Advances in Computers thread

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Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ vs. Galaxy S6 edge
By Chris Wood - August 17, 2015 28 Pictures

Last week, Samsung added an all-new phablet to its smartphone lineup in the form of the Galaxy S6 edge+. In a lot of ways, the standard S6 edge and new edge+ are different sizes of the same handset, but let's look at the ways they break off from each other.

 

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New internet routing method allows users to avoid sending data through undesired countries

Censorship is one of the greatest threats to open communication on the Internet. Information may be censored by a user's country of residence or the information's desired destination. But recent studies show that censorship ...

 

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Snake skin-inspired steel could lead to better hard drives and more
By Stanley Goodner - August 18, 2015 4 Pictures

When it comes to human phobias, snakes are frequently found toward the top of the list. But despite the negative reputation, these reptiles make up an important part of our ecosystem while exhibiting some very unique biological aspects. The way snakes move across surfaces is pretty incredible, and Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have figured out how to potentially use that feature to enhance hip prostheses, computer hard disks, or smartphones.

 

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Google launches OnHub, its vision of the ultimate router
By David Nield - August 18, 2015 4 Pictures

The humble home router may not have the same kind of buzz associated with smartphones and tablets, but when you think about the role it serves, it's still a very important bit of kit. Google today announced its very own take on the router: Called OnHub and built in partnership with TP-Link, it's designed to provide a secure, simple internet experience for everyone.

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Intel’s Reinvention of the Hard Drive Could Make All Kinds of Computers Faster

A new kind of hard drive available next year will be able to move your data many times faster than the best today

The speed at which data storage can operate has become a bottleneck on the performance of computers – limiting what they can do for us.
Computers from laptops to supercomputers could get a major speed boost next year, thanks to a new kind of hard drive developed by Intel. Intel Optane drives, as they will be called, are based on a new way to store digital data that can operate as much as 1,000 times as fast as the flash memory technology inside hard drives, memory sticks, and mobile devices today.
The first Optane drives won’t be that much faster than today’s data storage. An early prototype shown by Intel at its annual developer conference in San Francisco on Tuesday was only about seven times as fast as a top-of-the-range flash disk drive available today. However, even that level of performance could have significant effects on the capabilities of consumer and corporate computers, and Optane drives may perform better by the time they hit the market in 2016.
The sluggish speed of data storage compared to the pace at which processors can work on data has become a significant bottleneck on the capabilities of computers. Several large computing and chip companies have invested heavily in promising new data storage technologies, but none has yet borne fruit. Intel’s Optane drives are based on a technology called 3D Xpoint, developed in collaboration with the memory chip company Micron.
Intel says the technology is affordable enough that Optane drives will be made available next year for uses ranging from large corporate data centers to lightweight laptops. Rob Crooke, a general manager on Intel’s memory project, predicted that they would improve gaming, supercomputers, and data analysis. “We expect to see breakthroughs in personalized medicine, in business analytics to allow companies, cities, and maybe countries to run more efficiently,” he said.
The flash memory chips that are the fastest way to store data today use a grid of clumps of electrons trapped on silicon to represent the 0s and 1s of digital data. A 3D Xpoint chip instead has a grid formed from metal wires layered over one another; data is stored by using electricity to change the arrangement of atoms inside material trapped at each junction of the grid. Just like flash, 3D Xpoint chips hold onto data even when powered down. They can’t currently store data as densely, but Intel says the Xpoint grids can be stacked vertically, providing a route to storing more data on one chip.
Intel hasn’t released much more detail about 3D Xpoint, but its basic design is similar to what’s at the heart of an ambitious project by Hewlett-Packard to use devices called memristors to create faster data storage and new computer designs (see “Machine Dreams”). Other large companies as well as startups are working on similar technology (see “Faster, Denser, Memory Challenges both DRAM and Flash”). However, progress has been slower than anticipated and Intel is the only company promising complete hard drives on the market next year. After difficulties with its own memory technology, HP recently scaled back its memristor plans (see “HP Puts the Future of Computing on Hold”).

 

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IBM scientists develop brain inspired chip

Scientists have developed a brain inspired computer chip which mimics the neurons inside your brain.
The chip consumes just 70 milliwatts of power and can perform 46 billion synaptic operations per second.
Since 2008, scientists from IBM have been working with DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) programme.
They have developed the chip, or processor called TrueNorth, which is claimed to be efficient, scalable, and flexible non-von Neumann architecture using contemporary silicon technology.
TrueNorth has 5.4-billion-transistors with 4096 neurosynaptic cores interconnected via an intrachip network that integrates 1 million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million configurable synapses.
It can be tiled in two dimensions through an interchip communication interface and can be scaled up to a cortexlikesheet of arbitrary size.
The chip has been fabricated on Samsung's 28nm process and claimed to be IBM's largest chip in terms of transistor count.
During the simulation of complex recurrent neural networks, the chip consumes less than 100mW of power and has a power density of 20mW / cm2.
IBM fellow Dharmendra Modha said: "Unlike the prevailing von Neumann architecture -- but like the brain -- TrueNorth has a parallel, distributed, modular, scalable, fault-tolerant, flexible architecture that integrates computation, communication, and memory and has no clock.
"It is fair to say that TrueNorth completely redefines what is now possible in the field of brain-inspired computers, in terms of size, architecture, efficiency, scalability, and chip design techniques."
The chip can be used in many applications that use complex neural networks in real time including multi-object detection and classification.

