engadget
So here’s the new graphics card from nvidia. The sexy 9800, still no word on a release date that I have heard of. But this card is supposed to be very beastly.
Here’s the gallery of the card
click here to see what overclockingwiki has to say about the card.
Want a Phenom 9900? I know I do, but how about in a case that could very well fly away for even start walking around your room. While I doubt it’ll spark the machine revolution this case will most certainly be the most badass thing I’ve ever seen.
to see mod click here
-from engadget
Okay, try not to let your mind get blown by the possible time-space paradox we’re about to illustrate, but MSI’s supposedly introducing a new ECOlution motherboard at CeBIT with an “air powered cooler” that operates on the Stirling Engine Theory to transform the thermal output of its chipset into the kinetic energy necessary to power that same chipset’s fan. Of course, as the fan cools the heatsink it deprives itself of energy, supposedly the piston affixed to the crankshaft pulls back down, giving it another potential surge when its heat rebuilds. Supposedly it works at 70% efficiency, so we’ll just let the thermodynamics geeks in the audience mull over the possibility and audacity of it all — they certainly seem to have given up on Steorn at this point.
-from engadget
Merely two days after Dell added NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800M GTX to its beastly M1730, it seems that Rock is looking to up the graphical ante as well. Reportedly, the firm is gearing up to unleash the (likely rebadged) Xtreme XL8, which will house an Intel X6800 quad-core processor, a delightful pair of NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTXs, up to 1TB of storage space and a 17-inch 1,920 x 1,200 resolution panel to boot. Furthermore, you’ll find an Ethernet jack, Draft-N wireless card, an obligatory (no, really) HD DVD drive and a presumably laughable battery life. Waiting for the sting? Try £2,500 ($4,976) to £3,000 ($5,971), with pre-orders going live later this month.
Read
-from techPowerup
This could well be the most overpriced expensive commercial computer ever to be launched: the Zeus Jupiter. The computer’s case is made of solid platinum embedded with diamonds which have been arranged to mimic astrological constellations. However, given that the PC has a price tag of ¥80,000,000 (just over $750,000) you’ll be disappointed to hear that it’s powered by a 3GHz Intel E6850 CPU, 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM, a 1TB hard drive, a dual Blu-ray/HD DVD drive and a 256MB GeForce 8400GS. Yes, that’s one of NVIDIA’s entry level graphics cards. Of course, if that’s just out of your price range you could always go for Jupiter’s little brother Mars, which has the same specs but with gold instead of platinum. That sells for a mere ¥60,000,000, which is just under $565,000.
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
This is the newest in Microsoft’s product line. A touch screen table, now there was some news about this a while back but looks like their finally going to be releasing it. This is apretty nifty device, I’ll try to get out more tonight, got all the specs that Microsoft released and I’ll see about posting them up.
-from gizmodo
A US company has come up with a headset that reads your brainwaves – and they plan on marketing it to gamers. NeuroSky’s prototype measures a person’s baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. So, if you’re playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour and you lose concentration, you could find your shot buried in the rough if you fail to keep your Zen-like concentration.
The company has already developed a version based on Star Wars. Don the Darth Vader helmet, which contains a sensor that reads the brain’s signals and, if you concentrate, your light saber remains illuminated. Start thinking about your girlfriend dressed as Princess Leia, with Danish Pastries over her – oops – and you lose the force, Luke. The headset is expected to go into production later this year and could cost as little as $20. – Ad Dugdale
-from Science Daily
Science Daily — IBM has announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips that will extend Moore’s Law beyond its expected limits. The technology – called “through-silicon vias” — allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.
IBM extends Moore’s Law to the third-dimension: An IBM scientist holds a thinned wafer of silicon computer circuits, which is ready for bonding to another circuit wafer, where IBM’s advanced “through-silicon via” process will connect the wafers together by etching thousands of holes through each layer and filling them with metal to create 3-D integrated stacked chips. The IBM breakthrough can shorten wire lengths inside chips up to 1000 times and allow for hundreds more pathways for data to flow among different functions on a chip. This technique will extend Moore’s Law beyond its expected limits, paving the way for a new breed of smaller, faster and lower power chips. (Credit: Image courtesy of IBM Research)
The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The result is a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.
“This breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” said Lisa Su, vice president, Semiconductor Research and Development Center, IBM. “This allows us to move 3-D chips from the ‘lab to the fab’ across a range of applications.”
