Sun To Replace Computer Wires With Leaser beams To Connect Processor Chips

Sun is trying to replace the wires between computer chips with laser beams to eliminating a bottleneck. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields. From the article:

Sun Microsystems is trying to do for computing what all the king’s horses and men failed to do for Humpty Dumpty. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields.

Now Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact.

The computer maker, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce on Monday that it has received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

I’m not an expert in electricity or electronics but on paper a laser should move as fast as energy. I really hope this will to improve speed :) Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip via a beam of laser that could carry billions of bits of data a second.

Reduce Hardware Piracy with EPIC

Interesting development; from the article:
Hardware piracy, or making knock-off microchips based on stolen blueprints, is a burgeoning problem in the electronics industry.

Computer engineers at the University of Michigan and Rice University have devised a comprehensive way to head off this costly infringement: Each chip would have its own unique lock and key. The patent holder would hold the keys. The chip would securely communicate with the patent-holder to unlock itself, and it could operate only after being unlocked.

The technique is called EPIC, short for Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits. It relies on established cryptography methods and introduces subtle changes into the chip design process. But it does not affect the chips’ performance or power consumption.

=> Unique locks on microchips could reduce hardware piracy

India unleashes 4th fastest super computer

India has now official broke into top ten super computers in the world.

For the first time ever, India placed a system in the Top 10. The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop/s performance.

The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, already a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing, is expected to become an even hotter topic of discussion as the latest list shows five new entrants in the Top 10, which includes sites in the United States, Germany, India and Sweden.

Fastest Computers

  1. USA – BlueGene/L – eServer Blue Gene Solution
  2. Germany – JUGENE – Blue Gene/P Solution
  3. USA – SGI Altix ICE 8200, Xeon quad core 3.0 GHz
  4. India – Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c, Xeon 53xx 3GHz, Infiniband
  5. Sweden – Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c, Xeon 53xx 2.66GHz, Infiniband

See: 30th Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released, Big Turnover Among the Top 10 Systems

Photography tips and demonstrations from Nikon professionals

Nikon is a Japanese company and famous for cameras, binoculars, microscopes, measurement instruments etc. Now there is a Nikon Digital Learning Center which provides practical photography tips, demonstrations from Nikon professionals and industry experts, as well as other useful information as it relates to capturing the shot you really want.

Several of Nikon’s sponsored professional photography experts, including Rosanne Pennella and Cliff Mautner, as well as Nikon School instructors Reed Hoffman and Bill Durrence, will be dropping by this group (when not globetrotting on assignment) to post images, and provide tips and commentary ranging in topic from aperture, shutter speed, and composition — to specific genres like photojournalism, landscapes, and portraits.

Wow! this is a good news for all, if you like to learn photography from experts. Although I don’t have Nikon camera, I can still use the tips for my HP digital camera.

Flickr’s Nikon Digital Photography Learning Center

=> Visit Nikon Digital Learning Center online.

Real Apple iPhone review: It is a piece of shit

The (in)famous Maddox an American author and magazine columnist, wrote an interesting and real review of the Apple iPhone. I think it is a non-biased review:

No, I’m not going to get an iPhone, quit emailing me about it. I’m not getting one because I already have a phone that’s better: it’s called the Nokia E70, it’s the pinnacle of human achievement, and I love it more than my family.

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face (found via digg)

40 Gbps world’s fastest broadband in central Sweden

The world’s fastest internet connection is in Sweden at 40 Gigabits per second connection – thousands of times faster than the average ADSL / DSL / Cable home Internet connection.

According to this article:

A 75 year old woman from Karlstad in central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books – with the world’s fastest internet connection.

Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.

But Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council’s network arm, has arranged the connection.

People in India still struggling to get 256k connection.

Sigbritt, 75, has world’s fastest broadband

Desktop Supercomputer Prototype Created

Maryland Professor creates desktop Supercomputer ( a mainframe computer that is among the largest, fastest, or most powerful of those available at a given time) using nothing but normal desktop computer parts.

