The Kickass Processors That Will Power Your Next Computer

Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-kickass-processors-that-will-power-your-next-comput-510668761

Bits and pieces of info about Intel's brand new 4th generation processors have been dripping out for months now. Good graphics, crazy battery life. Exciting stuff. Finally, though, we've got a full view of guts that'll power most of next year's computers, and they'll be available starting June 4th. The future looks very, very bright.

To put these chips—previously known as Haswell—in their proper perspective, remember that Intel has what it calls a tick-tock system when it comes to processor upgrades. The tick is a smaller, incremental upgrade where things get shrunk down and tuned up. The tock is where the big changes get made. This is the tock.

At a glance, the 4th gen chips don't appear wildly different from their predecessors. While the chips have grown just slightly in size, from 160nm^2 to 177nm^2, they're built on the same 22nm process. So why slightly bigger? To accommodate the biggest graphics on-die space Intel's ever had.

And that's just for starters. Here's the full rundown of what these bad boys can do.

Bigger, better battery life

What's maybe most exciting about Intel's 4th generation cores is the leap ahead in battery life. It's the biggest in Intel's history. The gains come from a few different places. For starters, the 4th gen chips pull less power than their predecessors for CPU tasks, but they've also got some sophisticated sleep states and panel refreshing are able to cut back on power used by the rest of the system as well.

When it comes to practical applications, that means that you'll be getting 9 hours of HD video playback where you used to get only 6, and similar increases when you're just using your device for light-use things like browsing the web, or working in a word processor. The really huge jump is for standby time though. With previous-gen Ivy Bridge cores, you'd be lucky to get four or five days of standby life on a full charge. With a 4th gen core, Intel's promising a number more like 10 or even 13. And this is all with no better batteries required; the gains are purely from more efficient performance.

To explain it simply, devices running on 4th gen chips will be able to sleep way more often than what you've got right now. Essentially, Haswell's introducing a new kind of sleep state that marries all the power saving qualities of an actual, non-responsive sleep state with being totally awake. So now, when you close the lid (or turn off the display), your device can take a power nap, but still be damn quick waking back up. And those little naps count for a lot.

Integrated graphics that are actually awesome

Intel had already let slip some of the details about its sweet new integrated graphics brand a few weeks ago. In sort, Intel's Iris graphics are able to hold their own in a way they never have before, running stuff like Bioshock Infinite at playable speeds with moderate settings. Granted, there's still nothing quite like have discrete graphics in your laptop, but these 4th gen cores do built-in damn well.

Super small laptops and convertibles running U-series processors chips in the 15w range are going to be treated to a nice performance increase in graphics power thanks to Intel HD Graphics 5000, the next step up in Intel's traditional integrated graphics line. But laptops with more power-hungry chips in the 28w range are treated to Iris, and real chunky, performance-first devices in the 50-ishw neighborhood and up are going to see even bigger gains with top of the line Iris Pro, using on-die eDRAM high-speed memory. But all of them will be able to handle things like OpenCL, DX11.1, OpenGL4.1, making things like playing Tomb Raider on your laptop possible.

And the graphics advancements aren't just limited to gaming. The new chips also support three-screen displays and UHD (4K) output by default. And even if you're not pushing that kind of video right now, it's going to be good to have the option when super hi-res displays start getting more affordable.

Getting your video onto other, bigger screens that aren't attached to your device is going to get easier too. 4th gen chips will have Intel's Wireless Display (WiDi) 4.1 built in. It's not as open as something like Miracast, but it does support wireless streaming of HD video, and it's already in some LG and Toshiba HDTVs. And with it baked into 4th gen Intel devices from here on out, you can bet that trend will continue.

A high bar for tiny computers

In reality, there's really no such thing as an "ultrabook," but that doesn't stop Intel from laying down a definition of what it thinks a thin, ultraportable laptop should be, and what a thin, ultraportable laptop on current hardware can handle.

And when Intel sits down to describe its dream scenario for an "ultrabook," it's setting the standard pretty high. We're talking touchscreens and voice control capability across the board, the ability to handle at least 9 hours of idle time on Windows 8, at least 6 straight hours of HD video, and seven days of standby time. And damn snappy too; we're talking wake times under three seconds.