 

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Smart light lets you control your environment
By Lakshmi Sandhana - August 19, 2015 3 Pictures

What if the light in the room could sense you waving your hand as you enter? And what if it responded by introducing minute light changes that instructed your smart coffee machine to switch on? Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a sensing system called LiSense that aims to make the light around us "smart." Not only does it use light to sense people’s movements, but it also allows them to control devices in their environment with simple gestures, using light to transmit information.

 

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Samsung Galaxy Note 5 vs. iPhone 6 Plus
By Will Shanklin - August 19, 2015 29 Pictures

Comparing the Galaxy Note 5 to the iPhone 6 Plus isn't completely fair, as Samsung's phablet is hot off the press while Apple will likely have a new model out next month. But nevertheless here's our breakdown of the two popular mega-phones.

 

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Potentially a very big deal - Dwave 2X 1000-2048 qubit quantum annealing system becoming faster than classical computers

Nextbigfuture has covered the 28 page benchmarking paper and the developments, applications and algorithms for the Dwave systems. Highlights * the Dwave system is broadly 15 times faster than commercial multi-core solvers * the Dwave system can be 600 times faster * Dwave is doubling the number of qubits every year or two * there are over...

Dwave Systems 1000+ qubit system available, faster than regular computers with 15-600 times speed up over classical solvers

DWave announced their 1000+ qubit quantum annealing system Dwave announced the general availability of the latest generation of D-Wave quantum computers, the D-Wave 2X™ system. With 1000+ qubits and many other technological advancements, the D-Wave 2X will enable customers to run much larger, more complex problems on the system. In addition...

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A new design for an easily fabricated, flexible and wearable white-light LED

Researchers from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan have created highly flexible, efficient white LEDs with potential use in wearable displays and non-flat surfaces, such as curved and flexible television screens. While .

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Startup Knowm combines machine learning, quantum computing via memristors

Startup Knowm's has a combo 'Anti-Hebbian and Hebbian' (AHaH) machine learning approach using memristors (others use one or the other, but only Knowm uses both at once) thus allowing the customer to define their own specific learning algorithm using the same building blocks.

"Knowm’s AHaH computing approach combines the best of machine learning and quantum computing via memristors," Chief Executive Officer Alex Nugent told EE Times in advance of the company's unveiling today. "Our neuromemristive processors use a low-level instruction set that can be combined in various ways to achieve any number of learning algorithms."

Many researchers take the “let’s decode the brain!” approach and want to simulate the brain on massive computer clusters. While this will most certainly provide insights into how the brain works, they will eventually be faced with the reality that that their simulations will not be able to compete on power, density and speed with other approaches that have addressed the issue directly.

Knowm has taken a different approach, which is to build a chip that doesn’t necessarily emulate a brain but instead provides adaptive-learning functions at a foundation ‘physical’ level and consequently beats other approaches on power and density.

 

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Russian Scientists Claim Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough

Researchers in Russia claim to have made a major step towards the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI). They have created an "artificial medium of natural intelligence - physical model, capable of self-learning."

The international team of scientists at a laboratory based in Tomsk State University in western Siberia have created a device that could be an artificial carrier of a natural mind, able to learn and react to the environment, according to a press release.

The system was built based on mathematical and computer models of the human brain states the head of the effort, Professor Vladimir Syryamkin. "After that it was designed radio-electronic device comprising perceptrons. It is capable of handling various information (video, audio, etc.) Now we are working to establish the basic system robotic system, which is an intelligent control center.
"In the end, an artificial brain should be analogous to the biological model," the main developer of the system, Shumilov Vladimir said. "We have a tremendous amount of work, but a very important step has been taken - we were able to reveal the secret of brain neural network. In our physical model, as in the human brain, the formation of new neural connections and damping existing. In humans, it is the process of forgetting."

This physical model is capable of self-learning and life experience.

 

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Intel watchers await more details about Skylake chip
Intel watchers have been keeping their eyes and ears open for any definitive news about its new platform Skylake. Flocking to San Francisco for the chip giant's annual IDF developer event on Tuesday, there were expectations ...

