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OCAU News |
Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 18-November-2015 11:39:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Computing pioneer Gene Amdahl recently passed away. Whenever you draw cash from your bank, take out insurance, book a flight, or shop in a large department store, the transaction was probably handled by an IBM mainframe originally designed by a former South Dakota farm boy, Gene Amdahl, who has died aged 92. Amdahl’s System/360 mainframes, announced in 1964, transformed IBM, and transformed computing. They became such an essential part of large-scale data processing that most Fortune 500 companies are still using them 50 years later.
NVIDIA have revealed details of their new Pascal GPU. As always, the Pascal GPU will be manufactured in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), using the brand new 16nm FinFET process. This process is much more than a simple number, since it marks the shift from planar, 2D transistors to the FinFET i.e. 3D transistors. This shift required that the engineers make lot of changes in the thought process, and should result in significant power savings.
PCPerspective checked out Intel Speed Shift. Without a doubt, Intel Speed Shift technology has improved the ability for the Intel + Windows platform to respond to user interaction dramatically. Though it will be most easily discernable with touch screen configurations, the same technology will apply to mouse based control. Intel has been oddly quiet about the inclusion of this feature with the new Windows 10 v10586 update and I can't quite understand why - the only reason might be questions about proper platform support for Speed Shift in the EFI of currently shipping systems.
Huawei have been demonstrating a fast-charging battery. During a battery conference in Japan over the weekend, the number one smartphone manufacture in China, Huawei showed off its new smartphone battery which is capable of being charged 10 times faster than current batteries on the market. They were advertising a 3000mAh lithium-ion battery that was capable of being charged to nearly 50% in just five minutes and a 600mAh battery that was capable of nearly 70% in just two minutes.
Back to NVIDIA, with Phoronix reporting on the Jetson TX1 board. As a recap, the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 is comprised of four ARM 64-bit Cortex-A57 CPU cores (max frequency of 1.91GHz) and four Cortex-A53 low-power cores, 4GB of LPDDR4 memory with 25.6GB/s of memory bandwidth, and has a 256-core Maxwell graphics processor capable of 1 TFLOP/s. The Tegra X1 is a very nice upgrade over the Jetson TK1 with the Tegra 1 predecessor that was 32-bit ARM and using a Kepler graphics processor.
The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is.. an emoji. Not the word "emoji", but an actual specific emoji. That’s right – for the first time ever, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a pictograph, officially called the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji, though you may know it by other names.
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