Micron announced its 176-layer NAND flash today, and declared volume shipments to customers have already begun. This marks a new high-water point for commercial NAND density in absolute terms, and it will have a positive impact on the price of solid state storage in both the computing and the mobile phone markets. Micron is claiming a number of firsts with this 5th Generation 3D NAND, including a 40 percent improvement in layer count, a 30 percent reduction in die size, a 35 percent reduction in write and read latency compared with Micron’s 96-layer NAND, and a 33 percent increase in raw data transfer rates.
Tomorrow Microsoft’s new Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles will officially launch and go up for sale in stores around the country. These new high-powered gaming machines feature cutting-edge graphics and can rival modern gaming PCs. The more higher-end of the two systems is the Xbox Series X, which comes equipped with a custom SoC with an 8-core AMD Ryzen processor and a powerful 52 CU AMD processor. It’s slated to compete directly with Sony’s PlayStation 5 and it retails for $499.99. The new Xbox Series S isn’t quite as powerful as the Series X console. It also has an 8-core AMD processor, but it’s graphics processor is less than half as fast as the Xbox Series X with just 20 CUs.
The microscopic world is full of fascinating creatures, some of which serve as inspiration for cutting edge “synthetic microswimmers.” These particles could revolutionize medicine with their ability to move through a liquid medium via chemical interactions. Researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands have been hard at work , which could help us understand how shape affects the capabilities of these nanoscale devices. One of the shapes they chose is none other than the USS Voyager. It doesn’t have warp engines, but it can get along fine with the help of hydrogen peroxide and platinum. In the Star Trek universe, Voyager was an Intrepid-class starship measuring 343 meters (1,125 feet) long with 15 decks and one of the most sophisticated sensor arrays in Starfleet.
It was exciting when Nvidia announced a new low price point for its dev kits, with the $59 . I’m a big fan of the Jetson product line, and it is pretty amazing how much software Nvidia has running on them. However, having reviewed the 4GB version, the AGX version, and a DIY Jetbot, I didn’t want to just fire up the and write something up. I decided to tackle the task of building a DIY face mask detector and connect to a set of red, green, and blue, traffic lights. The project, like so many, had a lot of twists and turns, as well as taking roughly 10x the effort I’d hoped.
As the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 head towards formal launch, most of the attention has been focused on the top-end products in each stack, which is to say, the $500 PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, not the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition at $400 or the Xbox Series S, at $300. The console has gotten generally favorable reviews for its performance level, but there’s a big caveat to be aware of — one that could wind up costing you a pretty penny in the long run. The Xbox Series S only offers the player 364GB of useable storage out of a 512GB base capacity.
Most efforts to combat the coronavirus have focused on public health measures and the race to develop a vaccine. However, a team from Columbia University, Cornell University, and others has developed something new: . In a newly released study, the concoction was effective at deactivating the novel coronavirus before it could infect cells. Like all viruses, SARS-CoV-2 (the causative agent of COVID-19) needs to enter a cell to reproduce. The virus injects its RNA genome and hijacks cellular machinery to make copies of itself, eventually killing the cell and spreading new virus particles to infect other cells. Gaining access to a cell requires a “key” that fits into a protein lock on the cell surface.
Next year, Intel will introduce Alder Lake, a hybrid SoC with a mixture of big and little x86 CPUs on the same slice of silicon. The two chips will be based on Atom and Core, respectively, and they’ll offer up to 16 cores in an 8+8 configuration. There have been questions about whether AMD would do something equivalent, and while the company isn’t talking about long-term plans, it’s got no similar product coming to market in the short term. In a recent roundtable focused on AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs, CVP and CTO Joe Macri shared details of how AMD sees that option.
One positive outcome from the election this week has been the passage of a major right-to-repair law in Massachusetts. Question 1 requires that Massachusetts vehicle owners and repair facilities be granted “expanded access to mechanical data related to vehicle maintenance and repair.” Beginning in 2022, all manufacturers who wish to sell vehicles in MA must equip those vehicles with an open access data platform. The new law stipulates that third parties must be able to retrieve information from the vehicle for the purposes of diagnosing problems, repair, and maintenance. Manufacturers are specifically barred from requiring that customers or independent vehicles first seek authorization to access this information unless the authorization process is both completely standardized and administered by someone other than the manufacturer.
You could argue that Earth hasn’t been an ideal place to live lately, but it could be worse. Scientists from Canada’s McGill University have released a new analysis of an exoplanet called K2-141b. This world orbits its star so closely that its ecosystem is . The ground is rock, the seas are rock, and yes, even the air is rock. Astronomers first detected K2-141b several years ago — it has the distinction of being the first planet identified during the Kepler Space Telescope’s “second light” mission, often called K2. It’s a few hundred light-years away, making it an impractical vacation spot.