A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has been developed by researchers in the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip.

Parallel processing is an approach that allows the computer to perform many different tasks simultaneously, a sharp contrast to the serial approach employed by conventional desktop computers. The prototype developed by Uzi Vishkin and his Clark School colleagues uses a circuit board about the size of a license plate on which they have mounted 64 parallel processors. To control those processors, they have developed the crucial parallel computer organization that allows the processors to work together and make programming practical and simple for software developers.

Read more

Who Invented Mobile Phone?

A little history about modern mobile phone and its inventor Dr. Martin Cooper.

We use mobile phone everyday. I own a blackberry and a Nokia phone. In the 90s the cellphone was a luxury item. I thought it would be an interesting idea to dig out a little history about mobile phone.

Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola, made the first US analogue mobile phone call
Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola, made the first US analogue mobile phone call

  1. Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola is considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone. On April 3, 1973, Martin placed a call to rival Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T’s Bell Labs, while walking the streets of New York City talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC prototype.
  2. In 1940s Motorola developed a backpacked two-way radio, the Walkie-Talkie and a large hand-held two-way radio for the US military. The same technology developed further and produced the mobile phone that we know today.
  3. In 1946 USSR (Russia) successfully tested their version of a radio mobile phone mounted inside a car.
  4. The modern handheld cell phone era began in 1973 when Motorola invented the first cellular portable telephone to be commercialised, known as Motorola DynaTAC 8000X.
  5. On October 13, 1983, the pilot commercial cellular system of Illinois Bell begins operating in Chicago. The second pilot system run by ARTS in partnership with Motorola begins operation in Baltimore/Washington on December 16, 1983.
  6. By 1984, Washington, DC has two competing cellular providers,
  7. By 1988, many cellular systems (particularly New York and Los Angeles) are already becoming overloaded as the promise of nearly infinite expansion of capacity from cell splitting turns out to be more costly and difficult than foreseen.
  8. The Motorola StarTac was the first phone in the world with Vibrating alert function. It was unveiled in North America on January 3, 1996. StarTACs remained popular until the early 2000s.
  9. The Sharp J-SH04 was the industry’s first mobile phone to feature an integrated 110,000-pixel CMOS image sensor for taking digital photos (camera mobile phone).
  10. By 2003 or 2004 Blackberry begun to take the market by storm. The phone were optimized for wireless email communication. GPRS could provide data rates from 56 kbit/s up to 114 kbit/s. It can be used for services such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) access, Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and for Internet communication services such as email and World Wide Web access.
  11. On January 9, 2007 Apple unveiled the iPhone to the public.

WHERE WERE MOBILE PHONES FIRST USED?

=> United States of America (USA)

These days we use second generation (2G) GSM / CDMA / TDMA mobile networks and phones. Many service providers now looking to create a third generation (3G) mobile network. The most significant feature offered by third generation mobile technologies is the capacity to support greater numbers of voice and data customers but as usual it is quite expensive to roll out. Now, a 4G system is expected to provide a comprehensive and secure all-IP based solution where facilities such as IP telephony, ultra-broadband Internet access, gaming services, and streamed multimedia may be provided to users.

References:

Top things you should look while buying a computer for Gaming

I’m looking to build a new computer for gaming purpose. I think any gaming system should consider following fast components :)
=> A fast Intel or AMD dual core processor / CPU (Intel core 2 extreme, is the latest in ass-kicking technology)

=> 1GB dual channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz

=> 512 MB Graphics card from ATI or NVIDIA (look for GeForce 8600 / 8800)

=> Good sound card (on board sound cards are quite good these days so you can same some money)

=> SATA 3.0 Gb/s hard disk (500G)

=> And most important good cabinet / chassis with 2 cooling fans with enough power supply

Dell / Alienware offers top of the line gaming and multimedia computer. Personally I prefer to build my own computer :)