The Cray Titan lost bragging rights this past week as China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer clocked in at a silicon-scorching 30.65 petaflops (74% faster than Titan) making it the fastest supercomputer on the planet. The feat was even more impressive given that Tianhe-2 was not even running at full capacity. Theoretically it could hit 50 petaflops although
Category: Computer Hardware
Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) memory standard promises 15 times better performance than traditional DDR1/2/3 SDRAM
The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium finished hammering out the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) 1.0 standard this week. With a max bandwidth of 320GB/sec to a nearby CPU or GPU (compared to 24GB/sec for DDR3 SDRAM), HMC offers up to 15 times the performance of DDR3, while using 70% less energy. Rather than placing RAM dies…
Seagate ships world’s first 4TB Hard Drive – priced at less than $200 per unit
Today, Seagate began shipping what it claims is“the world’s first 4TB Hard Drive”. The new technology will utilize four 1TB platters giving the drive 800,000 times more storage space than the first desktop drive it introduced way back in 1979. According to Seagate, “There’s enough storage space to tuck away 800,000 photos, 450 hours of…
Samsung Galaxy S4 fizzle but device does solidify position as king of the mobile arena – for now…
The Samsung Galaxy S4 was revealed today and although there were no mind-blowing revelations (and a couple of disappointments), it is indeed a beauty. With a 5 inch Super AMOLED 1920×1080 display (441ppi and protected via Gorilla Glass 3) and 1.6GHz 8-core Exynos Octa 5410 SoC (which is really two quad-cores – four Cortex-A15 cores…
LG announces 100 inch “Laser TV” – throws image on wall from 22 inches
Just ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), LG has announced a television that could become the most talked about piece of gear at CES. The new “Hecto” Laser TV system is designed to project a 100 inch 1080p image onto a screen from just 22 inches away. Unlike traditional projectors that require dark…
Say hello to UEFI, the new computer BIOS for the next decade
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a boot level program that will replace the BIOS on computers made from this date forward. UEFI defines the software interface between the operating system and platform firmware. It resides in non-volatile memory on the motherboard (or on the hard drive or a network drive) and initializes the computer…
4 cores, 8 cores, 12 cores, more? Phooey! Intel now shipping 60-core Xeon Phi processors
Intel announced today that the first model of the new Xeon Phi (aka Knights Corner) family of processors is now shipping. A response to high-end GPUs from companies such as nVidia and a stepping stone towards Intel’s goal of reaching 1 exaflop by 2018, the first Knights Corner chip, the Xeon Phi 5110P, has 60…
The new Titan supercomputer is badass but will China’s Tianhe-2 blow past it in 2015? [UPDATE]
China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is expected to arrive in 2015. At 50 petaflops it would be three times faster than the new Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer but let’s face it, vaporware doesn’t count in the supercomputer race and China has only held the title once (in 2010 when its Tianhe-1 briefly held the title of the…
Memoto discrete, wearable digital camera records your entire life in 30-second intervals and saves recorded “moments” in the cloud
Stockholm-based Memoto, has developed a postage-stamp, waterproof, wearable camera that snaps a photo of your surroundings every 30 seconds, creating a visual archive of your life. The camera shoots 5 megapixel pictures, logs GPS coordinates and date/time, and has a two-day battery. It is capable of storing over 4,000 photos. A small, stainless steel clip…
Apple introduces iPad Mini (and a new MacBook Pro, new iMacs, new Mac Mini, and other tiny stuff)
A trash talking Schiller made a point to compare the new iPad Mini to the other guys (ahem, Google Nexus 7) in today’s announcements telling the crowd, “You get a tablet experience on the iPad Mini. You get a scaled-up phone experience on the other”. Bunch of exciting Apple gear was announced today. Good specs…