Granted, nobody's going to be forcing OEMs to live up to these kind of standards, and they're going to build whatever the hell they want as usual. But it definitely says something about what Intel things is possible—and important—for even the slimmest of the slim this time around. And if these ideal ultrabook specs are any indication of the reality we'll actually see, slim laptops won't have to skimp on key features.

Detachables

Windows 8 put the dream of a real computer that's also a real tablet on the to-do list for manufacturers everywhere. The onslaught of tablet-laptop hybrids alongside Microsoft's own first-party Surface push shows it. But no one's really hit that sweet spot yet. For the most part, at best you get a tablet with a keyboard. Or occasionally something weirder.

Intel's aiming to bridge that gap this generation with a new line of ultra-low power, but still fully-featured mobile processors: the Y-series. In the past, 17W U-series processors have been the brains of ultrabooks everywhere. Detachables and almost-a-tablet slate PCs have been stuck with low power chips that aren't even in the same ballpark, like Atom or ARM.

Now, the U-series is reaching new power lows by hitting 15 watts, but the Y series is taking things even further, dropping down to a ridiculously low 6w, specifically for use in ultra portables where all those guts have to fit behind the glass.

With Y-series chips under the hood, detachables should actually be able to hang with the rest of the crew. They'll still be at the bottom of the list when it comes to capability, but they won't have to sit at the kids' table any more, stuck with a processor that's not quite the real thing.

Don't forget the desktops

And if, by chance, you still have a desktop and you've got no interest in going mobile, it's not a bad time to check out an all-in-one either. Battery life's not really an issue there, but Intel's 4th gen cores have a lot to offer when it comes to performance, whether it's just office stuff, video editing, or the occasional game. All in a package that's probably a bit more interesting than your dusty old tower.

Bottom line

Hopefully you waited to buy a laptop, because these are the sorts of bonuses you'll be getting when 4th gen cores start rolling out this summer. There's still going to be a little bit of a wait until things start hitting store shelves, but you can bet we'll see a fresh new line of Macs trotted out at WWDC, and you can bet they'll be repping Haswell.

We might not be post-PC yet, but everything that has to rely on a battery is about to get a whole hell of a lot better, and a lot less tethered to the wall. And who doesn't want that?

Read More...

Summary only...

Intel sets Haswell launch for June 4th, details bold battery life claims

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/01/intel-haswell-launch/

Haswell is hardly a secret at this point: there's been a steady drip-drip of demos and technical leaks since as far back as 2011, and just a month ago we brought you the low-down on its integrated graphics. But today, finally, we have official pricing for a number of variants, a concrete date for availability (this coming Tuesday, June 4th) and, perhaps most importantly, some detailed benchmark claims about what Haswell is capable of -- particularly in its mobile form.

Sure, Intel already dominates in MacBooks, Ultrabooks (by definition) and in hybrids like Surface Pro, but the chip maker readily admits that the processors in those portable PCs were just cut-down desktop chips. Haswell is different, having been built from the ground up with Intel's North Cape prototype and other mobile form factors in mind. As a loose-lipped executive recently let slip, we can look forward to a 50 percent increase in battery life in the coming wave of devices, with no loss of performance. Read on and we'll discover how this is possible and what it could mean for the dream of all-day mobile computing.

Gallery: Haswell mobile slide deck

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Intel

Comments

Read More...

Summary only...

Apple Juice: How to Charge Your Phone With Pocket Change and Fruit

Source: http://gizmodo.com/apple-juice-how-to-charge-your-phone-with-pocket-chang-510129312

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but he was wrong. It's easy to tell the difference—technology works. For example, "remote-viewing" mentalists claim they can see events far away, yet they fail every test. In fact, remote viewing is simple: It's called TV.

Another example that recently circulated online was a fake video of someone charging his iPhone by jamming the end of a USB cable into an onion. How do I know it was fake? First, you need contacts made of two different metals, and second, you can't get enough voltage out of a single vegetable. What makes the ruse so disappointing is that it is possible to charge an iPhone this way, if you do it right.

Theodore Gray, the author of Popular Science's monthly column, "Gray Matter," is convinced that when kids and adults are introduced to science in its most exciting form, they, too, will get hooked. In his newest book Mad Science²: Experiments You Can Do At Home, But Still Probably Shouldn't, Gray wants to spark that curiosity with visually spectacular experiments that illustrate the principles, the beauty, and the power of science.

