More power to the palm of the people

The revolution on processing power for portable devices has begun. All companies have been producing multi core processors specially designed for portable devices for some time now. And as we were getting used to dual core processors that rocked our worlds we get quad core ones.
The first company that gave us a quad core mobile processor was Intel with the new lineup of Sandy-Bridge processors announced in January. Apart from the usual mobile processors for laptops, Intel introduced multi core models designed for ultra thin portables and tablets. These new processors use a new technology that keeps power consumption to a minimum.
The second company that gave us a multi core processor was Nvidia with its Kal-El processor. This processor was announced in February and will be released to the market in a few weeks. This processor that could be named Tegra 3 can be seen in action in a very cool video here .
The third company was Qualcomm which just announced its new series of Snapdragon processors with two and four core models. The two core model will integrate a 3G/LTE modem and will be available in 2011. The quad core model is expected in the first quarter of 2012.
The last but not least was Texas Instruments, which just a day after the announcement of the new Qualcomm processors, announced its' new processor. The new OMAP processor has a pair of A9 cores and a pair of M3 cores for multimedia and will be available in 2011.
The next 12 months will be a very hot year for mobile computing  enthusiasts as there will be more than enough machines to the market. All companies have been collaborating closely with Microsoft to make their CPUs compatible with windows 8.

For more info check the links below.

Sources: Intel new processors, Nvidia Kal-El demo, Qualcomm Press Release, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Texas Instruments OMAP

New sea water cooled data center for Google

Ecology today should not be a trend nor something trivial, it should be a priority. For Google ecology is a priority for years now and the company prooved it once more. In Googles new data center, which was built in Finland at the old facilities of a mill, it was decided to use sea water for cooling. Apart from reducing the amount of river water that would be used this sea water approach takes into account the temperature difference between used and bay water. So used water is mixed with cool bay water so the temperature difference between the used and bay water will be trivial. You can take a virtual tour in Googles new Data Center through the video above.

via: engadget

Source: Datacenter Dynamics

New Cray supercomputer puts IBMs to shame.

IBM just recently proudly announced a new 10 petaflop supercomputer overcoming predictions for supercomputer growth for 2011 by almost 3 petaflops.Everybody was over-enthusiastic about the accomplishment and IBM was, for a short period of time, the ultimate ruler of the Top 500 supercomputer list. But IBM's rein didn't last long. The new XK6 Cray supercomputer that was announced managed to reach the astonishing 50 petaflops mark. This performance is not just better than the one achieved by IBM. it is 5 times better and far from the rest of the competition. This new computer uses 6200 AMD Opteron CPUs, accompanied by NVIDIA Tesla 20 series GPUs, all running under a custom version of linux. The people at Cray were not very cocky though. They were humble and announced that the new supercomputer is the first

"general-purpose supercomputer that uses GPU technology".

Humble in an "annoying to IBM" kind of way that is. By the way if you want to know more about the previous top supercomputer check here.

via: engadget
source: Cray

Black hole sucking galaxy into oblivion caught red handed.

This is one of the best moments of Astronomy or Physics in general if you like. The moment that you actually bear whiteness through experimenting or by just observing an incident that was only speculated. The incident we are referring is the slow death of the galaxy Centaurus A because of a black hole it has in its core. The galaxy's death is slow but not quiet. Large jets of particles spread around the black hole as matter flows in and gets caught in the extreme gravitational pull. These jets have been recently observed by scientists and caught on film. As you can see in the relevant video particles jets can be observed with a 12 light days resolution even though we are 12 million light years away. More info at the links and the videos below.

via: PhysOrg.com
source: NASA

Robotic sciense helps paraplegic student walk.

No matter how successful, rich and famous you are and no matter how careful and thoughtful you may be you could be involved in a car accident. In fact most people in developed countries have at least one trivial or serious accident involving cars in their lifetime. This is the case of Austin Whitney. A young man having just completed high school and scheduling to continue his studies. He was ambitious and hardworking but he made a mistake. He got involved in a car accident back in 2007, after drinking and driving and was left paralyzed. The doctors said he could never walk again. At a point in life such as this a man needs a lot of strength to carry on and most of the times he needs support from friends and family. This time Austin had also the support of science. A professor at Berkeley University created an exoskeleton light and affordable to help paraplegics walk again. There are other exoskeletons in the market but their cost, being over $100,000, is just prohibitive. The exoskeleton that was created by the Berkeley team costs a fraction of the price of others at $15,000. With that price you get a lightweight but strong exoskeleton with a battery life of 8 hours. This exoskeleton helped Austin walk to the podium and receive his graduation title in front of a crowd that kept silence through this effort. Since that day, Austin and others like him can look at the future with hope for a better life.

via: Gizmodo
sources: Austin Whitney, UC Berkeley, San Francisco Chronicle

Adobe has more holes than a Swiss cheese!

Well before you accuse us of spreading inaccurate facts about Swiss cheese, we need to tell you more about the recent top ten PC vulnerability list by Kaspersky Labs. According to Kaspersky Labs Adobe was not once, not twice, but five times in the list and occupied the three first places. First came Adobe Reader that managed to put 40% of the computers that was installed at risk, the following two places were occupied by Adobe Flash. Other companies in the list include Apple with Quick Time, Microsoft with MS Office, Java Virtual Machine and Winamp. More at the links below.

via: Engadget
Source: Kaspersky Labs

My browser is running linux!

My browser is running Linux! That's how we imagine Fabrice Bellard made every single one of his friends drop his jaw to the ground. By the way, if you managed to keep your jaw in place and said "Yeah, right!" thinking this is an April Fools day joke some months overdue, we have to inform you that it is absolutely true. Mr. Bellard managed to make a PC emulator in javascript and port a version of Linux to it. Well right now there aren't many things you can do with it but who knows what it can do in a few months. If you want to take a look at the javascript page click at the emulator link bellow. More info on Mr. Bellard at his personal page.

via: Engadget
Source: bellard.org, Emulator