TechEye |  |
- AMD puts hopes on Opteron-X
- Pegatron might pick up Apple business
- Nvidia supercomputer powers HIV breakthrough
- Bell Labs speeds bandwidth up to 400 Gigabits
- Motorola sheds more light on X-Phone
- SanDisk splutters at Moore's Law
- Gates-backed school database blue screens
| Posted: 30 May 2013 04:56 AM PDT AMD is banking that its new Opteron-X chips will save its nadgers in the increasingly competitive micro-server market according to corporate veep Andrew Feldman. Eweek points out that AMD's new x86-based Opteron series of chips. formerly code-named Kyoto, are highly dense and energy-efficient processors built to shut Intel's low-power Atom chips out of the market. Feldman, general manager of AMD's Server Business Unit, said that the market is important because it 's fueled by the rise of cloud computing and the growing demand for greater energy efficiency in the data centre. More often, servers are being asked to run massive numbers of small, highly parallel workloads, rather than large applications that require huge amounts of computing power, Feldman said. Feldman showed off HP's Project Moonshot motherboard armed with Opteron-X chips. But the area is highly competitive. Intel last year rolled out its Centerton Atom SoCs, the first aimed specifically at microservers, and later this year will release its next-generation Avoton chips. ARM partners such as Calxeda and Marvell Technologies are already selling 32-bit ARM-based chips for server deployments. AMD is promising not just Opteron-X chips, but starting next year will make ARM-based microserver SoCs on ARM's upcoming 64-bit ARMv8 designs. Feldman said that AMD had relaxed its religious commitment to x86 and is expecting to be a "premiere vendor" of ARM-based server chips. |
| Pegatron might pick up Apple business Posted: 30 May 2013 04:16 AM PDT The long love affair between Apple and Foxconn might be over, according to the celebrity columns of the Wall Street Journal. Apparently Apple has been seen holding the hand of Taiwanese beauty Pegatron, while Foxconn has not left its flat. The Taiwan-based supplier has long history with Apple and there have been some jealous antics between the two for Apple's affections before. Electronista said that Pegatron has won the contract to be the primary supplier of a future "low-cost" iPhone model that has been rumoured for months. Pegatron already produces most of the iPad minis, and recently announced it was hiring an additional 40,000 workers for an unnamed project. Apple is expected to play both sides off against each other for a while. Foxconn keeps custody of the iPhones, iPads and other products. But it looks like new projects are being given to Pegatron. One of the last straws for Apple was that Foxconn changed component suppliers for a part in the iPhone without notifying Apple. It also moaned publicly that the iPhone 5 was difficult to assemble and went on to produce iPhones with scratches and scuffs out of the box. |
| Nvidia supercomputer powers HIV breakthrough Posted: 30 May 2013 03:38 AM PDT Nvidia's Tesla GPU accelerators are being used to help fight the spread of HIV. The computer is powered by 3,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators, which the company says is the highest performance, most efficient accelerators ever built and gave researchers the computational performance to run the largest simulation ever published, involving 64 million atoms. However, it is hoped that by providing a better understanding of the structure of the HIV capsid, pharmacologists will have more information to help them develop new and potentially more effective antiviral HIV drugs. |
| Bell Labs speeds bandwidth up to 400 Gigabits Posted: 30 May 2013 03:33 AM PDT Researchers in Bell Labs have used a technology similar to noise cancelling headphones to increase the bandwidth on their network to a stonking 400 Gigabits. Apparently they need to stream a lot of, er, documentaries, in Bell Labs these days and the team hit on the idea of "phase conjugation". According to Nature this means sending two streams of data through a single fibre optic pipe. They reasoned that one of the problems of networking is that to send data any distance you need a pit of power. When you add the juice the signal starts to get noisy and break up. But if they send a copy of the data on other streams and superimpose them at the end, they can filter out the noise by comparing the streams to each other. So far the method has hit 21.7 terabits of bandwith and has been sent over 7,954 miles of fibre. That means that it will work over a trans-oceanic line and trunk lines across the country. It means that it certainly could speed up the internet without having to lay too much more fibre but would slow down as traffic hits a town. Town and last mile networking will still be dependent on new fibre upgrades being touted by Google, but it means that there will be fewer bottle necks once they hit the wider world. |
