The Great Geek Manual News

It’s nearly 40 years old but one leading research company says the days of the computer mouse are numbered.

A Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years.

Taking over will be so called gestural computer mechanisms like touch screens and facial recognition devices.

“The mouse works fine in the desktop environment but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it’s over,” declared analyst Steve Prentice.

He told BBC News that his prediction is driven by the efforts of consumer electronics firm which are making products with new interactive interfaces inspired by the world of gaming.

“You’ve got Panasonic showing forward facing video in the home entertainment environment. Instead of using a conventional remote control you hold up your hand and it recognises you have done that,” he said.

“It also recognises your face and that you are you and it will display on your TV screen your menu. You can move your hand to move around and select what you want,” he added.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The BBC

Intel continues to speed down the 45 nm path, shipping dozens of millions of processors before AMD will get its first 45 nm CPU into customer hands. While AMD wanted the 45 nm manufacturing process to be a technology the company can close the gap to Intel, it now seems that Intel is actually improving its already existing big advantage.

According to Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Intel will be shipping its 100 millionth 45 nm processor before the end of the year, which means that Intel is currently cranking out more than 10 million 45 nm chips per month. The company had shipped about 8 million 45 nm processor at the end of the first quarter of this year. Otellini noted that yields of the 45 nm production are ahead of 65 nm yields at the same time of its life cycle. The company expects to reach the crossover point at which it will produce more 45 nm than 65 nm processors during the current quarter.

Otellini did not provide additional details which 45 nm processors are behind the success of this process generation. However, it was clear that much of Intel’s current pace is determined by mobile processors and chipsets, which contributed more than one third to Intel’s Q3 revenue. Atom processor production is still ramping, but the executive noted that shipments are exceeding initial expectations and a sharp increase of shipments is expected for the second half of the year, which apparently will bring more Atom-based notebooks and desktops.

Major product launches for the third quarter include the Centrino 2 platform as well as the Dunnington 6-core Xeon MP server CPU.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Tom’s Hardware

One terabyte hard drives still cramping your decadent data storage lifestyle? No more tears. Seagate is rolling out 1.5TB HDDs this August.

Seagate’s 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will use four platters to cram the scale-tipping new raw capacity into an eleventh generation of its flagship drive. The storage firm points out its the single largest hard drive capacity bump in the last 50 years. As the name suggests, the HDD spins at 7,200RPM. The 3Gb/s SATA I interface has a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s.
Seagate artist’s rendering of what the drive would look like in space.

The disks are also sold in 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB varieties with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Yesterday, Hitachi rolled out its second generation of 1TB hard drives, using three platters of 375GB each. A bit of basic arithmetic then suggests both Hitachi and Seagate are dealing with platters of roughly the same density.

Hard drive manufacturers absolutely adore keeping pricing details mum until zero hour, and this case is no different. Expect some damage to the billfold, but the upshot is the price of 1TB HDDs may drop as a result.

Seagate also announced a new pair of 500GB hard drives for notebooks. The 2.5-inch Momentus drives will be offered in 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM variations, with 8MB of cache and 16MB of cache respectively.

The drives are offered with a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent damage when dropped. According to Seagate, the sensor detects any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disk to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives will begin shipping in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Source: The Register

The petaflop barrier was not only broken last week, it was pulverized into infinitesimally small, neutrino-sized particles. While Intel continues to blow even more horns, suddenly it’s the Cell processor that has engineers talking.

When in November 2003, the Oklahoma Sooners football team blew out Texas A&M by a score of 77 - 0, a sportscaster was heard to have said, “It wasn’t that close.” When the news arrived this morning from Mannheim — after a few days delay, apparently to celebrate — of the absolute trouncing of the once unstoppable IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer by, quite literally, a hybrid collection of AMD Opterons and parts you’d find in a PlayStation 3 — not a vanquishing, not a clobbering, but a mathematical and systematic decimation of the former champion by 231% — it was the type of blowout that the late, great Jim McKay would have loved to have described, up close and personal.

As it turned out, Los Alamos National Laboratories’ new Roadrunner system didn’t really have a lot of competition after all. The race to break the petaflop barrier, to compute one quadrillion floating point operations per second, wasn’t even a race. Roadrunner broke away from the pack, and not even Chuck Jones could have adequately caricaturized its competition.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: BetaNews

As more manufacturers aim for the 1 TB storage high-water mark, Western Digital pushed the pace further today with the announcement of its new 7200 rpm 3.5-inch SATA Caviar hard drives, in 750 GB and 1 TB capacities.

