Vigile writes “Intel unveiled a completely new processor design today the company is dubbing the ‘Single-chip Cloud Computer’ (but was previously codenamed Bangalore). Justin Rattner, the company’s CTO, discussed the new product at a press event in Santa Clara and revealed some interesting information about the goals and design of the new CPU. While terascale processing has been discussed for some time, this new CPU is the first to integrate full IA x86 cores rather than simple floating point units. The 48 cores are set 2 to a ’tile’ and each tile communicates with others via a 2D mesh network capable of 256 GB/s rather than a large cache structure. ”
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This awesome infographic shows the internet costs and speeds around the world for the top 20 nations in the ITIF Broadband Rankings. Unsurprisingly, we don’t compare too well.
Number one is, predictably, Japan, where the average broadband speed is 60mbps and they pay $0.27 per 1mbps. We, in comparison, average 4.8mbps and pay $3.33 per 1mbps, putting us at #15. Be sure to click the above image to see it in its full glory. [Zach Klein]
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MojoKid writes “HotHardware has posted a sneak peek at a new motherboard Asus has coming down the pipe with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The Asus P7P55D-E Premium has a PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation that connects to NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips. With a USB 3.0 enabled external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port and then to the board’s USB 3.0 port, there were some rather impressive gains to observe. When connected to a USB 3.0 port, the external hard drive was about 5 — 6x faster versus connecting over USB 2.0, with total throughput in excess of 130MB/sec. On the other hand, benchmarks with Seagate’s new Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive show little performance difference but a burst rate that is off the charts. According to ATTO, there are slight overall performance benefits to be had connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small; somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s or so.”
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Asustek has unveiled its first supercomputer, the desktop computer-sized ESC 1000, which uses Nvidia graphics processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops. Asus’s ESC 1000 comes with a 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 microprocessor designed for servers, along with 960 graphics processing cores from Nvidia inside three Tesla c1060 Computing Processors and one Quadro FX5800
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We can’t say we’ve had problems typing on our iPhones here at HackaDay, must be the elfin fingers, but for [Ben Kurtz] it was a real pain. The obvious solution is to carry around an Arduino, 9 volt battery, iPhone breakout board, a ps2 keyboard, and of course the iPhone itself. Well, maybe it could be a little smaller with fewer parts, but at least it works. The Arduino reads input from the keyboard and converts it to serial, then the iPhone pulls the data via VNC. Like we said, a little roundabout, but we love the amount of ingenuity involved. 
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By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Imagine a wireless home network where devices communicate directly with one another instead of through the wireless router — a sort of mesh network without the need to switch to ad hoc mode. Today the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it has almost completed the standard which could make these a reality: Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct was known as “Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer,” and has repeatedly been referred to in IEEE meetings as a possible “Bluetooth Killer.” By means of this standard, direct connections between computers, phones, cameras, printers, keyboards, and future classes of components are established over Wi-Fi instead of another wireless technology governed by a separate standard.
Even though the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands are often dreadfully overcrowded in home networks, the appeal of such a standard is twofold: Any certified Wi-Fi Direct device will be able to communicate directly with any legacy Wi-Fi devices without the need for any new software on the legacy end, and transfer rates will be the same as infrastructure connections, thoroughly destroying Bluetooth. The theoretical maximum useful data transfer for Bluetooth 2.0 is 2.1 Mbps, while 802.11g has a theoretical maximum throughput of 54 Mbps.
“Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn’t available. The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise,” Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa said in a statement today.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
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EconolineCrush writes “3DMark Vantage developer Futuremark has clear guidelines for what sort of driver optimizations are permitted with its graphics benchmark. Intel’s current Windows 7 drivers appear to be in direct violation, offloading the graphics workload onto the CPU to artificially inflate scores for the company’s integrated graphics chipsets. The Tech Report lays out the evidence, along with Intel’s response, and illustrates that 3DMark scores don’t necessarily track with game performance, anyway.”
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Remember those nearly pointless USB 3.0 cables one could buy way back in the golden days of April? If you were one of those who bought one by mistake or merely wanted to use its USB 2.0 speed until you had an actual 3.0 device and controller, now is your chance. Buffalo is offering what they claim to be the “world’s first!!” shipping USB 3.0 hard drive in delicious 1TB and 1.5TB flavors come late this month, and a 2TB model is in the works. Since one would obviously need a controller as they don’t come standard on motherboards just yet, the company is also offering one of NEC’s world-firsts: the handy dandy USB 3.0 controller. Together these’ll cost you over US$285 at the very least, but sometimes you just have to have shiny pieces of the world’s first [place name here] before anyone else.
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The rumor that we discussed a few months back is looking more real. Vigile writes “Once the darling of the enthusiast chipset market, NVIDIA has apparently decided to quit development of future chipsets for all platforms. This ’state of NVIDIA’ editorial at PC Perspective first highlighted the fact that the company was backing away from its plans to develop a DMI-based chipset for Intel’s Lynnfield processors due to legal pressure from Intel and debates over licensing restrictions. That effectively left NVIDIA out in the cold in terms of high-end chipsets, but even more interesting is the later revelation that NVIDIA has only one remaining chipset product to release, what we know as ION 2, and that it was mainly built for Apple’s upcoming products. NVIDIA still plans to sell its current offerings, like MCP61 for AMD platforms and current generation ION for netbooks and nettops, but will focus solely on discrete graphics options after this final release.”
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