 

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Landlines (remember those?) can now go mobile with Voice Bridge
By Stanley Goodner - August 24, 2015 4 Pictures

With so many new consumer gadgets going the way of wireless connectivity, it can be easy to forget about entire subsets of products that still use cables. Though landline telephones aren't as feature-packed or exciting as smartphones, they are still critical for businesses and homes everywhere. With the Swissvoice Voice Bridge, users will be able to combine the best of both worlds by taking landline calls on mobile devices.

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Could a hydrogen-powered iPhone be in the works?
By Eric Mack 2 Pictures

For decades we've been promised that hydrogen fuel cells will revolutionize our lives, but it always seems to be around the next corner. But that hasn't stopped one UK company from pursuing a near future in which iPhones and other devices are completely disconnected from the electrical grid and instead use embedded fuel cells to power themselves for a full week between recharges.

 

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Microsoft Prototypes A Keyboard Cover With E-Ink Display

Tablets have became the right tool for finishing the work properly. In order to make the difference between slate and laptop bigger, Microsoft Applied Science made a new prototype device called DisplayCover: a cover for keyboard that can house an e-ink touchscreen display. Thanks to 1,280 x 305 resolution screen, you will be provided with access to app shortcuts and will be able to handle navigational touch gestures and accept stylus input as well. With the stylus feature, you will easily be able to handle things like signing document and scribbling notes based on the demo video. Provided that you would like to use an app such as Photoshop where you need to access the tool palettes constantly, you can move them at the top of the keyboard so you can have more of your tablet’s space at disposal.

 

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DARPA CRAFT Program Aims for Affordable Designer Circuits that Do More with Less Power

Demand for specialized integrated circuits for military electronics continues to surge exponentially with no end in sight. Systems that synchronize the activity of unmanned aerial vehicles; real-time conversion of raw radar data into tactically useful 3-D imagery; and instant access to high-resolution sensor feeds on the battlefield are only...

 

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Facebook has a billion users in a single day, says Mark Zuckerberg

For the first time over a billion people used Facebook on a single day, according to company founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The "milestone" was reached on Monday, when "1 in 7 people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family", he said in a post.

Facebook has nearly 1.5 billion users who log in at least once a month, but this was the most in a single day.

The company gained its billionth user in October 2012.

It was founded in 2004 by Mr Zuckerberg while he was a Harvard student.



http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-34082393

 

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Eight-Layer 3D IC Wafer Stack Containing Active Logic

Today at the IEEE 3DIC conference, Tezzaron Semiconductor and their manufacturing subsidiary, Novati Technologies, announce the world’s first eight-layer 3D IC wafer stack containing active logic.
The transistor and interconnect densities per cubic mm are far higher than achievable with 2D 14nm silicon fabrication, promising to accelerate high-performance computing and put Moore's Law back on track, potentially saving the industry billions of dollars.

 

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Quantum computer that 'computes without running' sets efficiency record

Due to quantum effects, it's possible to build a quantum computer that computes without running—or as the scientists explain, "the result of a computation may be learned without actually running the computer." So far, however, the efficiency of this process, which is called counterfactual computation (CFC), has had an upper limit of 50%, limiting its practical applications.

Now in a new paper, scientists have experimentally demonstrated a slightly different version called a "generalized CFC" that has an efficiency of 85% with the potential to reach 100%. This improvement opens the doors to realizing a much greater variety of applications, such as low-light medical X-rays and the imaging of delicate biological cells and proteins—in certain cases, using only a single photon.
The researchers, led by Prof. Jiangfeng Du at the University of Science and Technology of China and Prof. Liang Jiang at Yale University in the US, have published a paper on the high-efficiency counterfactual computing method in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
"The main keys to achieving high-efficiency CFC include the utilization of exotic quantum features (quantum superposition, quantum measurement, and the quantum Zeno effect), as well as the use of a generalized CFC protocol," Du told Phys.org.

 

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Nest Announces 3rd Generation Nest Learning Thermostat

Published on September 1st, 2015 | by Joshua S Hill

Nest has announced that it is upgrading its flagship Nest Learning Thermostat with a 3rd generation version of the pioneering home energy management tool. The new Nest Learning Thermostat will feature a sleek new design with [&hellip...

 

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Intel debuts 6th gen Core processor family at IFA 2015
By Paul Ridden - September 2, 2015 2 Pictures

Intel says there are over 500 million computers in use today that are at least 5 years old, frustrating users with slow wake-up times, the inability to wander away from a wall socket for very long and sluggish overall performance. Today at IFA 2015 in Berlin, the company introduced its new 6th generation Core and Xeon processor families that promise 2.5x faster performance over what was available 5 years ago, 30x better graphics and 3x the battery life.