Hardware

A team led by NVIDIA has been awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, USA) to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing." The current crop of supercomputers don't scale with energy usage very efficiently.

The four-year research contract, awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covers work to develop GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers which will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers.

The hardware should be released sometime in 2018, so you'll be able to solve your own cool computational problems, like the shortest solution for the Rubik's cube, if you start saving now.

Solid State Drives still too expensive for your tastes? Seagate comes to the rescue with the Momentus XT 'Hybrid' 2.5" HDD. The drive packs 4GB of SLC NAND solid state memory alongside the regular spinning disk, available up to 500GB at 7200RPM.

The Adaptive Memory technology of the device monitors your frequently used applications and data files, then places them into the solid state portion of the drive so they can be quickly recalled. The folks over at Engadget did a hands-on and noted the adaptive memory did indeed shave a few seconds off the standard HDD time for repeated tasks.

The previous model of the Momentus allowed you to get the drive equipped with free-fall sensors or self-encryption but there's no word on these features yet.

"As a kid, everyone played those video games that showed you how much armor you had left as a percentage bar," said John Wray, a U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center contractor. "That's exactly what we're working on here and more."

Intelligent armor is based on piezoelectrics, or materials that generate a small voltage when bent. The reverse is also true: Apply a small voltage, and a piezoelectric material will bend.

The combination of knowing your opponent's weaponry damage and having real-time information about the integrity of the armor could save the soldiers' lives. "If you know that one side of the armor is weakening, you could turn the vehicle to protect that side," said Thomas Meitzler, a TARDEC scientist.

To find out more about this, keep reading.

AMD's Phenom II CPU has been pushed to 7.08GHz using liquid helium. A video can be viewed at CrunchGear.

Overclocking competitions in the last year yielded results of over 6GHz with the AMD multicore CPU, but no one has touched the elusive 7... until now.

Oh and please don't try this at home. This is done by, uh, professionals, in a controlled environment. Perhaps.

Dell have taken the next step in the laptop/notebook evolution. This latest addition to the already impressive line of latitude laptop/notebooks, the latitude Z, boasts so many features that it may take a bit of time for the competition to pick themselves up off the floor.

Pros: 1.25cm thick, 16inch screen, 2kg, SSD's and wireless charging

Cons: extended battery charge time, external dvd, simple laptop inside and price



Read on for more details.

Well well, it's been a long time between drinks, but the NDA on ATI's next gen 5870 and 5850 has lifted, and the results are in for the world's first DirectX 11 card - and the results are good. Boasting a number of improvements to a whole new architecture, complete with a 40nm core packing in a tight 2.15 Billion transistors (compared to 965 million on the HD 4890), doubling the shader processors (1600), ROPs (32) and texture units (80), and effectively coming up with double the performance, all with a lower power consumption than the 4870. Enough fancy rambling - the reviews do that in depth. Having read a couple and briefing the rest, here's a list of a handful of the good one's I've chosen. The exam will be in one week, so get studying.

September 23rd is the release date for ATI's upcoming 5 series of cards, with the 5870 and 5850 hitting the shelves very soon. This should also drive down the price of the 4870 and 4850, so nobody's got an excuse not to play Crysis Wars now (except me, I have no time)...

Reviews should be out any day now, So check back for a small list of the good ones later. The 5870X2 is slated in for a Q4 release which should be a little exciting also. The single 5870 should be able to stick it to a single GTX285, so here's hoping for a new king of the pack to drive down some prices of other high spriced tech. Get your wallets ready!

Specs listed here.

Loading times? What loading times? You'd better be holding on to your pants when these babies hit the streets - they are the fastest storage drives you've seen to date. Intel this week announced their first 32nm based SSDs in the form of:

- 80GB ($225)
- 160GB ($440)

Both drives feature a ball-tearing seek time of 0.2ms, compared to the WD Velociraptor's seek of (wait for it) 17ms. errrr, pwned. Read speeds are amazing also, up to 180MB/s in loading games and OS according to LegitReviews. To be fair, the drive slows down to a 70MB/s sequential write, but this is the only time it looks like slowing down. We should see these in stores soon - go get your wallet.

The boys in blue have released news of their upcoming i7 and i5 parts for Q3 '09, namely the following quads:

- Core i5 750 (2.66 GHz)
- Core i7 860 (2.80 GHz)
- Core i7 870 (2.93 GHz)

All feature an integrated dual channel memory controller and 8MB of L3 cache. Welcome to the new gen. Oh, and P55 boards are out and about too, providing some nice homes for the upcoming processors, released early September - we will keep you posted.

Read on for the full rundown...

Semiconductor giant AMD will beat NVIDIA to the punch this year, pushing out DX11 cards in time for Windows 7's release on Oct 22. All this is planned some two months before any word of the green team's GT300, catching them with their pants down in the middle of the shopping mall.

AMD hope to have their DX11 guns out doing their 1001st bicep curl through the upcoming GPUs:
- RV870 (HD5870)
- RV840 (HD5850)
- RV800 (HD5870X2)

The new cards are solid on the specs, based on a 40nm fabrication process and sporting 1200 stream processors (RV870), 900MHz core and 1150MHz GDDR5.

NVIDIA have announced their move to a 40nm process across the mainstream/budget/HTPC sector with their GT210 and GT220 GPUs, migrating their mobile technology to your mum's desktop PC or even a HTPC near you. They support DirectX 10.1, something NVIDIA claimed was irrelevant not too far back, and may come with a newer version of PureVideoHD.

These cards should begin rollout in October, but will feature in exciting gaming PCs such as HP, Dell and Apple very soon.

Let's hope they can hold their own in a few games for those casual Sims 3 playing mothers out there. We love you.

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