The new line of 3.5-inch Caviars, which will ship next week, features 7200 rpm spin speed, 32 MB cache, SATA 3 GB/s interface.

Although WD is promoting these new Caviars as the fastest available in their form factor, the company did not offer any independent benchmarks, and the major enthusiast sites have yet to get their hands on one. However, the dual processor and 32 MB of cache is expected to be a step above similar HDDs that feature just one processor and only 16 MB of cache.

The new models will feature the company’s StableTrac technology, introduced last year. Rather than attach motor mounts to the bottom only, WD’s motor shafts are now secured at both ends, helping to increase read and write operation tracking. Internal lab testing also led WD to create a new “NoTouch ramp load technology” where the recording head in the HDD does not touch the disk media, and that helps limit the wear to the recording head.

One terabyte is the new standard these days, with Seagate, Hitachi, and Samsung also promoting 1 TB 7200 rpm HDDs to their product lines in recent months. The new WD Caviar HDDs will be available next week, with a $200 price tag for the 750 GB HDD, and $250 price tag for the 1 TB model.

Source: Beta New

IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer, with AMD and Cell chips, is the first significant manifestation of what IBM calls hybrid computing. The supercomputer was codeveloped with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and will be used to verify U.S. nuclear weapons. The technology used in Roadrunner may benefit businesses in the future.

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to use a new hybrid supercomputer codeveloped by IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate U.S. nuclear-weapons performance. Code-named “Roadrunner,” the $100 million machine will be capable of performing 1,500 trillion computational operations per second (1.5 petaflops), which is three times faster than the largest supercomputer currently in use.

IBM executives say Roadrunner, which is twice as fast as IBM’s trailblazing Blue Gene supercomputer, has the computing power Relevant Products/Services of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops. According to IBM Vice President David Turek, the new supercomputer represents the first significant manifestation of what Big Blue calls hybrid computing.

“At its center are very conventional kinds of microprocessors from AMD — the kinds of microprocessors that you’ll find in laptops and servers,” Turek said. “But surrounding this are a large number of chips known as a Cell Broadband Engine — the same kind of chips that you find in the Sony PlayStation 3.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: News Factor

Hewlett-Packard Tuesday unveiled its entry in the growing list of slim laptop PCs, the half-inch thick Voodoo Envy 133.

The Envy, which is priced at $2,099, weighs less that three-and-half pounds and takes aim at Apple’s MacBook Air. The laptop from the No. 1 PC maker features a sleek design and a removable battery, an obvious jab at the MacBook which foregoes a removeable battery, as well as an Ethernet jack.

Introduced in Berlin, Germany, the thin laptop is among the first PCs HP is creating using the Voodoo brand, part of the 2006 acquisition of high-end game computer maker VoodooPC.

Along with HP, a number of computer makers are entering the designer laptop arena. Dell, which is the No. 2 PC maker, has already announced plans to produce slimline laptops and desktop computers.

Source: All Headline News

A supercomputer built with components designed for the Sony PlayStation 3 has set a new computing milestone.

The IBM machine, codenamed Roadrunner, has been shown to run at “petaflop speeds”, the equivalent of one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The benchmark means the computer is twice as nimble as the current world’s fastest machine, also built by IBM.

It will be installed at a US government laboratory later this year where it will monitor the US nuclear stockpile.

It will also be used for research into astronomy, genomics and climate change.

“Roadrunner will enable us to tackle problems we couldn’t tackle before,” said John Morrison, leader of the high-performance computing division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, where it will be installed.

“We’ll be able to run a different level of problems. We’ll be able to do calculations that we wouldn’t even consider before.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The BBC

A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said.

Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of “hair-width” cooling arteries.

They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components.

The technology was demonstrated in IBM’s 3D chips, where circuits are stacked one on top of the other.

Laying chips vertically, instead of side by side, reduces the distance data has to travel , enhancing performance and saving critical space.

“As we package chips on top of each other….we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don’t scale,” explained Thomas Brunschwiler at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory.

“In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: BBC

SanDisk Corp, the world’s No.1 supplier of flash memory-based data storage cards, said it would target ultra low-cost personal computers and business-use laptop PCs to drive demand for its solid-state drives.

Solid-state drives, semiconductor-based memory devices that use NAND flash memory chips, are seen as a promising alternative to hard disk drives used in laptop PCs as they are more shock-resistant and consume less power.

A move toward solid-state drives poses a threat to hard drive makers such as Seagate Technology (STX.N: Quote, Profile, Research).

