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FPGAs, ASICs, and other high performance commercial applications will be targeted by next year at volume Today, vertical NAND (v-NAND) flash memory is in production and bumping storage densities in mobile devices to new highs.  Yet while many players -- including Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) -- are actively producing v-NAND, vertical DRAM -- stacked volatile memory -- remained unsampled until now. I. HMC -- 70 Percent Less Power, 8x the Transfer Rate of DDR4 Micron Technologies Inc. (MU) this week announced the industry's first stacked DRAM.  While Micron describes the stacked chips as a "hybrid memory cube" (HMC) (also known as vertical DRAM (v-DRAM), the...

It's been a long time coming, and Advanced Micro Devices definitely clamored about it wherever and whenever they could: The Hawaii graphics processing unit from the Volcanic Islands line is now out, and so is the Radeon R9 290X graphics card based on it.Hawaii is the first in a new collection of chips, the other two being Hawaii Pro and Hawaii XT, which will arrive around October. On that note, the first video card powered by the new chip, and the flagship graphics adapter for that matter, might not ship right away either. We'll know for sure after watching retailers...

Wrapping up our AMD product showcase coverage for the week, AMD’s final announcement for the showcase was a very brief announcement about a new API called Mantle. Mantle is something of an enigma at this point – AMD isn’t saying a whole lot until November with the AMD Developer Summit – and although it’s conceptually simple, the real challenge is trying to understand where it fits into AMD’s product strategy, and perhaps more importantly what brought them to this point in the first place. So although we don’t have all of the necessary details in hand quite yet, we wanted...

API inception of sorts AMD’s Hawaii even dragged on for hours and that is perhaps our only complaint – there was too much stuff, it was too damn long. For some reason AMD left the best for last. The consumerish stuff was shown off first, new cards, some audio tech and new games. But Mantle was for some reason reserved for the end of the presentation. So what’s the big deal about Mantle? Well AMD describes it as a low-level high-performance console-style graphics API for PC. That is a mouthful, but basically it is an API designed to tie in...

Give me Steam It looks like Valve’s announcement about its SteamOS has poked Nvidia and AMD to spruce up their Linux support. A day after Valve announced penguin flavoured SteamOS, AMD and Nvidia announced improvements to their driver support for the Linux. One of the things which prevented Linux from taking off in the gaming world, other than a lack of decent games, was a lack of drivers. AMD is active in the Linux community, but its open-source Linux drivers are not as good as its Windows drivers. It has been making efforts. It recently released 165 kernel patches...

AMD Introduces New Radeon R7 and R9 Graphics ProductsAdvanced Micro Devices on Wednesday introduced its all-new Radeon graphics cards as well as new family of graphics processing units. The new R9- and R7-series of GPUs -- which will be available at price-points from $89 to $599+ -- will not only improve performance, but will also introduce a set of new graphics, audio and compute-related capabilities. The new AMD Radeon R7 and R9 families of graphics chip feature three key pillars: AMD GCN architecture with tweaks that adds support for DirectX 11.2 application programming interface; AMD TrueAudio technology, a fully programmable...

********************************************************* Intel proves once and for all that PCs are not coming back IDF 2013: Rant - Dead and gone because that is what Intel wants for some reason I went to IDF this year hoping to find a reason that PCs weren’t doomed and came away knowing all key players are actively making things worse. The PC isn’t just in trouble, it is actively being destroyed because no one involved is interested in changing.Lets face it, the modern Windows 8 PC is a miserable experience, it is not a step forward from its predecessors in any measurable way but...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has released three silicon-validated reference flows within the open innovation platform (OIP) that enable 16 FinFET systems-on-chip (SoC) designs and 3D chip stacking packages. Leading electronic design automation (EDA) vendors collaborated with TSMC to develop and validate all these flows through multiple silicon test vehicles. There are three reference flows.

Last month, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charted the 11,967 tropical cyclones that have occurred on Earth since records began. By colouring how many times any storm track overlapped another, certain patterns arise in the density of storms affecting a given area. Cyclone tracks overlapped the most in the western Pacific and Bay of Bengal. The frequency of track overlaps is much lower in the Western Hemisphere

Crucial Rolls-Out Mammoth 64GB DDR3 1333MHz Crucial on Thursday announced the 64GB LRDIMM (load-reduced dual-inline memory module) for new-generation servers. Load-reduced DIMMs enable users to populate more DIMMs per channel for up to twice the installed memory capacity of a server, which is crucial for new-generation servers that can feature twelve or more microprocessor cores per socket.The 64GB Crucial DDR3L LRDIMMs operates using 1.35V, unlike the 1.5V common in DDR3 RDIMMs, making the new module more energy-efficient and cost-effective, especially in large deployments. The modules work at 1333MHz clock-rate with CAS latency 9. These modules offer up to a 35%...

