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Sony is making some waves in (believe it, or not) magnetic tape technology. Reaching a maximum capacity of an astounding 185TB, Sony hit a world record in data density of 148GB per square inch. This massively outpaces the current industry standard LTO variants’ density rate of 2GB per square inch as well as maximum capacity by a factor of 70. This means that my entire collection of Ultrium 3s at 800GB could be contained on a single cartridge of Sony’s new tape with space for another 13 years worth of backups.My Ultrium 3 800GB Tape Collection Sony detailed the fine...

AMD Signs Architectural License Agreement With ARM Holdings SAN FRANCISCO—Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Monday disclosed new dimensions to a high-profile strategy shift, including plans to make its first original chip designs based on technology licensed from ARM Holdings PLC.

Chip maker AMD wants the world to know that it is not just dabbling in ARM processors, but rather intends to make ARM chips peers to its X86 products. At an event in San Francisco today, the top brass of the company revealed the full extent of its “ambidextrous computing” strategy, which includes an effort code-named “SkyBridge” that will see future X86 and ARM processors have the same pin-outs.AMD also announced that it has become a full ARMv8 architecture licensee of ARM Holdings, which will allow it to create its own custom ARM core designs. On the server front,...

***************** AMD has just announced their Opteron roadmap for 2014-2016 at the Core Innovation conference which unveils the upcoming Project Skybridge and K12 architecture based family of APUs and SOCs. The new roadmap reveals the ambidextrous design framework which brings computing to several form factors in the dense server market.AMD Announces 2014-2016 Roadmap – 20nm Project SkyBridge The Project Skybridge is AMD’s next generation ambidextrous computing architecture that allows x86 Cores and ARM cores to be pin-to-pin compatible allowing the motherboard to run off both SOCs and APUs. The Project Sky-Bridge will feature the new family of APUs and SOCs...

Flash will save everyone of us Toshiba has launched of its 15nm process technology at least for 2-bit-per-cell 128 gigabit (16 gigabytes) NAND Flash memory. The technology will kill off second generation 19nm process technology and full production with the new technology next week at Toshiba's Fab 5 in Yokkaichi.Chips based on the new processing technology will have better peripheral circuitry technology. They will have the write speed as chips formed with 19nm process technology, but boost the data transfer rate to 533 megabits per second which is 1.3 times faster, particularly if it is going downhill with the wind behind...

Samsung researchers have developed a new method of synthesising graphene, which they claim could accelerate the commercialisation of the so-called 'miracle material', for use in electronic devices. Graphene is one of the thinnest, lightest, strongest and most conductive materials know to man, consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. Its versatility means that it can potentially support a wide variety of applications in electronics, including flexible displays, wearables and other next-generation electronic devices.

Seagate introduced Backup Plus FAST portable drive; the world's first portable 4TB storage device, providing twice the capacity and speed of existing external portable drives. This new Seagate Backup Plus FAST drive features a super speed USB 3.0 interface to deliver transfer speeds up to 220MB per second, making it the perfect companion for a field photographer or filmmaker looking to quickly move large files to backup."With Backup Plus FAST, Seagate has taken a very mature product category and has delivered innovative enhancements to address the real world challenges of our customers," said Rajesh Khurana, country manager, India & SAARC,...

Seagate announced it is now shipping the world's fastest 6 TB hard disk drive (HDD) - the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4. Boasting industry-leading performance, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 is an important step forward in scale-out data infrastructures delivering supersize storage and enterprise reliability to meet the explosive growth of corporate and cloud-based data centers."Unstructured data growth is doubling exponentially and will propel the digital universe to reach 16 Zettabytes of data by as early as 2017. This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering...

Nvidia and IBM today announced a high-speed interconnect called NVLink which dramatically improves data movement between the CPU and GPU. The new technology will be integrated into Nvidia’s future GPUs, starting with its Pascal GPU architecture expected to be introduced in 2016, as well as IBM’s future versions of its Power CPUs.

The atom-thick sheet of carbon, graphene already has a number of amazing properties to it, including strength and electrical conductivity. As impressive its conductivity is though, superconductivity is still greater and has been observed with graphene, but not explained. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have now found how graphene and calcium become a superconductor.Called calcium intercalated graphite, or CaC6 is produced by interweaving calcium and graphite, which is a means of isolating sheets of graphene. About ten years ago it was discovered that this material could become superconducting, but neither the exact means nor...

GDC 2014: Completely different because it is not called Mantle, just ask MS PR Just as SemiAccurate predicted months ago, Microsoft has adopted AMD’s Mantle but are now calling it DX12. The way they did it manages to pull stupidity from the jaws of defeat by breaking compatibility in the name of lock-in. The impetus for all of this mess is the dire situation the XBox One is in. You might recall that it is woefully underpowered compared to the Sony PS4, has roughly 50% less shader performance, far lower memory bandwidth, significantly harder to program for, and tools described...

