China Creates World's Fastest Supercomputer, Surpasses the US' Jaguar

Recently a survey ranked a Chinese supercomputer as the world's most powerful, surpassing The Jaguar, the supercomputer that previously headed the Top 500 (www.top500.org).

Dubbed Tianhe-1, which means Milky Way, the Chinese supercomputer showed a speed of 2,570 trillion calculations per second, thus making it to number 1 position in the Top 500 survey of supercomputers.

The machine is located at the National Centre for Supercomputing in the northern port city of Tianjin and most of the chips it uses were designed in the United States.

It is worth mentioning that The Jaguar, installed at a US government facility in Tennessee, boasts a speed of 1,750 trillion calculations per second, thus holding the second position in the ranking.

The third most powerful supercomputer is located in China as well. Called the Nebulae, the supercomputer can be seen at the National Supercomputing Centre in the southern city of Shenzhen, reports Physorg.

Over a half of supercomputers included in the Top 500 list are in the United States. China has now 42 systems in the list, surpassing Japan, France, Germany and United Kingdom.

Samsung Launches World's First Ultra Definition 3D TV

Samsung has already amazed gadget fans with its Galaxy S smartphone and Galaxy tab and now the company launched a brad new revolutionary device - a three-dimensional ultra definition TV.

The new 70-inch 3D Ultra Definition (UD) TV from Samsung is currently considered to be the first of its kind and is the largest 3D TV on the market today.It is worth mentioning that the 70-inch diagonal display supports a 240Hz resolution which in its turn takes the 3D feature to a new level.

Nokia Team Builds Ice Touchscreen

A group of specialists at Nokia in Finland decided to develop the world's first ice touchscreen. It is worth mentioning that there's a tradition in Finland to make various ice sculptures throughout the long cold winter. This tradition inspired Antti Virolainen and his team members to create the device.

"We decided to see if we could make an ice sculpture that was interactive," said Virolainen.

A 25-centimeter-thick river ice, weighting 1 ton, was delivered by a firm in nearby Oulu. Then, using a chainsaw, the piece was cut into 50-centimeter-square parts. The team used these parts to build a 2m x 1.5m ice wall. Then the wall was blasted with a heat gun to make a smooth surface.

To make the wall interactive the Nokia team used a digital projection technology. The ice touchscreen makes use of rear-diffused illumination (RDI). It is worth mentioning that this technique was for the first time used in Microsoft Surface, a table-based interactive touchscreen presented by the software giant in 2008.

At the back of the ice touchscreen the team installed a near-infrared light source along with a series of near-infrared cameras that are focused on the front surface, reports NewScientist.

When a person places their hand on the ice, it reflects the light towards the infrared cameras. Each camera collects a signal which allows a computer (connected to a projector) to locate the hand position, size and motion. The computer used the gathered information to project images beneath the hand.

Intel to Create 1,000-Core Processor

The current prototype Intel chip features 48 cores, but in the near future it could be turned into a 1,000-core processor.

Intel researcher Timothy Mattson mentioned that the architecture for the company's prototype chip is "arbitrarily scalable."

"This is an architecture that could, in principle, scale to 1,000 cores, Because I can just simply keep adding, adding, adding cores," Mattson was quoted as saying during the Supercomputer 2010 conference.

At the same time Matson reminded that if over 1,000 cores are added, the diameter of the on-chip network that links the cores would surpass the optimal size parameters, which could negatively influence the performance.

For more information regarding Intel's Single Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) click here.