Advances in Computers thread

[ScienceRocks]

SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever'


12 September 2014

Memory specialist SanDisk has created an SD card with 512 gigabytes (512GB) of storage space - the highest capacity ever released.

The card, which is the size of a postage stamp, will go on sale for $800 (£490).
The launch comes a decade after the firm released a 512-megabyte (MB) SD card with one-thousandth of the space.
Experts believe SD cards could eventually hold up to 2 terabytes (TB) of data, about 2,000GB.
The new card is aimed at film-makers shooting in the high-quality 4K format.
The 4K format - which is four times the resolution of HD - requires large file storage. Depending on compression, a single minute of 4K shooting will typically take around 5GB of storage space.
"4K Ultra HD is an example of a technology that is pushing us to develop new storage solutions capable of handling massive file sizes," said Dinesh Bahal, vice-president of product marketing at SanDisk.
The SD card format is one of the most widely used standards of flash storage, popular with digital cameras, camcorders and other mobile devices.
While camera types, resolutions and settings vary - a 512GB card could potentially hold around 30 hours of HD video.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-29175093

 

[ScienceRocks]

Cryogenic on-chip quantum electron cooling leads towards computers that consume 10x less power



http://www.extremete...-10x-less-power

"Cryogenic on-chip quantum electron cooling leads towards computers that consume 10x less power.

Researchers at UT Arlington have created the first electronic device that can cool electrons to -228 degrees Celsius (-375F), without any kind of external cooling. The chip itself remains at room temperature, while a quantum well within the device cools the electrons down cryogenic temperatures. Why is this exciting? Because thermal excitation (heat) is by far the biggest problem when it comes to creating both high-performance and ultra-low-power computers. These cryogenic, quantum well-cooled electrons could allow for the creation of electronic devices that consume 10 times less energy than current devices, according to the researchers.

What, you may ask, is a quantum well? In essence, a quantum well is a very narrow gap between two semiconducting materials. Electrons are happily bouncing along the piece of semiconductor when they hit the gap (the well). Only electrons that have very specific characteristics can cross the boundary. In this case, only electrons with very low energy (i.e. cold electrons) are allowed to pass, while hot electrons are sent back from whence they came. (If you’re technically minded, the well is created by sandwiching a narrow-bandgap semiconductor between two semiconductors with a wider bandgap – it’s basically the quantum equivalent of the neck between the two bulbs of an hourglass)."

 

[marc09190933]

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[marc09190933]

Hello friend. I just got a industrial grade SD card from RENICE. The performance is amazing with 70/64 MB/S read/write speed.And they're now presenting some free CF, SD cards and SSD to Twitter followers Renice on Twitter We will giveaway USB 3.0 SSD CF and SD cards to celebrate our National Day of China. More info http t.co VxIBkTJ41k Renice giveaway RT

 

[ScienceRocks]

Intel Opens Door on 7nm, Foundry

Rick Merritt
9/11/2014 07:45 AM EDT

Intel believes it can drive Moore’s Law down to 7 nm even without long-delayed advances in lithography. It also gave its most detailed look to date at its foundry service for sharing its chipmaking prowess, including a description of a new low-cost alternative to 2.5D chip stacking it has in development.

“My day job is working on [research for a process to make] 7 nm [chips and] I believe there is a way without EUV,” said Intel fellow Mark Bohr, responding to a question after a talk on Intel’s new 14 nm process.

http://www.eetimes.c...?doc_id=1323865

 

[ScienceRocks]

Ultra-fast ‘phase-change materials’ could lead to 1,000-times-faster computers

Replacing silicon, new ultra-fast “phase-change materials” (PCMs) that could eventually enable processing speeds 500 to 1,000 times faster than the average laptop computer today — while using less energy — have been modeled and tested by researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Singapore A*STAR Data-Storage Institute, and the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

PCMs are capable of reversibly switching between two structural phases with different electrical states — one crystalline and conducting and the other glassy and insulating — in billionths of a second, increasing the number of calculations per second.

Also, logic operations and memory are co-located, rather than separated, as they are in silicon-based computers (causing interconnect delays and slowing down computation speed), and PCM devices can function down to about two nanometers (compared to the current smallest logic and memory devices based on silicon, which are about 20 nanometers in size). The researchers have also demonstrated that multiple parallel calculations are possible for PCM logic/memory devices.

Achieving record switching speed

The researchers used a new type of PCM based on a specific chalcogenide glass material that goes further: it can be melted and recrystallized in as little as 900 picoseconds (trillionths of a second) using appropriate voltage pulses.

PCM devices recently demonstrated to perform in-memory logic do have shortcomings: they do not perform calculations at the same speeds as silicon, and they exhibit a lack of stability in the starting amorphous phase.