---

Why It Works

A regulation vegetable battery, made by sticking strips of zinc and copper into a potato, generates about half a volt. The electricity comes from the oxidation of zinc; the vegetable is just an elecrolyte (conductive barrier), and the copper completes the circuit. Stacking alternating layers of vegetables, zinc, and copper is like wiring batteries in series, each set adding its voltage to the total.

After some 10 volts' worth of teary-eyed onion peeling, I decided to switch to apples using a fruit corer to cut out the apple rods and a cheese slicer to cut them into disks. Pennies with the copper plating sanded off on one side made a handy source of copper and zinc layers in one.

About 150 of these, arranged into six parallel batteries of 25 apple/zinc/copper layers each, yielded enough power to charge an iPhone, but only for about a second. (Much larger zinc plates and whole slices of apple would have provided more power for longer.) Around 200 of the layers went into one three-foot long apple battery, delivering much higher voltage. I was able to create a visible, and potentially fatal, spark with this battery. Yes, in the right configuration, you can electrocute yourself with an apple.

How I Did It

This was one of the most involved demonstrations I've done, due to the need to produce a couple hundred half-sanded pennies. Post-1982 pennies are made of copper-plated zinc, so if you sand off the copper plating on one side of them, and combine them with solid copper pre-1982 pennies, you have both metals needed to create a battery.

I mounted a short iron water pipe, whose inside diameter was just about the same as a penny, up against a small vertical belt sander, leaving a gap between the end of the pipe and the sanding belt that was just a bit thinner than a penny. Then I filled the pipe with a stack of pennies, and pressed them up against the running belt with a plunger. Each penny in turn was sanded down until it was thin enough to fit through the gap, at which point the moving belt threw the penny out of the machine, allowing the next one to advance into position. It worked surprisingly well as an automatic penny sander, plopping out a sanded penny every few seconds.

I first thought of using onions because I figured I could core them with a fruit coring tool (basically a very thin-walled metal tube with a sharpened edge, which you can use to cut plugs out of fruits), and then the layers would separate into lots of individual disks. Unfortunately onion didn't work very well, I think becasue each layer has a sort of membrane on one side that doesn't conduct electricity very well. So I switched to using apples instead, and had to manually slice the cores into disks.

With about two hundred sets of alternating penny/apple disks connected in series (stacked inside a clear plastic tube) the battery produces enough voltage (over 100V) to actually be dangerous. To charge an iPhone I had to rearrange the battery into six stacks of about 20 apple/penny slices each, with the six stacks connected in parallel to incrase the current capacity. Even so it charged the phone for literally about one second, just long enough for it to come on and display the charging symbol

Real Danger Alert: This experiment could damage your iPhone if done improperly.

---

In his new book, Mad Science²: Experiments You Can Do At Home, But Still Probably Shouldn't, science enthusiast Theodore Gray illustrates the awesome power of science with illuminating behind-the-scenes tours of the potential of the world around us. His (often dangerous) experiments are sure to capture the imaginations of students and anyone interested in science or just plain old cool stuff.

Read More...

Summary only...

Scientists Revived 400-Year-Old Plants That Could Help Us Live on Mars

Source: http://gizmodo.com/scientists-revived-400-year-old-plants-that-could-help-510691491

A recently uncovered, perfectly preserved, 400-year-old plant specimen might be the answer to our increasingly important colonization of other planets—and the preservation of the human race as a whole.

You probably already know that human stem cells hold a vast, wildly exciting potential—both in terms of furthering our understanding of the human body and in saving countless lives. But did you know plants have their very own version of the industrious little cells, called bryophytes, that could prove just as important in saving humanity? That's exactly what scientists have found, and what's gotten them so excited.

Lead by Catherine La Farge, a team of researchers from the University of Alberta was exploring mosses around the Teardrop Glacier in the Canadian arctic archipelago when they discovered that portions of the (now rapidly receding) glacier were tinted an incongruous green. After taking the sample plant material back to her lab, the team ground up the specimens, placed them in potting soil, and watched with awe as they successfully regenerated from their 400-year-old parent material.

As the glacier recedes at an astonishing rate of 3 to 4 meters per year since 2004, scientists have gained access to an increasing amount of centuries-old plant life frozen in time. Every discovery up until now, though, has been flora of the vascular variety. But it's this non-vascular sort that, though often overlooked, holds the key to understanding our past and our future.