The high cost of solid-state drives compared to hard disk drives with the same memory capacity has until now hindered PC makers’ shift to the flash-based drives.

But the rising popularity of smaller, cheaper PCs — designed primarily for accessing the Internet, and which do not require a large memory — is set to boost the market for flash memory-based drives, SanDisk said.

“There are more and more companies that have joined in to make such laptops for a second computer for many people,” Doreet Oren, director of SanDisk’s product marketing, told Reuters at Computex on Tuesday.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Reuters

Nvidia Corp on Sunday announced a processor line-up it believes will power a new class of fast, small devices with long battery life that can surf the full Internet, play high-end games and display high-definition video.

The graphics chipmaker is calling the Tegra 600 and Tegra 650 processors “computers on a chip” for highly portable, visual devices, and it is aiming squarely at a market also targeted by No. 1 chipmaker Intel Corp.

Nvidia hopes the Tegra chips, which also include its previously announced application processor APX2500 used in smartphones and handsets, will go into a broad array of computing devices. But it’s aiming first for an emerging category called mobile Internet devices, or MIDs.

Intel was among the first to start bandying about the term, and its Atom family of chips is targeted at MIDs. But Intel and Nvidia both say people are still unsure exactly what a MID is.

Nvidia says it is more than a dumbed-down notebook PC or super-portable notebook with keyboards suited more for the hands of Smurfs than humans.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Reuters

Nvidia has joined a growing band of hardware makers producing low-power, portable laptops.

Better known for graphics cards, Nvidia has shown off two Tegra processors designed for tiny laptops or netbooks.

It said devices fitted with the chips would be able to browse the web, show high-definition video and be able to handle graphically-heavy games.

The move pits Nvidia against chip giant Intel which is releasing a similar line of chips for such small devices.

Nvidia said it would release more details of the Tegra 600 and 650 processors at the Computex show in Taiwan which runs from 3-7 June.

The chip maker said the processors were aimed at light, portable gadgets that are fitted with a screen up to 12in (30cm) across, a keyboard, high-speed wireless connection and a port for a game controller.

Nvidia has dubbed such devices Mobile Internet Devices or “Mids”. Others, such as Dell and Intel have started calling them “netbooks”.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The BBC

Smaller, low-cost PCs are likely to be at the top of the shopping list for technology buyers gathering in Taipei this week for the world’s second largest computer fair, as an economic slowdown in the United States forces consumers to cut back on spending.

Shoppers are feeling the pinch from rocketing fuel costs and rising prices, and in the United States the subprime crisis has left lenders less willing to hand over credit, leaving some consumers reluctant to buy new expensive personal computers and gadget heavy mobile phones.

Cheaper, low-cost PCs, such as Asustek Computer Inc’s (2357.TW: Quote, Profile, Research) Eee computer, aimed at emerging markets and buyers of additional computers, may keep growth on track for many computer and component makers.

These PCs, many with longer battery lives and wireless connection features, will share the stage with a line of eco-friendly computers with slimmer, energy-efficient displays and solar power systems, designed to cut power consumption as oil prices soar and consumers seek ways to reduce their environmental impact.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Reuters

Electronic Arts has announced it is developing a spinoff based on its best-selling SimCity franchise for the Wii and DS. SimCity Creator is being designed to take advantage of the DS and Wii’s control systems, with EA confirming the title will play differently on the two machines.

On Wii, players will be able to create their own city, with homes, businesses, factories, skyscrapers, motorways and railroads available. “On the Wii, for the first time in the SimCity franchise, you will have the ability to build curved roads and differently-shaped zones allowing you to make more authentic places all utilizing the motions of the Wii remote. Employing the new city advisor system, you will be able to make the game as complex or simple as you want.

According to EA, the title boasts “a completely new user interface, designed specifically for the Wii and the Wii Remote. You’ll discover many ways to customise your city, including 13 city styles to explore, such as American, European and Asian themes.”

On DS, users will evolve their city, starting with ancient times, through the Middle Ages to present day, with access to four different game modes. “On Nintendo DS, we will give you the ability to make a city develop through time and to overcome the different challenges each era of urban development presents. I know both long-time and new SimCity players will enjoy these innovative experiences in SimCity Creator.”

“SimCity Creator for the Wii and Nintendo DS brings two separate, delightful new ways to create, enjoy and destroy your own cities,” said Rod Humble, head of studio for The Sims Label.

SimCity Creator is scheduled for release on September 19.

Source: Digital Spy