Computing

Nest CEO Fadell: Internet of things is a decade away

PARIS -- It will take 10 years before the "Internet of things" catches on widely, said Nest Labs Chief Executive Tony Fadell, whose smart-thermostat startup embodies the technology.

"People think there's this Internet of all kinds of crazy devices that are going to talk to each other. It's going to take some time," Fadell said at the LeWeb show here. "Give it five or eight years and then you'll see machines talking to machines. Then it'll be commonplace in 10 years or so."

The Internet of things is the idea … Read more

Bringing 'Minority Report' touchless gestures to Windows 8

Elliptic Labs wants to bring the touchless gesture controls seen in the science-fiction film "Minority Report" to everyday consumer electronic devices, starting with Windows 8.

The company -- a Norwegian university spinout with offices in Oslo and Silicon Valley -- unveiled a set of tools to help consumer electronic companies enable touchless controls in their products. These would be similar to the kind of gesture controls seen with the Xbox 360 Kinect and in certain smart televisions like a few models from Samsung Electronics, but presumably would work more smoothly.

That's because the Elliptic device won't … Read more

DARPA SpaceView enlists amateur astronomers

DARPA today announced a new approach to tracking the increasing population of space debris: crowdsourcing. The SpaceView program will reach out to amateur astronomers in helping to protect satellites from what NASA estimates is more than 500,000 pieces of hazardous space debris orbiting the Earth. It's a low-cost way to both improve the scope of the space coverage and better protect assets in space, some of which are satellites providing mission-critical combat support. Decomissioned satellites, spent rocket stages, aluminum oxide slag, and lost tools make up some of the half million pieces of debris -- and the Space … Read more

Titan steals No. 1 spot on Top500 supercomputer list

Predictions that Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer had become the most powerful machine in the world have turned out to be right.

The machine, powered by Nvidia graphics processors and Advanced Micro Devices computer chips, stole the No. 1 spot on the Top500's list from another U.S. machine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia.

Sequoia, which uses processors from IBM, became the top computer in June with a performance of 16.32 petaflops a second. Titan beat that showing, sending Sequoia to second place on the list, with a result of 17.59 petaflops per second. … Read more

Tech breakthrough may double smartphone life

Smartphone batteries may soon last twice as long -- if an MIT spinoff's power amplifier technology lives up to its promise.

The power amplifier is one of the most power-hungry pieces of hardware in a phone. It converts electricity into radio signals and consumes power in two basic modes: standby and output signal for sending out digital data. Such a chip wastes more than 65 percent of its energy, according to a report in the MIT Technology Review, and the only way to make it more efficient is by reducing the power used in standby. … Read more

Intel developing supercomputer-strength smartphone chip

Intel researchers are developing a 48-core processor for smartphones and tablets, something that could potentially give users the capabilities of a supercomputer (or, at the very least, a mainstream PC) in their hands.

According to a report from Computerworld, Intel researchers in Barcelona are "working on finding new ways to use and manage many cores in mobile devices." They expect such chips to be available in about 5 to 10 years, according to the report, which CNET confirmed with Intel for its legitimacy.

Today, smartphone and tablet chips typically top out at four cores (or five, if you … Read more

Titan supercomputer debuts for open scientific research

Forecasting for weather like this week's "Frankenstorm" may become a lot more accurate with the help of the Department of Energy's Titan supercomputer, a system that launched this month for open research development.

The computer, an update to the Jaguar system, is operated in Tennessee by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the DOE's network of research labs. Researchers from academia, government labs, and various industries will be able to use Titan -- believed to be one of the two most powerful machines in the world -- to research things such as climate change and … Read more

IBM brings carbon nanotube-based computers a step closer

In the effort to find a replacement for today's silicon chips, IBM researchers have pushed carbon nanotube technology a significant step ahead.

Carbon nanotubes are very small structures made of a lattice of carbon atoms rolled into a cylindrical shape, and a team of eight researchers have figured out a way to precisely place them on a computer chip, IBM announced today. That development allows them to arrange the nanotubes 100 times more densely than earlier methods, a key step in economical chipmaking, and IBM has built a chip with more than 10,000 carbon nanotube-based elements.

The new … Read more

What would happen if Moore's Law did fizzle?

First of all, don't panic.

If Moore's Law came to an end and computers stopped getting steadily faster, plenty of companies would suffer. But an end likely would come with lots of warning, lots of measures to cushion the blow, and lots of continued development even if transistors stopped shrinking.

The hardest hit would be companies dependent on consumers replacing their electronics every few years and tech companies such as Google whose long-term plans hinge on faster computers, cheaper storage, and better bandwidth. And the continuing miniaturization of computers -- mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to smartphones -- … Read more