| Motorola sheds more light on X-Phone Posted: 30 May 2013 03:30 AM PDT Motorola has finally gone on record with a few interesting details about its rumoured X-Phone. The device will be called the Moto X, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside told the D11 tech conference on Wednesday. Developed by Motorola’s Skunk Works, the phone will be the first smartphone built entirely in the United States. Motorola will source 1,100 components used in the phone from across the globe. The processor will be stamped out in Taiwan, while the OLED screen will come from South Korea. On top of that, it will use components from twelve US states, from Corning in New York to a bunch of suppliers in California. It will be assembled in Forth Worth, Texas. The 45,000 square foot factor will employ about 2,000 people by August. It would sound impressive if it weren’t for the fact that the site employed 16,000 people 15 years ago when it was still churning out Nokia phones. The benefits of building phones stateside are plain to see. The company believes the move will help it reduce engineering and design costs, while at the same time drastically cutting shipping costs and saving plenty of time. In addition, it will probably get a lot of positive press coverage for bolstering the US manufacturing sector. It is also very unlikely to face any labour rights outcry, since it will base the plant in Forth Worth, and anyone trying to abuse workers in the great state of Texas has a very good chance of getting shot in the face. We still don’t know the exact specs, but with all the hype surrounding it, Motorola’s X-phone might be worth the wait. |
| SanDisk splutters at Moore's Law Posted: 30 May 2013 02:49 AM PDT It appears that SanDisk has been talking up some technology which is a spectacular failure for Moore's Law. For those who came in late, Moore's Law is the self-fulfilling prophecy that transistor counts on integrated circuits double every two years. It has been working pretty much as a prophecy since Moore came up with it. But SanDisk seems to have managed to break the law with its 1Y generation of NAND flash nonvolatile memory. It has announced that it would be manufactured using 19-nm minimum geometry which is the the same as its 1X generation. 1X-nm is a term coined to denote a manufacturing process node somewhere between 10- and 19-nm. 1Y and 1Z imply nodes also between 10- and 19-nm but different to the 1X node. According to eeTimes, SanDisk stared into the abyss of triple or quadruple patterning using masks and immersion lithography to define minimum geometries of 15-nm. It thought while the technical possibility of getting to 15 or even 10-nm with multiple patterning was straight forward enough, there were too many concerns about the extra dwell time on machines, the complexity of additional process steps and the impact on yield. SanDisk found a way to improve the memory cell through design by reducing the area by about 25 percent without scaling the geometry. All this lateral thinking certainly runs against the "spirit" of Moore's Law. But really this sort of thing could have been predicted a while back as his black and white principles started to grey. First there was the introduction of such terms like 1X, 1Y and 1Z which are pretty confusing, and in the logic world FinFET processes are also chucking a spanner in the works. After all they are based on 20-nm back-end of line processes but labelled at 16-nm and 14-nm. What appears to be really happening is that it is no longer economical to move to the next manufacturing process node and that means, for some, Moore's law is not the ultimate truth. |
| Gates-backed school database blue screens Posted: 30 May 2013 02:45 AM PDT A school database, which is backed by Bill Gate's charity foundation, is losing State backers as parents start to question the set up's security. The $100 million database was set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students and launched this year. However, US states are starting to walk away from the project after complaints from parents. The database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, tracks students from kindergarten through high school by storing myriad data points, including test scores, learning disabilities, discipline records and even teacher assessments of a child's character. The big idea is that consolidated records make it easier for teachers to use software that mines data to identify academic weaknesses and come up with better lesson plans. But where it is getting messy is that kids are identified by name and their details can be shared with private companies developing education software. The database is run by a nonprofit called inBloom and is seeing action in nine US States. Parents and civil liberties groups are concerned about potential privacy breaches. Louisiana Superintendent of Education, John White, withdrew student data from inBloom in April. He's planning to hold public hearings on data storage and security this summer and is wondering if there really is a need for inBloom. Kentucky, Georgia and Delaware have been telling Reuters that they never made a commitment and have no intention of participating. Representatives from Massachusetts and North Carolina said they are still evaluating the project and may never upload student data. This leaves just New York, Illinois and Colorado as active participants. The Gates Foundation has said that it is confident about inBloom's future, saying early adopters will provide a "blueprint for the future" and "assuage the concerns that have been raised". This is not the first time the Foundation has been mired in controversy about its plans for education. One of Chicago's largest ever public sector strikes saw thousands of teachers walk out on the job in protest of a Gates backed initiative on standardised testing, among other proposed changes. The database is free but will start charging participating states or school districts annual fees of $2 to $5 per student in 2015. |
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