At the VMWorld Conference in Las Vegas, Intel will possibly release a six-core Xeon 7400 processor codenamed Dunnington. Aimed at the blade/server segment, this six-core chip is manufactured on the tick 45nm process, and will be the last chip in the Penryn lineup.
Dunnington has each core sharing 3MB of L2 cache with access to 16MB of L3 cache. Frequently used instructions can be stored in these large memory caches to reduce bottlenecks. The Thermal Design Power rating is approximately 130W, and the chip supports 1066 MegaTransfers per second interconnectivity and new SSE4 instruction sets.
At Intel Developer Forum last month, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group announced that Intel servers had broken multiple world performance awards. The Dunnington chip will precede Nehalem chips which will come in two, four and eight cores with integrated graphics.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Robots To Do The Bouncy Human Walk
For all its "humanity", ASIMO can't walk like a human being. Its gait may look human, but a large amount of energy is spent for every step. And what if you wanted it to run?
When we walk, our muscles store about 40 percent of the energy we spend--they act as springs. Now, roboticists at Oregon State University are working on giving the same to robots using steel cable tendons and inbuilt springs.
Right now, the project has produced a one legged robot that just hops, but does so more efficiently than any robot before it. Soon, we'll see a two-legged robot, and when the machines finally take over, they'll be able to outrun us in no time.
When we walk, our muscles store about 40 percent of the energy we spend--they act as springs. Now, roboticists at Oregon State University are working on giving the same to robots using steel cable tendons and inbuilt springs.
Right now, the project has produced a one legged robot that just hops, but does so more efficiently than any robot before it. Soon, we'll see a two-legged robot, and when the machines finally take over, they'll be able to outrun us in no time.
Large Hadron Collider Goes Online
For the purpose of this story, let's call this section Past Watch, for that is the purpose of the controversial Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This 27-kilometre circular tunnel will serve as the arena for some serious atom-smashing, and will give us more insight into what precisely happened when the universe began. It's also, incidentally, been accused of heralding its end--scientists have battled death threats to get this behemoth up and running.
On Wednesday, the team of scientists at CERN, Switzerland, gave the LHC its first test run, successfully sending a beam of particles all the way round the tunnel at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. In October, two such beams will be made to collide at similar speeds, and the researchers hope to recreate the first few seconds of the big bang. The reaction may reveal new dimensions, dark matter, and what is known as the "God particle"--the Higgs boson. The particle is the only one in the Standard Model of particle physics to have never been observed, and is thought to be the reason that particles (and hence us) have mass.
With a statement like "recreate the big bang", it's hard not to think of this as the end of the world--the last big bang was pretty darn big, we've been told. However, the scientists are quick to point out that this is a controlled environment, and we aren't likely to see a new universe create itself.
And if they're wrong, what can you do?
On Wednesday, the team of scientists at CERN, Switzerland, gave the LHC its first test run, successfully sending a beam of particles all the way round the tunnel at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. In October, two such beams will be made to collide at similar speeds, and the researchers hope to recreate the first few seconds of the big bang. The reaction may reveal new dimensions, dark matter, and what is known as the "God particle"--the Higgs boson. The particle is the only one in the Standard Model of particle physics to have never been observed, and is thought to be the reason that particles (and hence us) have mass.
With a statement like "recreate the big bang", it's hard not to think of this as the end of the world--the last big bang was pretty darn big, we've been told. However, the scientists are quick to point out that this is a controlled environment, and we aren't likely to see a new universe create itself.
And if they're wrong, what can you do?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)