Silicon Photonics - The Future of Interconnects

Imagine all that copper cabling replaced with high speed optic fibre. Intel have announced chips that can do just that - with 4 light sources capable of 50 Gpbs transfer.

Light is a wonderful medium as it's not affected by electromagnetic interference, unlike traditional copper cables which carry electric current.

By adding more light sources this technology can scale into the Terabit/second range towards truly high-speed computing.

Source: Tom's Hardware

Latency maps

Could this be a new frontier in digital art?

When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience. Many characteristics seen in these patterns are still not understood, but so far their analysis is revealing systemic behaviors that were previously unknown.

Source: ACM

Interview with Intel re 48-core SCC chip (codename Larrabee)

Intel's shipping samples of its experimental 48-core processor (codename Larrabee). They are calling it a SCC "Single Chip Cloud computer". Some notable design features no floating point processor and clock speed around 1.6 GHz. It's interesting to see the future of this design, it seems highly suited for server consolidation / virtualisation applications. See the link below.

Of course the graphics card companies have been moving towards programmable architecture, their chips are highly suited for parallel applications also. Perhaps the CPU that we know of today (highly optimised single threaded) will become a "co-processor" of the future, much like the "math co-processor of the 80s).

Source: X-bit labs

Some very interesting heat transfer technologies

Article features a many carbon based nano technologies, very promising!

Source: FrostyTech

iPhone hacked to run Android OS

Video the video preview at: Builder AU

Web developers get the first taste of IE9

Hi, I haven't had much time to post here lately.

Latest news is IE9 browser is in the works, includes hardware accelerated rendering, faster Javascript engine, better standards support (Acid3 test) and support for new standards (CSS3 / HTML5).

Source: Ars

Landmark case: ISP wins against Hollywood

The giants of the film industry have lost their case against ISP iiNet in a landmark judgment handed down in the Federal Court today.

The decision had the potential to impact internet users and the internet industry profoundly as it sets a legal precedent surrounding how much ISPs are required to do to prevent customers from downloading movies and other content illegally.

But after an on-and-off eight-week trial that examined whether iiNet authorised customers to download pirated movies, Justice Dennis Cowdroy found that the ISP was not liable for the downloading habits of its customers.

In a summary of his 200-page judgment read out in court this morning, Justice Cowdroy said the evidence established that iiNet had done no more than to provide an internet service to its users.

He found that, while iiNet had knowledge of infringements occurring and did not act to stop them, such findings did not necessitate a finding of authorisation.

Source: The Age