However, the Cambridge and Singapore researchers found that, by performing the logic-operation process in reverse — starting from the crystalline phase and then melting the PCMs in the cells to perform the logic operations — the materials are both much more stable and capable of performing operations much faster.

 

[ScienceRocks]

BT claims 1Gb fibre broadband speed boost

BT is claiming to have made a "big breakthrough" with fibre broadband, which could see homes and businesses see speeds rise to 1Gbps (gigabit per second).

A trial of so-called G-Fast technology has managed download speeds of 800Mbps (megabits) and upload speeds of 200Mbps.

The trial is significant because it utilises existing technology.

BT has been criticised for its continued use of copper lines.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-29360758

 

[ScienceRocks]

D-Wave CEO: Our Next Quantum Processor Will Make Computer Science History (Video)

Things get weird at the atomic scale.
The rules of classical physics governing the objects we can see and touch break down. Particles can occupy two places at once or connect across vast distances, conditions known as superposition and entanglement (or what Albert Einstein dismissively described as “spooky action at a distance.”)
Scientists have explored for decades the theoretical possibilities of applying quantum mechanics to computing. But D-Wave Systems has been working to push the field into the practical realm, using an approach known as “adiabatic quantum computation.” The Burnaby, British Columbia, company, founded in 1999, released what it describes as the first commercial quantum computer in 2010.
Conventional computers deal with binary bits of information, 1s or 0s. But a quantum computer manipulates what are known as qubits (or quantum bits), which can be 1s and0s at the same time, leveraging the power of superposition. Such a machine depends on entanglement as well, performing many operations on the same data simultaneously.
No one can really say for certain where those helpful distant qubits are operating. Theleading bet among physicists is the many-worlds interpretation, which would suggest quantum computers offload processing to parallel universes. (No, seriously — read this!)

 

[ScienceRocks]

Ultra-low-energy-consuming transistors and circuits

European project E2SWITCH is developing new electronic systems with ultra-low energy consumption, based on tunnel FET (TFET) heterostructures for switches (transistors) and circuits.

The idea is to design that will be built on silicon substrates but designed to operate at voltages that are up to five times lower than those used in mobile phones, while reducing thermal dissipation.

Transistors and circuits based on lower voltages result in reduced energy expenditures compared to current CMOS technology.

 

[ScienceRocks]

A new approach to on-chip quantum computing

Commercial devices capable of encrypting information in unbreakable codes exist today, thanks to recent quantum optics advances, especially the generation of photon pairs—tiny entangled particles of light. Now, an international team of researchers led by professor Roberto Morandotti of INRS-EMT in Canada, is introducing a new method to achieve a different type of photon pair source that fits into the tiny space of a computer chip.

The team's method, which generates "mixed up" photon pairs from devices that are less than one square millimeter in area, could form the core of the next-generation of quantum optical communication and computing technology. The research will be presented at The Optical Society's (OSA) 98th Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics, being held Oct. 19-23 in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game

When Microsoft first demonstrated its IllumiRoom research project at CES last year it generated a huge amount of attention ahead of a next-generation Xbox unveiling. A video showed off a projection system that was linked to the Xbox to extend games from a TV to nearby walls, and appeared to be more than just a concept demo. It turned out that IllumiRoom was "just research" after all, but Microsoft is back this year with IllumiRoom 2.0: RoomAlive.



RoomAlive builds on the familiar concepts of IllumiRoom, but pushes things a lot further by extending an Xbox gaming environment to an entire living room. It’s a proof-of-concept demo, just like IllumiRoom, and it combines Kinect and projectors to create an augmented reality experience that is interactive inside a room. You can reach out and hit objects from a game, or interact with games through any surfaces of a room. RoomAlive tracks the position of a gamers head across all six Kinect sensors, to render content appropriately.



RoomAlive’s video projectors and Kinect combination is far too costly and large for living rooms right now, but Microsoft is imagining a future where this technology will be smaller and low-cost. Sony has created similar virtual reality experiments in the past, but Microsoft’s system can automatically detect the floors and walls of the room to let the system work anywhere. "There’s still lots to explore with RoomAlive as a gaming platform," explain’s a Microsoft Research spokesperson. "We envision a future where games can use physical objects as part of the game."

http://www.theverge....rojector-system

 

[ScienceRocks]

EmTech: Qualcomm Working to Build Artificial Intelligence Into Smartphones

Future smartphones will be able to understand what you’re taking photos of and recognize faces, says mobile chip maker Qualcomm. Researchers at the company are working to make a powerful new approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning a standard feature of mobile devices.

Smartphone camera apps often have “scene” modes to get the best shots of landscapes, sports, or sunsets. Qualcomm has created a camera app able to identify different types of scenes on its own, based on their visual characteristics. That could lead to phones that can choose their own settings without having to send or receive data over the Internet.