What's a Bryophyte?

Vascular plants are primarily defined by the existence of a xylem and a phloem, or in other words, the parts that suck up water and nutrients and send them shooting throughout the rest of the plant. Non-vascular plants, as all you keen observers may have already guessed, don't have this system—they're a far more simple breed. Made to freeze and dry out, they're able to survive in conditions that vascular plants, what with their fancy leaf and stem tissue needing "water" and "food" all the time, could only dream of.

Bryophytes, which fall into this latter category, have to reproduce asexually since they often don't have access to water, which is key to fertilization. And because of this, depending on its environment, a single bryophyte cell can essentially reprogram itself to grow as an entirely different plant. But that's not even the exciting part. As La Farge explained:

This has been known forever by biologists who deal with bryophytes. Because if a moose goes through a forest, it might pick up moss in its toes and carry that material somewhere else. So when the plant tissue drops, it will be able to reestablish itself in its new environment and thrive.

It's as if you could drop a lion in the ocean and have it grow gills.

So... What's the Big Deal?

As glaciers retreat and a greater variety of plant life surfaces, it's essentially like peeling a blanket back over a perfectly preserved portion of the past. Dormant, yes—but alive nonetheless. And that's what makes this discovery so incredible. The knowledge that it's even possible for plant life to survive in such extreme conditions opens the door to a deeper understanding of this robust group's cell biology. Which in turn, could very well pave the way towards us figuring out how the hell we're going to grow plants on other planets—oh, say Mars, for instance.

Because unquestionably, before we can even begin to fantasize about sending people into the red abyss, we're going to need to test whether or not plants can survive in those kinds of conditions—harsh light, dryness, freezing, etc. And now it seems like we may have found just the plant for the job. Eschews water? Check. Ability to reproduce simply and all by its lonesome? Check. Doesn't mind the cold? Double check. Not to mention the fact that it can morph into other plants.

Which is part of the reason why bryophytes represent the second largest lineage of land plants in terms of diversity—10,000 different species diverse, to be exact. And various, disparate strains will happily live side-by-side; they don't compete in the way vascular plants do. Rather, they bunch as close together as possible, which allows them to retain the moisture that facilitates their entire biological life cycle. So there's a reason you'll always see moss growing in tufts. And though they might be virtually microscopic as single organisms, there's still plenty about them to find fascinating—especially if you're a bryophyte enthusiast like La Farge. As she explained to us:

It's mind boggling, because normally you walk through a forest, and you see green moss on a rock. So you might think oh, that's a nice moss and move on. But you never stop to think about what that green actually represents. How diverse is it? How many species are we really considering here? I mean, when you're up in the high arctic, if you pick up just a small packet, say a letter envelope size, you can often get 15 different species of bryophytes in one letter-size collection. It's pretty amazing.

The Next Stage

There's still many other organisms that could be lying peacefully under the still-frozen glacier. Scientists knew that fungi, yeast, and bacteria were all able to survive in ice, and they also knew that both vascular plants and mosses could live on the top of a glacier. But this is the first time we've really considered the possibility that the stuff peeking out from underneath the glacier just might be alive. Frozen specimens, then, won't necessarily be considered dead on arrival, leaving researchers with plenty of work ahead of them.

La Farge is particularly interested in moving into the lower latitudes, where the even more rapidly shrinking icecaps are exposing even older glimpses of past life. And all of this will only enhance our newly illuminated understanding of basic life systems—something we're going to need when we start planting biodomes on other planets.

Of course, tests like that may still be quite a ways off. But at least now, we have plenty of reason to hope. [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States]

Images via Catherine La Farge

Read More...

Summary only...

How a Supercomputer May Have Finally Unlocked a Way to Beat HIV

Source: http://gizmodo.com/how-a-supercomputer-may-have-finally-unlocked-a-way-to-510672032

There's no easy answer for HIV; the sly virus uses our own immune cells to its advantage and mutates readily to shrug off round after round of anti-retrovirals. But thanks to the efforts researchers from the University of Illinois and some heavy-duty number crunching from one of the world's fastest petaflop supercomputers, we may be able to stop HIV right in its tracks.

