Mars is a weird and wonderful place. Not only is it the only planet populated entirely by robots, but it also has a fascinating geological history. An image captured in 2011 has been making the rounds after it appeared on the NASA science blog and Astronomy Photo of the Day, and many have been wondering . As it turns out, we only have part of the story. NASA spotted this unusual surface feature in 2011 thanks to the HiRISE instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The image reveals a large hole in the center of an even larger crater on the slopes of the Pavonis Mons volcano.
AMD, Intel, and Nvidia all love to talk about their supercomputer wins. Winning a supercomputer contract doesn’t just represent a few thousand CPU or GPU sales — it gives the company in question unique bragging rights depending on the target workload, system speed, energy efficiency, and other demonstrated technology milestones. Winning a world government as a supercomputing customer is typically read (or at least marketed) as a demonstration of trust in a company’s long-term product roadmap. Today, AMD and HP are talking up their new partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to build El Capitan — an exascale-class supercomputer scheduled to be delivered by early 2023.
Nvidia may be planning to bring massive new GPUs to market when it makes the jump to 7nm, possibly in a bid to protect its supercomputing market share from any products Intel might launch. A number of new Nvidia GPUs have popped up on places like Geekbench in recent weeks, all with massive core counts: 6,912, 7,552, and as of this week, 7,936. Currently, Nvidia’s top-end GPU in terms of core count is the Tesla V100, with 5,102 cores. Even the 6,912-core card would be a 1.35x increase, while the 7,936-core GPU is a 1.55x increase. The chart below by Tom’s Hardware shows the relative configuration of each part.
One of the major trends in computing over the past decade has been a dramatic improvement in monitors and overall display technology. While companies continue to push resolution, especially in TVs, there’s been far more attention paid to other aspects of image quality. Apple is reportedly working on a number of devices with mini-LED displays. This rumor comes from the usual source of Ming-Chi Kuo, along with that Apple doesn’t expect its mini-LED commercialization to be impacted by Covid-19 (coronavirus). The product research and development for mini LED remain unaffected by the COVID-19. The visibility for commercialization has even exceeded the expectations in our previous report.
General Motors is going electric in a big way. This week the company announced plans for a new battery technology called Ultium that will have more range than Tesla and be used in a broad array of future EVs including an upcoming Cadillac luxury SUV and flagship sedan. GM says the technology uses less hard-to-get, hard-on-miners cobalt, and cell costs should fall below the $100-per-kilowatt-hour level that starts to make EVs more competitive than gasoline-engine cars. The batteries will be built as rectangular pouches rather than cylindrical cells – more space-efficient – that can be stacked horizontally and vertically.
Today you can get a new 2-in-1 laptop from Dell that features one of AMD’s newest Ryzen processors and a half-terabyte SSD. Or if you want something with a bit more flashy, there’s also a big discount on an Apple MacBook Pro. This excellently priced laptop comes equipped with a fast AMD quad-core processor, a 1080p display, and a half-terabyte NVMe SSD all for the low price of $499.98. Just use promo code LTINSP1452AFFat checkout at Dell.com to drop the price down from $929.98. Apple’s aluminum-clad MacBook Pro comes sporting a dual-core Intel Core i5 processor that operates at 2.4GHz.
Microsoft is in the midst of a multi-year effort to modernize the Windows interface, and one of the most iconic parts of Windows is up next. Microsoft showed off its during a recent . Live Tiles are fading into the background, and those are front and center. In past years, Microsoft would roll out major Windows UI changes in new versions of the OS. However, it’s doing it piecemeal this time because it doesn’t do monolithic version updates anymore. We’ve been on for the last five years, and probably will be into the foreseeable future. Microsoft recently began rolling out a new batch of app icons to Windows 10, and the next step might be revamping the Start Menu.
The year was 1999, and the Intel Pentium III was the most powerful CPU on the market, screaming along at 500MHz. The University of California Berkeley sought to tap into the power of idling PCs to search for aliens with SETI@home. Now, 21 years later, the SETI@home project is . This isn’t the end of community involvement in the search for ET, though. One of the best ways to search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to listen for their radio signals. However, space is really, mind-bogglingly big. The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia collected more data than the SETI project could process, so researchers turned to the ever-expanding collection of home PCs that sat idle much of the day.
We love our smartphones. We love our tablets. We love our laptops. But for just a second, let’s throw a little love at that often-forgotten workhorse of the tech world: the trusty desktop computer. Say what you will about those smaller, more mobile cousins, but there are just some jobs that require hunking down in a chair at a desk and unleashing a big can of RAM-powered whoop on a digital project. Who’s gonna do it? You, iPhone? You, Galaxy Tab? No, it’s gonna be your old pal, the desktop. And right now, you can save up to hundreds of dollars on 10 extremely worthy refurbished desktop computer options to put a little new muscle into that next report.
