World’s Number One System Powered by the AMD Opteron Processor
By Business Wire May 31, 2010

AMD continues to hold the reigning spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer list announced today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Jaguar, the world’s highest performing system, is a massive, 1.75 petaflop Cray XT5(TM) supercomputer based on the Six-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processor and features almost a quarter of a million cores. Additional Top 10 systems based on AMD technology are:
– #3: Roadrunner, a hybrid system from IBM using AMD Opteron processors in conjunction with IBM Cell technology located at Los Alamos National Laboratory
– #4: Kraken, a Cray XT5 system at the University of Tennessee
– #7: Tianhe-1, a hybrid system using ATI Radeon(TM) graphics processors at the National SuperComputer Center in China
Forty-seven additional AMD systems are in the TOP500 from OEMs including Appro, ClusterVision, Dawning, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Koi Computers, Penguin Computing, and Sun.

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ASUS’ new tablets/slates run in Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows Embedded Compact 7
By Brandon Hill – May 31, 2010

ASUS sparked the netbook craze with its Eee PC family of products. While ASUS isn’t the first one to market a tablet device, it’s hoping to bring something new to the tablet with a couple of tablet offerings based on Microsoft operating systems. The first product is called the Eee Pad EP121 and it has a 12.1″ display. The device features a CULV Core 2 Duo processor and runs Windows 7 Home Premium. ASUS says that the device can run for up to ten hours on a single charge. Text entry can be accomplished using either the virtual on-screen keyboard or via an external dock/keyboard hybrid apparatus. The second tablet offering from ASUS is the Eee Pad 101TC. Instead of using a mainstream offering like Windows 7, the 10″ Eee Pad 101TC uses Windows Embedded Compact 7.

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By Sumner Lemon, May 31, 2010

Hardware makers will unite behind Google’s Android as the primary operating system for tablet computers, according to Nvidia’s CEO. Tablets are shaping up to be one of the highlights of the annual Computex show in Taipei, where hardware makers are showing off their latest products and prototypes. Most manufacturers are expected to show off tablets, with some designed to run Android and others Windows. But Windows isn’t the best choice for a tablet, said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at Nvidia. “Windows is too big and it’s too full featured for smartbooks and tablets,” Huang said, speaking with reporters in Taipei on Monday. Smartbook is a term used to describe low-cost laptops containing processors designed by Arm instead of x86 chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices. “The good news is that we finally have an operating system to unite behind. Android is an operating system that has gained a tremendous amount of momentum all over the world,” Huang said.

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Apple may face its day of reckoning for its bullying on music, Flash, and more.
By Jason Mick – May 31, 2010

Apple has long played itself up as the cool outsider, making fun of rivals like Microsoft as stodgy, uptight business people.  However, Apple’s success has transformed it into exactly the type of company it mocks — a giant with effective monopolies in several markets.  And according to many observers, the company — one of the tech industry’s largest firms — has become increasingly brazen in its violation of antitrust laws. Last week, government investigators began to probe whether Apple broke the law by bullying music companies into dropping a major deal with digital music provider Amazon.com.  Exclusive deals are a common promotional tool and Amazon.com scored a win by convincing major music labels to put certain tracks on sale through Amazon’s service one full day before their broad release. Apple caught wind of the deal and reportedly tried to kill it.  Apple, whose iTunes service controls roughly 69 percent of the digital music market, reportedly told music labels that it would penalize them if they carried through with the plan (penalties included refusing to sell the applicable tracks in iTunes).

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Google has been showing off some of the new HTML 5 features that it will be building into future releases of Chrome and Android 2.0, codenamed Donut. Speaking at the Google IO developer conference keynote Google’s Vic Gundotra, vice president of developer products, showed off new features such as support for geolocation services and a new way of adding applications to web pages. Chief among these is a tool called Google Web elements, which allows developers to drop in Google applications directly on to pages with just a few lines of code. The company also said that it had now released full support for Java within its App Engine and said it had 10,000 applications using Java ready to go.

