IBM, in partnership with Samsung and GlobalFoundries (which manufactures chips for Qualcomm and AMD, among others), has developed a process for building 5nm chips. Two years ago IBM unveiled a 7nm process, and Samsung will likely ship 7nm chips next year, but today’s announcement sounds like an even more important breakthrough in chip design.
Today, Apple announced a brand-new tier of its all-in-one desktop called the iMac Pro. The new product, unveiled onstage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, is supposed to be a “the most powerful Mac ever,” according to the company. In other words, this computer is going to replace the painfully outdated and woefully mismanaged Mac Pro line, at least for the foreseeable future. The iMac Pro will start shipping this December starting at $4,999, Apple confirmed.
Apple says the computer will ship with an 8-core Xeon processor, with configurations that scale up to an 18-core Xeon processor, 5K display, and an all-new AMD Radeon Vega GPU. You’ll also be able to shell out for up to 16GB of VRAM, up to 128GB of data corruption-protecting ECC RAM, and up to 4TB for SSD storage. There’s a whole bunch of other upgrades in there. Check out the full list Apple shared in its presentation below:
Posted in futurism
Apparently there are 6–8 people in the world who look exactly like you.
A new study led by Northern Illinois University geography professor Wei Luo calculates the amount of water needed to carve the ancient network of valleys on Mars and concludes the Red Planet’s surface was once much more watery than previously thought.
The study bolsters the idea that Mars once had a warmer climate and active hydrologic cycle, with water evaporating from an ancient ocean, returning to the surface as rainfall and eroding the planet’s extensive network of valleys.
Satellites orbiting Mars and rovers on its surface have provided scientists with convincing evidence that water helped shape the planet’s landscape billions of years ago. But questions have lingered over how much water actually flowed on the planet, and the ocean hypothesis has been hotly debated.
IBM, its Research Alliance partners Globalfoundries and Samsung, and equipment suppliers have developed an industry-first process to build silicon nanosheet transistors that will enable 5 nanometer (nm) chips. The details of the process will be presented at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. In less than two years since developing a 7nm test node chip with 20 billion transistors, scientists have paved the way for 30 billion switches on a fingernail-sized chip.
The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The power savings could also mean that the batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today’s devices, before needing to be charged.
Scientists working as part of the IBM-led Research Alliance at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, NY achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor, instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology.
Posted in drones
Posted in futurism
The subconscious communicates truths better than intellect.
Actor Ethan Hawke on ambiguity.
Posted in bioengineering, ethics