 

[ScienceRocks]

This device lets you charge your phone just by walking around or working out

Yesterday I noted a portable battery charger that needs only 5 minutes to get enough juice for a full iPhone 5 charge and today I found one that’s a polar opposite: It takes almost all day just to top off this battery, which only provides another 3 hours of run-time for a phone. There’s one more big difference, though. This device, dubbed the Ampy, doesn’t need to be plugged into a wall charger at all. Instead, it uses your own kinetic energy.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Australian researchers make epic leap in quantum computing research

Quantum computing is something of a brass ring in the field – ultra-fast computers that run on very little energy. Unfortunately, one barrier has been the accuracy of qubits, the building blocks that process quantum data. Thankfully, two teams of scientists from UNSW in Australia may have cracked the code– they’ve developed two different qubits using silicon that process data with an accuracy of 99%.

 

[ScienceRocks]

New records bring super-powerful quantum computers closer to reality

In what are claimed to be new world records, two teams working in parallel at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia have each found solutions to problems facing the advancement of silicon quantum computers. The first involves processing quantum data with an accuracy above 99 percent, while the second is the ability to store coherent quantum information for more than thirty seconds. Both of these records represent milestones in the eventual realization of super-powerful quantum computers.

Each of the teams produced two types of quantum bits (the vertical and horizontal polarization of an electron representing the binary state of 1 and 0 – known as qubits) in their research. One qubit, developed by the team led by Professor Andrew Dzurak, using an "artificial atom" produced in a MOSFET (Metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor), and the other, developed by the team led by Associate Professor Andrea Morello, used a "natural" phosphorus atom to develop their qubit.

In both cases, keeping qubits in their fragile quantum states long enough to use them to store information and accurately read the results whilst ensuring that tiny error rates don’t quickly add up when millions of computations are performed, are integral factors in creating future quantum computers and the accuracy of the quantum algorithms that will drive them.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Samsung accelerates wi-fi speeds
BBC News - Samsung accelerates wi-fi speeds

Samsung claims to have found a way to make wi-fi data travel five times faster than it does currently.

It said its engineers had overcome two significant technical problems that had restricted the transfer of data at well below its theoretical limit of 4.6Gbps.

If the technology lives up to its promise, it would mean a 1GB file could be transferred in less than three seconds.

Experts said it could take time for the tech to be built in to gadgets.

Slow start
In a short statement, Samsung said its engineers were working on wi-fi that operated in the 60GHz band.

Current wi-fi systems use 2.4 and 5GHz bands, and some can operate at speeds in excess of 1Gb per second.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Google building TV that changes shape and size

If you're sick of flat screen or curved TV screens, Google may be working on something you might be interested in.

The company is reportedly building a modular TV screen that can be rearranged into different shapes and sizes, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Google is said to be developing a display comprised of smaller screens that plug together like Legos to form a single image.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Transparent Tablet Concept- The Touch of Reality Features

The innovation world is getting emotional progressions, and these progressions are getting to be speedier in this new century. May be something astonishing is sitting tight for us within a brief period of time. As an ardent enthusiast of sci-fi and cutting edge motion pictures, I have constantly longed for owning a transparent machine or tablet. It looks just as my fantasies are at long last working out as expected. In 2002, Minority Report turned out and totally knocked my nerdy socks off. From that point forward I have frantically been longing that somebody would make a transparent tablet. I’ve seen my offer of transparent telephones or tablets till now, however every new one still astonishes me. A sample is the slate made by Thomas Laenner, who envisioned an advanced tablet with a transparent show and increased reality characteristics. It would seem that Thomas Laenner is a genie, in light of the fact that he is conceding my wish. From sources we came to realize that Thomas Laenner has officially begun to envision around a transparent showcase advanced tablet which peculiarities increased reality characteristics. The pictures posted here reflect his creative energy.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Google tests ultra high-speed wireless Internet technology

Google is seeking FCC permission to test new technology which could marry the speed of Google Fiber to wireless services.

In an application to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday, the tech giant requested permission to conduct tests in California across wireless spectrums. Of particular interest, as noted by Reuters, is a rarely used millimeter-wave frequency that is capable of transmitting vast amounts of information across the air.

According to the publication, the tests could signal the creation of the base technology for use in high-speed, wireless connectivity — part of Google's plan to extend its reach in the Internet service provider industry. If so, this would obliviate the need for underground cables or fiber. A fast broadband service beamed into our homes could act as an extension to Google's slowly expanding Fiber service, which offers up to one gigabit in upload and download speed — but laying the groundwork is a slow process.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Samsung’s new Wi-Fi technology will download a movie in 3 seconds

Samsung has announced plans to set new standards for Wi-Fi devices that allow downloading a full-length movie in just 3 seconds. That is something. It means the Wi-Fi network’s data transmission speeds will reach 575 Mbps, a big leap that is almost 5 times faster than the current internet speed standards in use today.