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by Regeneration on May 27th, 2010

As you already know, Nvidia has robbed its customers by disabling the PhysX technology (GPU and PPU) anytime a Non-Nvidia GPU is present in the system (even IGPs) since the release of 186 GeForce drivers, to prevent consumers from using hybrid PhysX. As predicted, the community responded critically and eventually a user by name of GenL created a patch that removes the blockage and reclaims the feature. The following is Nvidia’s explanation behind their actions: “Physx is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons – some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs. I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused but I hope you can understand.” But now it seems that Nvidia has removed the hybrid PhysX blockage in the recent 257.15 GeForce drivers. However, it is still a mystery for us if it was done intentionally or perheps it is just a bug. “I’m seriously amazed. I’ve tested it by myself on Windows XP and Windows 7 x64 – it really works out of the box with 257.15. And even more surprising – timebomb issue is gone too. It would be at least one respectable deed by Nvidia, and my mod would be obsolete, which is great for everyone. So we better hope this is permanent.” said GenL.

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By Rory Cellan-Jones May 27, 2010

A British scientist says he is the first man in the world to become infected with a computer virus. Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading had a chip inserted in his hand which was then infected with a virus. The device, which enables him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone, is a sophisticated version of ID chips used to tag pets. In trials, Dr Gasson showed that the chip was able to pass on the computer virus to external control systems. If other implanted chips had then connected to the system they too would have been corrupted, he said. Medical alert: Dr Gasson admits that the test is a proof of principle but he thinks it has important implications for a future where medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants become more sophisticated, and risk being contaminated by other human implants. “With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses.”

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By: Jeffrey Burt 2010-05-27

Advanced Micro Devices has hired away an executive from rival Nvidia to head up its efforts to combine CPU and graphics technologies in a single computing platform. AMD on May 27 announced that Manju Hegde, Nvidia’s vice president of CUDA technical marketing, will now be corporate vice president of its Fusion Experience program. Hegde, whose job will be to find computing solutions and applications to take advantage of AMD’s upcoming family of APU (accelerated processing units) that combine CPU and GPU capabilities, will report to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Products Group. “As Manju and his team work with the ecosystem to usher in a new era of visual computing, we expect a wide range of industry leaders to embrace the future of accelerated computing through the combination of the GPU and CPU—a combination only AMD can deliver with its AMD Fusion technology,” Bergman said in a statement.

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by Donald Bell May 27, 2010

After achieving success with the OLPC XO-1 laptop, the One Laptop Per Child foundation is setting in motion plans to create a working $100 tablet for CES 2011. Marvell Technologies announced Thursday, that it will partner with the OLPC foundation to create the hardware for the proposed tablet, currently named the XO-3. Vague details and product renderings of the XO-3 tablet first surfaced last December. More-concrete specs are now taking shape, including an ambitiously low power rating of 1 watt per hour (compared with the 5 watts per hour required by the OLPC laptop). Other promised features include a multilingual, multitouch-screen keyboard with Haptic feedback, Wi-Fi, high-quality video (1080p full-HD encode and decode), integrated video and still cameras, high-performance 3D graphics, Flash 10 Internet, and two-way teleconferencing. The backbone of the XO-3 will be an ARM processor (likely the Marvell ARMADA 610), with initial models running a version of Google’s Android OS. As with the OLPC laptop, these initial models will be sold within developed nations, subsidizing the less-expensive $75 version (running the open-source, educational Sugar OS) distributed to children and institutions supported by the foundation.

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By Mark Ward 25 May 2010

Silicon chips that are allowed to make mistakes could help ensure computers continue to get more powerful, say US researchers. As components shrink, chip makers struggle to get more performance out of them while meeting power needs. Research suggests relaxing the rules governing how they work and when they work correctly could mean they use less power but get a performance boost. Special software is also needed to cope with the error-laden chips. The silicon industry is defined by Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors that can fit on a given area of silicon, for a given price will double every 18-24 months. This is usually accomplished by shrinking transistors and typically means that processing steadily gets more powerful. Transistors are tiny switches that are used as the fundamental building blocks of silicon chips. However, many experts point out that the relentless march of Moore’s Law could stumble when components get so small they become unreliable. The unreliability – or “statistical variability” – of chips is a problem that many researchers were trying to deal with, said Professor Asen Asenov from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow. Variability increases as components shrink, said Professor Asenov, who has been using large scale simulations on grid computers to study how the behaviour of transistors changes as they get smaller. For Professor Rakesh Kumar at University of Illinois the demise of Moore’s Law is being hastened by an insistence on making silicon chips operate flawlessly.

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