PengPod, a low-quantity Linux tablet vendor, released the PengPod 1040 tablet today that they claim will "transform the PC and Tablet world by merging both elegantly together to fit any lifestyle." But will it really pan out? The company claims their latest tablet will transform the PC and tablet worlds since it can effectively dual-boot between Android and Linaro/Ubuntu on ARM. This way, you can enjoy Android apps and then reboot and gain access to your normal Ubuntu (desktop-focused) apps -- not too different from Canonical's failed Ubuntu Edge campaign with a smart-phone dual-booting Ubuntu and Android. PengPod also...

IDF 2013: One tenth of power Intel has just announced Quark, a new SoC family that is just one fifth of Atom in size and uses one tenth of the power. This subatomic chip is intended for ubiquitous computing, from watches to washing machines and many medical devices that people can wear. Essentially companies such Intel wants to have as many computers possible in just about anything including headlights in your car. It creates new market and expands existing ones, hence all that hype about the internet of things.This might be Intel’s solution to a wearable computing like smart glasses,...

64-bit chip for iPhone 5S and iOS 7 In addition to the new 64-bit kernel iOS 7 as well as the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C, Apple has unveiled its new A7 SoC, which is actually the first consumer ARM-based SoC with 64-bit support.According to Apple, the new A7 SoC consists of over 1 billion transistors on a 102mm2 die, which is actually twice what they had in the A6 chip. The chip will feature 64-bit desktop-class architecture with a modern instruction set, twice the amount of general-purpose and floating-point registers.According to Apple, the new chip will be twice...

While the investing community this morning is focused squarely on the very disappointing iPhone 5 relaunch and the lack of a cemented China Mobile deal, which has resulted in a $20 billion loss in market cap in early trading for the second most widely held hedge fund stock, a thing that we find more curious in the aftermath of the latest revalations of an implicit, if not explicitly voluntary, joint venture between Apple and the US government and specifically its NSA uberspies, is just how much of Apple's product suite is derived thanks to developments by the US government....

Samsung unveiled its highly anticipated digital wristwatch Wednesday, beating Apple to what could become this year's must-have holiday gift item. So-called smartwatches, which can perform tasks such as displaying email and Twitter messages on a device worn around the wrist, have been around for several years but have failed so far to inspire great interest among ordinary consumers. But with smartphone behemoths Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc. joining the fray—and Google pushing its Google Glass gadget—experts see a chance of wearable computers breaking into the mainstream. That is, if consumers can get used to talking to their watch, secret...

How to fight 21st century financial crime with 19th century tools A US House of Representatives committee is investigating whether federal securities regulators are using last century's tools to review corporations' books. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa penned a stiff missive to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White asking for an explanation of why the regulator has been so slow to embrace the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL. White has been wanting more funds to hire additional staff but apparently is less interested in moving to XBRL. Issa pointed out that interactive data in financial...

Wearable technology seems to be a hot topic these days. Most of the major technology players have some form of wearable device in the works. Samsung is calling its product line, Galaxy Gear, which they say will encourage “a smarter life.” The hope is that Internet technology will move from being something that is some-what independent of us to something that is literally woven into our daily existence. From your shoes to your shirt, stove to your toilet, the future may be found in connecting every part of our lives. This is sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.”...

Seagate First to Utilize Next-Gen SMR Tech for Hard DrivesSeagate Technology, a leading maker of hard disk drives and storage solutions, has announced it has shipped over one million drives using shingled magnetic recording (SMR). SMR is the next generation in storage technology and is critical for continued improvement in areal density to support global growth in cloud and mobile usage. The SMR generation of storage technology is expected to power gains of up to 25%. “With nearly 7 billion inhabitants on earth we are creating an astounding 2.7 Zettabytes of data a year and as such are rapidly approaching...

Military planes as well AMD just said that the huge Airbus A380 uses AMD embedded chips, as well as some military planes. Arun Iyengar, General Manager of Embedded Solutions Group, mentioned that AMD has been used in submarines, rescue vehicles as well as some other markets that you don’t really expect it to be. This is a market that likes to buy these chips for a number of years and expect support for least 7 years for these parts to be available. AMD embedded is in the heads up display market and it’s interesting to mention that the next generation...

Hierofalcon A57, up to 8 cores As expected, AMD’s first ARM based product won’t go after phones and tablets. Arun Iyengar, General Manager of Embedded Solutions Group, AMD, has just announced the company’s first ARM product codenamed Hierofalcon.It is based on up to eight ARM 64-bit A57 cores and it is a 28nm chip. It is mainly targeting the network and communications market rather than anything else.The product comes with 10Gb network support, ECC support, PCI gen 3 and ARM trusted zone. It comes in second half of 2014 and since there is still plenty of growth potential in the...