo researchers.

“One of the limitations of high-speed quantum communication at present is that some detail is lost during the teleportation process. It’s the Star Trek equivalent of beaming the crew down to a planet and having their organs disappear or materialize in the wrong place.

This research is invaluable as for the first time, it enables us to quickly and reliably move quantum information around.

This process means we will be able to move blocks of quantum information around within a computer or across a network, just as we do now with existing computer technologies. The speeds hence achieved would be hundreds of times faster than current generation computers that rely on slow silicon transistors, consuming only the fractions of power.

via unsw

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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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United States is now owns the fastest SuperComputer, pushing China to the second place, of course leaving Google Plex aside. Very recently, China had pushed Cray XT5 Jaguar to the Rank 2. Although, you can Build yourself Supercomputers, it does cost millions when its built as a nation’s pride.

The Tianhe-1A, meaning Milky Way, was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. It is the work of 200 scientists, that makes groundbreaking performance record of 2.507 petaflops, or quatrillion calculations per second, making it the fastest system in the world today. Ordinarily the computer runs at 563.1 teraflops, or trillion calculations per second.

Lets welcome Blue Gene/Q, aka “Mira”,  IBM’s latest and greatest supercomputer boasting a ten-petaflops of raw power. Mira is capable of running programs at ten quadrillion calculations a second.

To give you an idea of how powerful this supercomputer is IBM’s statement tries to explain it:

“If every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second.”

Where would the Most Powerful SuperComputer be used?

Mira would be employed with US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, where it’ll be used to tackle 16 projects in particular that were drawn from a pool of proposals to gain access to her capabilities. We’re told that these include a range of initiatives — from reducing energy inefficiencies in transportation and developing advanced engine designs to spurring advances in energy technologies — and in time, it could lead to exascale-class computers “that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand.”

Here are notes from IBM’s press release:

WASHINGTON – 08 Feb 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM’s next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of our universe.

The 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, named “Mira”, will be operational in 2012 and made available to scientists from industry, academia and government research facilities around the world.

“Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges, like advancing clean energy and understanding the Earth’s climate,” said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne National Laboratory. “Argonne’s new IBM supercomputer will help address the critical demand for complex modeling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness.”

Argonne to use IBM Blue Gene/Q

Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM’s next-generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to stoke economic growth and improve U.S. competitiveness for such challenges as designing electric car batteries, understanding climate change and exploring the evolution of the universe. The 10 petaflop system, named “Mira”, will be twice as fast as today’s fastest supercomputer, providing a strong science and technology engine that will fuel national innovation. Argonne is one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s oldest and largest labs for science and engineering research, located some 20 minutes outside Chicago, IL (Feature Photo Service).

Mira will offer an opportunity for scientists to become more familiar with the capabilities an exascale machine will offer and the programming changes it will require. For example, scientists will have to scale their current computer codes to more than 750,000 individual computing cores, providing them preliminary experience on how scalability might be achieved on an exascale-class system with 100s of millions of cores.

Once Mira is online, the DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) and the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) programs will award blocks of computing time via a peer-reviewed, competitive process to researchers who are working on scientific challenges that are best addressed by the capabilities of high-performance supercomputers.

Blue Gene is one of 100 Icons of Progress in IBM’s 100 year history because it is a radical departure from the supercomputers of its time, consuming only a fraction of the energy and floor space. The system is part of a collaboration between Argonne, IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene’s speed and expandability have enabled industry and the scientific community to address a wide range of complex problems and make more informed decisions.

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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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