Hasta La Gadget!

Thirty-three years after the first Cray-1 supercomputer, the company is still cranking them out. Now the Cray XT5 “Jaguar” just won the title of world’s fastest computer, displacing the IBM Roadrunner that held the title for the previous 18 months, InformationWeek reports.

The Jaguar features six-core AMD Opteron processors, nearly a quarter million total CPU cores, and managed to hit 1.75 petaflops per second on the Linpack benchmark used by researchers in determining the biannual Top500 list. That’s compared with the Roadrunner’s 1.04 petaflop/s rating. (A petaflop/s is one quadrillion calculations per second.)

Of the top 500 machines in the list, 399 use Intel processors, 52 employ IBM Power chips, and AMD brings up third place in popularity with 42 systems. HP and IBM together account for building almost 400 of the 500 computers. Anyone for Crysis benchmarks?

Telephone giant/punching-bag AT&T showed off some undeniably cool future tech at last week’s AT&T Technology Showcase in San Francisco–including a concept for AirGraffiti, where mobile phone users can leave videos, photos, and songs “in the air” for others to find–but the one that really grabbed our attention was the demo of “smart slippers.”

These cushy slippers give the home network a whole new purpose. They contain sensors that can tell how a person is walking, and then report that data to the home network. If the wearer is unsteady on their feet, the system could issue a warning. If the wearer falls, the system could alert someone. While it’s only a concept now, it could one day be a lifesaver for older people living alone.

For more, check out the video of AT&T Labs research director Lusheng Ji showing off a slipper and the monitoring software. At the end of the video, Ji also shows a connected pill holder that can tell people when to take their medicine.

Stanford University has teamed up with Volkswagen to build two driverless cars–an Audi TTS and a VW Passat Wagon–and hopes to break a few records along the way.

So far the Audi TTS has already achieved an unofficial speed record for an autonomous car at 130 miles per hour, as Engadget reports. Stanford is hoping that the car will soon complete the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, a nine mile race with 156 turns–all by itself.

Meanwhile, Stanford’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory has developed a Volkswagen Passat “valet system” that handles tough parallel parking, as the report said. Videos of each after the break.

It’s getting cold outside, and soon your nimble fingers will be covered in warm, snuggly gloves that keep your digits warm but make it virtually impossible to navigate your iPhone. In fact, any capacitive touch-screen is pretty much beyond your reach (resistive works fine, thank you very much).

So you take off a glove and live with the cold, so you can touch your iPhone and virtually any one of the other 400 million capacitive touch screen devices you encounter–ATMs, gas stations, checkout counters, and the like.

On the other hand, you could simply use TouchTec’s new nano-technology-impregnated gloves and never remove them for a touch screen again (unless you want to). Check out my “hands-in” report in the video; more details after the jump.

Mobile phone and game device owners could soon be enjoying 3D images with no glasses required, according to an announcement from 3M. The Scotch Tape giant has created a sequential 3D optical film that allows for true auto stereoscopic 3D images on mobile phones, gaming products, and other handheld devices.

The film is integrated into the backlight module and requires only one LCD at a 120-Hz refresh rate. Integration is simple for device makers, with the standard optical film stack being replaced by reflective film, a custom light guide, and 3D film. The result is that left and right images are focused sequentially into the viewer’s eyes, enabling a full-resolution display.

This 3D technology will be on display at the Korea Electronics show, October 13 to 16.