The latest line of attack against HIV targets its viral casing (or capsid). Capsids lie between the virus's spherical outer coat, a .1 micron diameter, lipid based layer known as the viral envelope, and a bullet-shaped inner coat known as the viral core that contains the strands of HIV RNA. Capsids comprise 2,000 copies of the viral protein, p24, arranged in a lattice structure (a rough insight gleaned only from years of cryo-electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, cryo-EM tomography, and X-ray crystallography work). The capsid is responsible for protecting the RNA load, disabling the host's immune system, and delivering the RNA into new cells. In other words: It's the evil mastermind.

The lattice protein structure allows the capsid to open and close like a Hoberman Sphere.

As Dr Peijun Zhang, project lead and associate professor in structural biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine explained to the BBC:

The capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its structure in detail could lead us to new drugs that can treat or prevent the infection. The capsid has to remain intact to protect the HIV genome and get it into the human cell, but once inside, it has to come apart to release its content so that the virus can replicate. Developing drugs that cause capsid dysfunction by preventing its assembly or disassembly might stop the virus from reproducing.

But until very recently, the precise structure—how the thousands of copies of p24 actually meshed together—remained a mystery. The capsid's (relatively) large size, non-symmetric shape, protein structure has stumped researchers' attempts to effectively model it. Earlier research had revealed that the p24 arranged itself in either a pentagon or hexagon shape as part of the capsid structure, but how many of each and how the pieces fit together remained out of reach because science simply didn't have the computational prowess to model this incredibly complex subatomic structure in atomic-level detail.

This problem required a petaflop-level supercomputer to solve, a class of machine that has only recently become readily available. The team turned to National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its resident supercomputer, Blue Waters.

The team fed electron microscopy data collected in lab experiments conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and Vanderbilt University into Blue Waters and let the $108 million, 11.5 petaflop machine do its thing: Crunch massive amounts of information with its 49,000 AMD CPUs. Blue Waters can handle one quadrillion floating point operations every second, so stitching together 1,300 proteins into an oblong molecular soccer ball was no sweat.

The team developed a novel shaping algorithm for the project, dubbed molecular dynamic flexible fitting. "You basically simulate the physical characteristics and behavior of large biological molecules, but you also incorporate the data into the simulation so that the model actually drives itself toward agreement with the data," said Professor Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois in a press release.

"This is a big structure, one of the biggest structures ever solved," Schulten continued. "It was very clear that it would require a huge amount of simulation — the largest simulation ever published — involving 64 million atoms."

The team revealed the complete capsid structure in a Nature report yesterday:

The mature human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) capsid is best described by a ‘fullerene cone’ model2, 3, in which hexamers of the capsid protein are linked to form a hexagonal surface lattice that is closed by incorporating 12 capsid-protein pentamers.

In all, the HIV capsid requires 216 protein hexagons and 12 protein pentagons to operate—arranged exactly as the predictive models said they would be. The new discovery reveals a stunningly versatile protein in p24. The protein itself is identical whether it's shaped into a pentagon or a hexagon, only the attachment sites between p24 proteins varies between shapes. How that works remains a mystery.

"How can a single type of protein form something as varied as this thing? The protein has to be inherently flexible," said Schulten.

New questions aside, this breakthrough illustrates precisely how the capsid works and how scientists can best attack that function to disrupt the virus' ability to replicate. By exploiting the capsid's structure, researchers theoretically could deliver a molecular padlock that prevents the viral core from opening and the virus from spreading. This discovery could lead to an entirely new suite of treatment alternatives and could finally outpace HIV's ability to rapidly evolve resistance to current enzyme-based medications.

"The big problem with HIV is that it evolves so quickly that any drug you use you get drug resistance which is why we use a multi-drug cocktail," Professor Simon Lovell, a structural biologist at the University of Manchester, said. "This is another target, another thing we can go after to develop a new class of drugs to work alongside the existing class."

It's only a matter of time until HIV goes the way of polio. And it's thanks in no small part to one beast of a computer. [BBC - CNet - Nature - University of Illinois - National Science Foundation - NIH - Top Image: CDC (public domain) - Trio and duo Images: Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (www.ks.uiuc.edu), Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, UIUC - Blue Waters: kosheahan / Flickr - Pipes: UIUC - Illustration: NIAID]

Read More...

Summary only...