MWC 2014: Why? Because we can, that's why Mellanox was showing a very interesting networking card to SemiAccurate at MWC, one capable of 56Gb Ethernet. If you are scratching your head wondering when 56GbE became a standard, you didn’t miss anything yet.The cards shown off by Mellanox are a dual port 10GbE on the right and a dual port 56Gb FDR Infiniband on the left. No points if you figured out where this is going already. That card also does two lanes of 10 and 40GbE as well, likely for the high latency buffs out there. In short this card...

HMC Consortium Reveals Hybrid Memory Cube 2.0 Spec The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMCC), the organization dedicated to the development and establishment of an industry-standard interface specification for the hybrid memory cube (HMC) technology, has announced the second version of the HMC specification. The new spec could boost performance of the hybrid memory cubes to whopping 480GB/s, which is more than enough for next-gen graphics cards and mobile devices. HMC uses advanced through-silicon vias (TSVs) – vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips – to combine high-performance logic with Micron's DRAM. Micron's HMC features a 2GB memory...

Sony Corporation and Panasonic today announced that they have formulated "Archival Disc", a new standard for professional-use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage. Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored.

Graphics and x86 cores are all just 'compute units' now for our games, videos and apps AMD has released its long-awaited Kaveri processor, the first accelerated processing unit (APU) to incorporate both on-die CPU and GPU cores in a heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) with a shared memory architecture. Behold Kaveri, in which CPUs and GPUs are equal 'compute unit' partners (click to enlarge) "We're going to need to create a new term," AMD product CTO Joe Macri said at a Kaveri briefing, "because HSA has really changed what can be done on the graphics part of the die."That new term,...

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA and NEW YORK, NEW YORK--(Marketwired - Jan. 20, 2014) - LOMIKO METALS INC. (TSX VENTURE:LMR)(PINKSHEETS:LMRMF)(FRANKFURT:DH8B) (Europe: ISIN: CA54163Q1028, WKN: A0Q9W7) (the "Company") announces Graphene 3D Lab has reached a significant milestone by filing a provisional patent application for the use of graphene-enhanced material, along with other materials, in 3D Printing (Additive Manufacturing). "This patent application is the result of a diligent effort on behalf of our team. It opens up a clear path toward the commercialization of graphene," stated Daniel Stolyarov, Graphene 3D Labs' CEO. "It is important that our proprietary technology is accepted by consumers in...

Graphene, one of the world’s thinnest electronic nanomaterials, has long held the promise as a wonder material in everything from flexible touchscreens to super-fast circuits. IBM researchers have demonstrated one of the first working prototype chips made of graphene. They created a logic circuit that was reliable enough to send and receive a text message. The demonstration has the potential to improve today’s wireless devices’ communication speed, and lead the way toward carbon-based electronics device and circuit applications beyond what is possible with today’s silicon chips. Integrating graphene radio frequency (RF) devices into today’s low-cost silicon technology could also be...

Around 15 months ago, AMD announced that it would be building 64-bit ARM based SoCs for servers in 2014. Less than a month into 2014, AMD made good on its promise and officially announced the Opteron A1100: a 64-bit ARM Cortex A57 based SoC. The Opteron A1100 features either 4 or 8 AMD Cortex A57 cores. There's only a single die mask so we're talking about harvested die to make up the quad-core configuration. My guess is over time we'll see that go away entirely, but since we're at very early stages of talking about the A1100 there's likely...

Apple has managed to leave everyone behind with the world’s first 64-bit ARM architecture system-on-chip. However, if the rumours about Qualcomm’s forthcoming application processor is correct, then the world’s largest supplier of chips for mobile devices may be preparing something that will blow away not only Apple’s A7, but even Nvidia’s Tegra K1. Qualcomm is reportedly working on Snapdragon 810 system-on-chip that boasts up to eight 64-bit custom cores with up to 4MB of cache and up to 2.50GHz frequency. The app processor also packs Adreno 430 graphics core with up to 500MHz clock-rate, LPDDR3/LPDDR4 memory controller and various...

Seagate Technology said at a conference call with investors and financial analysts that it would release a hard disk drive with 6TB capacity in the beginning of the second quarter, 2014. The company did not reveal a lot of details about the upcoming product, but noted that this would be an enterprise-class hard drive. “We are continuing to expand our offering of high capacity drives with our six-disk, 6TB drive shipping early next quarter,” said Steve Luczo, chairman and chief executive of Seagate. At present 6TB hard disk drives in 3.5” form-factor are available exclusively from Western Digital Corp.’s HGST....