The new IBM method eliminates the need for long-metal wires that connect today’s 2-D chips together, instead relying on through-silicon vias, which are essentially vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. These vias allow multiple chips to be stacked together, allowing greater amounts of information to be passed between the chips.
The technique shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
IBM is already running chips using the through-silicon via technology in its manufacturing line and will begin making sample chips using this method available to customers in the second half of 2007, with production in 2008. The first application of this through-silicon via technology will be in wireless communications chips that will go into power amplifiers for wireless LAN and cellular applications. 3-D technology will also be applied to a wide range of chips, including those running now in IBM’s high-performance server and supercomputing chips that power the world’s business, government and scientific efforts.
In particular, IBM is applying the new through-silicon-via technique in wireless communications chips, Power processors, Blue Gene supercomputer chips, and in high-bandwidth memory applications:
* 3-D for wireless communications technology: IBM is using through-silicon via technology to improve power efficiency in silicon-germanium based wireless products up to 40 percent, which leads to longer battery life. The through-silicon via technology replaces the wire bonds that are less efficient at transferring signals off of the chip.
* Power Processors explore 3-D for power grid stability: As we increase the number of processor cores on chips, one of the limitations in performance is uniform power delivery to all parts of the chip. This technique puts the power closer to the cores and allows each core to have ample access to that power, increasing processor speed while reducing power consumption up to 20 percent.
* Bringing 3-D stacking to Blue Gene supercomputing and memory arrays: The most advanced version of 3-D chip stacking will allow high-performance chips to be stacked on top of each other, for example processor-on-processor or memory-on-processor. IBM is developing this advanced technology by converting the chip that currently powers the fastest computer in the world, the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, into a 3-D stacked chip. IBM is also using 3-D technology to fundamentally change the way memory communicates with a microprocessor, by significantly enhancing the data flow between microprocessor and memory. This capability will enable a new generation of supercomputers. A prototype SRAM design using 3-D stacking technology is being fabricated in IBM’s 300 mm production line using 65 nm- node technology.
3-D chip research at IBM
IBM has been researching 3-D stacking technology for more than a decade at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and now at its labs around the world. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has supported IBM in the development of tools and techniques for extending chips to the third dimension, with the aim of driving better performance and new applications of chip technologies.
IBM chip breakthroughs
This is the fifth major chip breakthrough in five months from IBM, as it leads the industry in its quest for new materials and architectures to extend Moore’s Law.
In December, IBM announced the first 45nm chips using immersion lithography and ultra-low-K interconnect dielectrics.
In January, IBM announced “high-k metal gate,” which substitutes a new material into a critical portion of the transistor that controls its primary on/off switching function. The material provides superior electrical properties, while allowing the size of the transistor to be shrunk beyond limits being reached today.
In February, IBM revealed a first-of-its-kind, on-chip memory technology that features the fastest access times ever recorded in eDRAM (embedded dynamic random access memory).
Then in March, IBM unveiled a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight-times faster than optical components available today.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by IBM Research.
-from engadget
We’ve got means to extract oxygen from water, a portable bar, and even ways to deprive entire server farms of the sustenance, but a new project being tackled by Lockheed Martin is hoping to create O2 on the moon. A critical part of NASA’s PILOT (Precursor In-situ Lunar Oxygen Testbed) initiative, this digger bot will work hand-in-hand with a “processing plant that will add hydrogen to moon soil, heat it to 1,652-degrees Fahrenheit, condense the steam, and finally extract the oxygen.” Additionally, the blue LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) box atop the three-foot-long machine can assist it in locating “oxygen-rich lunar soil and autonomously carry it to a processing plant.” The overriding goal is to use the newly extracted O2 for air, or moreover, to combine it with hydrogen and produce water for the four astronauts that the lunar base could support. Unfortunately, there’s no timetable as to when we’ll actually see the PILOT roll into action, but we’re most interested in porting this bad boy over to Mars along with half the traffic in LA
[Via The Raw Feed]
-from Gizmodo
Scientists over in China are building a prototype moon rover that they hope will not only lead to the country’s first unmanned mission to the moon, but also outdo the US’ first moon rover.
The Chinese rover will be capable of transmitting videos and stills, but whereas NASA’s rovers rely on solar-rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, the Chinese rover will convert heat from a radioactive source into electricity. China’s plan is to shoot their rover up into space by 2012. Personally, I’d like to see their rover duke it out with the NASA’s rover Battlebots style. – Louis Ramirez
Engineers Unveil China Moon Rover [BBC News]
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