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IBM has reported that they’re making great strides on developing a new technology that will continue to make chips smaller, while also making them continually faster at the same time. Using carbon nanotubes, IBM scientists have been able to build hybrid chips with more than 10,000 working transistors.

It’s said that the point in time when technology will reach a plateau as far as getting smaller and faster will come at some point, meaning that Moore’s Law won’t last forever. Even though Moore’s Law has lasted almost a half-century so far, it’s said to only be around until around 2020, give or take a few years.

If you’re not familiar with Moore’s Law, it’s basically an observation of sorts where the number of transistors that can fit onto an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and was coined by computer scientist and former Caltech professor Carver Mead.

IBM’s carbon nanotube discovery is huge, especially considering that chip makers have not yet found ways to improve chips beyond the next two or three generations. Not only will carbon nanotubes allow chip makers to build smaller transistors, but they’ll be able to increase the speed at which those transistors can be turned on and off. However, it’s not said when the new technology will be ready, but it most likely won’t be for a few more years at least, since it’s still in its early development stages.

[via New York Times]

Image via Flickr

IBM claims chip breakthrough using carbon nanotubes is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded, tackling complex climate change calculations with 20 petaflops worth of new processors. Under the (considerable) hood its NVIDIA’s “Kepler” GPUs and AMD Opetron 6274 processors doing the heavy lifting, though NVIDIA can’t resist pointing out that its graphics chips are in fact carrying 90-percent of the overall load. The GPUs, more commonly found powering gaming rigs, help make Titan “the world’s fastest supercomputer for open scientific research.”

That research will include simulating physical systems, such as weather patterns, or progressions in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials, and other fields. However, unlike most supercomputers, where access is jealously guarded, Titan takes a more open approach to access.

Researchers from schools and universities, government labs, and private industry can access Titan – by arrangement, of course – to crunch their own data. Final testing is still underway by the laboratory and Cray, and the supercomputer’s first year will be dominated by work on the Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

“The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections” James Hack, director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, said of the new machine.

In total, there are 299,008 CPU cores, sixteen to each of 18,688 nodes; each node also has an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics accelerator. The cores are used to guide the simulations, while the GPUs are relied upon to do the actual data crunching; altogether, it’s more than 10x faster and 5x more power efficient than the Jaguar supercomputer Titan replaces.

In fact, Titan can simulate 1-5 years per day of computing time, whereas Jaguar took a day to work through around three months worth of data. ORNL says it’s the equivalent of “the world’s 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.”

Titan supercomputer goes live with potent CPU/GPU tag team is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Apple has unveiled its latest mobile chipset, the Apple A6X, replacing the already-capable A6 in the third-gen iPad, and doubling performance compared to the A5X along the way. The new chipset, a custom SoC using ARM cores, delivers not only that 2x CPU grunt but doubled graphics performance too. It’s the new chipset at the heart of the 4th-generation iPad.

Apple hasn’t detailed exactly what’s going on inside the SoC, and we’ll probably have to wait for the first teardowns and assessments to see which ARM cores exactly have been used. We do know that it gets new, next-generation ISP, however, for better multimedia performance.

What’s particularly interesting is how the A6X could fit into Apple’s rumored ambitions to do away with traditional Intel processors in its desktop line-up, and instead adopt ARM-based chips of its own design. That could prolong battery life as well as leave Apple in control of its own silicon.

That probably isn’t in the pipeline for some time, though, and we’ll likely see a couple of iterations of A-series chips before they appear in notebook form factors. More on the new iPad 4th-gen in our Apple Hub.

Apple A6X revealed: New flagship chip is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

AMD has revealed the latest in its FX Series of processors: the Piledriver Vishera chips. Aimed at computer users with demanding hardware needs, the new series comes in 4, 6, and 8-core variants with a “default” speed of 4GHz. The chips feature a variety of enhancements and improvements over previous offerings.

The new line is composed of four processors: the 4.2GHz FX-8350 (8-core, $195), the 4.0GHz FX-8320 (8-core, $169), the 4.1GHz FX-6300 (6-core, $132), and the 4.0GHz FX-4300 (4-core, $122). The FX-4300 has 4MB of L3 cache, while the FX-6300 has 1MB of L2 cache per core with a total of 8MB of L3 cache. The two higher-end processors, the FX-8320 and FX-8350, both have 8MB of L3 cache. This series uses the Piledriver architecture, which is an improved version of the previously released Bulldozer.

The Piledriver cores were first introduced back in May in the A Series Trinity chips. Improvements include improved scheduling, larger L1 TLB, larger load queue, page translation reload optimization, and more. Said Adam Kozak, “We’re seeing anywhere from seven, all the way up to 15% [in improvement improvement]. Half of that comes from [instructions per cycle] improvements, and the other half or so comes from frequency improvements.” According to AMD, you need a 9-series motherboard to run the FX Vishera chips.

During a pre-release presentation, these four AMD processors were compared to Intel’s Core i5-3570K, i5-3450, i5-2300, and i3-2120 processors. In each case, the AMD processor was priced lower and offered better specs, according to the presentation slide. All FX Series processors are unlocked and can be overclocked.

[via Tech Spot]

AMD unveils 4GHz+ FX Series Vishera processors is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Intel may have recently spilled its Q3 guts for 2012, but we highly doubt that the chip maker planned on outing its forthcoming projects for next year. An alleged internal slide makes the claim that the silicon giant plans to introduce a 10-core Xeon E5-2600 V2 Ivy Bridge-EP CPU in the third quarter of 2013. Compatible with Socket R LGA 2011 motherboards, this brute will max out at 20 threads through HyperThreading. Packing 30MB of L3 cache, this unannounced Ivy Bridge supports up to 1866MHz of DDR3 system RAM. If these specifications have whet your appetite, the Xeon E5-2600 V2 is only the tip of the iceberg — Chipzilla is said to also have a 12-core processor in the pipeline as well.

Filed under: Misc, Intel

Intel roadmap reveals 10-core Xeon E5-2600 V2 Ivy Bridge CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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