Category: Hardware

Arduino Nano 3 released. Now even smaller.

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via engadget.com]

The new Arduino Nano

Hello, there, little guy. The new Arduino board’s just been outed, and it’s not kidding about the ‘nano’ part.

The Arduino Nano 3 boasts an ATMEGA328, breadboard capabilities plus Mini USB support built-in, and a bunch of other tweaks — like moving the power LED to the top — have been made in the interest of saving energy and space.

Other features of this new kid on the block include an automatic reset during program download, auto sensing / switching power input, ICSP header for direct program download, and a manual reset switch. Hit up the source link for a bit more info… or to get ordering!

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The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’

Posted by Nexus – 20/03/2010

[via datacenterknowledge.com]

A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center used to render the animation for the new James Cameron movie "Avatar." (Photo: Foundry Networks Inc.)

It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar. Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.

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NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance

Posted by Nexus – 20/03/2010

[via techpowerup.com]

A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA’s confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.

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Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users

Posted by Nexus – 11/03/2010

[arstechnica.com]

A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you’d expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly. The world of hard disks is set to change, and the impact could be severe. In the remarkably conservative world of PC hardware, it’s not often that a 30-year-old convention gets discarded. Even this change has been almost a decade in the making.

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Oh, Those Robot Eyes!

Posted by Nexus – 10/03/2010

[via hplusmagazine.com]

Willow Garage is organizing a workshop at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2010 in San Francisco to discuss the intersection of computer vision with human-robot interaction. Willow Garage is the hardware and open source software organization behind the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the PR robot development platform. Here’s a recent video from Willow Garage of work done at the University of Illinois on how robots can be taught to perceive images:

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‘Severe’ OpenSSL vulnerability busts public key crypto

Posted by Nexus – 09/03/2010

[via theregister.co.uk]

Computer scientists say they’ve discovered a “severe vulnerability” in the world’s most widely used software encryption package that allows them to retrieve a machine’s secret cryptographic key.

The bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library is significant because the open-source package is used to protect sensitive data in countless applications and operating systems throughout the world. Although the attack technique is difficult to carry out, it could eventually be applied to a wide variety of devices, particularly media players and smartphones with anti-copying mechanisms.

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$200 Chrome OS Tablet by Freescale

Posted by Nexus – 09/03/2010

[via thechromesource.com]

So it does exist. I had heard that there was going to be a Chrome OS tablet at the Mobile World Congress, and sure enough we finally see in a somewhat lengthy video the folks from Freescale showing off their prototype with a 7″ screen. This was the same model that was shown at CES running Android. The cost? Around $200, running on hardware in the form factor of their model known as the i.MX51. The video shows some locally cached video playback in HTML5:

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AMD Starts Shipping 12-core and 8-core ”Magny Cours” Opteron Processors

Posted by Nexus – 23/02/2010

[via techpowerup.com]

AMD has started shipping its 8-core and 12-core “Magny Cours” Opteron processors for sockets G34 (2P-4P+), and C32 (1P-2P). The processors mark entry of several new technologies for AMD, such as a multi-chip module (MCM) approach towards increasing the processor’s resources without having to complicate chip design any further than improving on those of the Shanghai and Istanbul.

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AMD’s 12-core Magny-Cours leaked on eBay

Posted by Nexus – 17/02/2010

[via bit-tech.net]

Holy huge die batman

If you just can’t wait to get your hands on AMD’s latest 12-cored ‘Magny-Cours’ Opteron processor, perhaps you’d care to risk buying leaked versions from eBay?

The as-yet unreleased dodeca-cored processors have popped up on the auction site under the user account oakvillemehlvillecomputers, available on buy-it-now at an eye-watering $7,700 (£4,880) for a batch of four 2.2GHz processors – designed for quad-processor socket G34 server systems and offering 48 logical processing cores to the host operating system.

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RealSSD C300 tested, offers sublime speed at superlative prices

Posted by Nexus – 04/02/2010

[via engadget.com]

It’s been a few months since Micron became the second to introduce the world’s first SATA 6Gbps hard drive (Seagate was the other), and regardless about who was earliest we now know which is currently the fastest.

TweakTown put a Crucial-branded C300 through its paces and came to a rather simple conclusion: “At this point in time there is no other drive, platter or solid state that is in the same league as the Crucial RealSSD C300.” It blitzed through all their tests and at the end, when others would be a smoking ruin of high access times, it still performed as good as new.

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