Hasta La Gadget!

BMW Group’s Designworks USA — where have we heard about those folks before? Ah, yes, that’s the crew that’s responsible for Thermaltake’s Level 10 PC case, and we’re desperately hoping that this concept has an equal (or greater) level of success in the open market. The subway car you see above is purportedly 97.5 percent recyclable, with an aluminum chassis, vivacious hues and a ridiculously spacious interior. It’s being labeled the Siemens Inspiro, and it’s on track to show up in Warsaw’s Metro Warszawskie just over a year from now. No word on where to sign up for conductor dutie, though.

BMW Designworks USA flexes its eco muscle with Siemens Inspiro subway concept originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rollable electrical displays are the holy grail of display technology…well they were until a University of Cincinnati Electrical Engineering Professor raised the possibility of paper-based, disposable flexible displays.

According to a report on Physorg.com, Professor Andrew Steckl has effectively demonstrated that actual paper can be used as an “electrowetting” (EW) device. Essentially this means the paper can hold electrified droplets that can be controlled to mimic print on paper and, more impressively, color video. In the research paper, published this month in Applied Materials & Interfaces, Steckl reports working with a variety of paper types, with “coating, roughness, thickness, and water uptake, among the most important properties” for effectively supporting EW.

Companies like Qualcomm are already working on color electronic ink displays and some, like Skiff, have even showed off flexible black-and-white e-ink displays. However, none of them have made it to market and the so-called flexible displays still end up under some-kind of rigid screen (plastic or glass) .

For now, all e-ink readers use a glass substrate–as do most backlit display readers like the iPad and Nook. They’re designed to last for years. E-readers based on Steckl’s new technology could be used for a day or week and disposed as safely as a piece of paper.

Don’t get excited about rolling up your favorite paper-based e-reader and stuffing it into your back pocket just yet. Steckl’s electrowetting paper still needs funding and is at least five years away from commercial delivery. In the meantime, I’m contemplating the possibility of a stack of digital papers sitting in the corner of my home–waiting for recycling. This is progress?

Image Credit: ACS Publications

The ATI name might be dead, but Radeon graphics cards are only growing bigger, bolder and better. AMD’s recent financial analyst day has made official what many of us already knew or suspected: there’ll be three new high-end GPUs forthcoming in the first quarter of 2011. The slides explicitly describe the recently launched HD 6870 / 6850 as mere refreshes, aiming to bring HD 5800 series performance in a more efficient package, but peek beyond them and you’ll see an armada of HD 6900 chips just itching to bring the fight to NVIDIA and its newly crowned GTX 580 king of the single-GPU hill. No specs yet, of course, but at least we now know there’ll be some fireworks to greet us early in the new year. Oh, and if the mobile realm is more your thing, we’ve got a shot of AMD’s plans on that front waiting for you just after the break.

Continue reading AMD GPU roadmap points to a happy 2011 for Radeon lovers

AMD GPU roadmap points to a happy 2011 for Radeon lovers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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10Gbps. In both directions. At the same time. That’s been the tantalizing promise of Intel’s Light Peak optical interconnect, and now we’re hearing its penchant for speed is overflowing into the company’s roadmap. CNET cites a source familiar with developments behind the scenes in reporting that Light Peak is expected to arrive in the early part of next year, slightly accelerating the already known plans for delivering the technology at some point in 2011. We’ve already been graced with a set of Light Peak-enabled prototypes, so you could’ve guessed things were gathering pace, but it’s always good to get the odd bit of anonymous confirmation that things are moving along swiftly. And hey, when Light Peak hardware finally drops, we can just switch gears and start salivating over improvements that’ll lift that 10Gbps ceiling even further.

Intel Light Peak on track for release in first half of 2011? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 05:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want to know where the next breakthrough in mobile technology will come from? Well, if Elpida and Sharp have their way, the answer will be the usual suspect of Japan, where they’re working away on new memory chips said to be capable of four orders of magnitude faster performance than the ordinary NAND flash storage of today. Dubbed ReRAM, or Resistive Random Access Memory, this project targets a 2013 date for commercialization and counts the University of Tokyo and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology among its development team. Details on how such blinding speeds will be reached aren’t readily available, but the Nikkei reports power consumption will be down to “virtually zero” when the memory’s not in use. So with ReRAM and HP’s memristors both set for three years from now, can we schedule NAND’s funeral for 2014 or what?

Elpida and Sharp team up for ReRAM in 2013: 10,000x the speed of current NAND flash chips originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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