aeds

Will Apple's silicon be good enough for a Mac?

Apple is starting to release some scary-good silicon. But can it muscle out Intel?

Last decade, the question was, will Apple go Intel? After years of speculation, that finally happened in 2006, when Apple dropped the PowerPC for its Mac line.

So are we now on a similar trajectory, as a Bloomberg story speculates, with Apple eventually evicting Intel from its Macs and using its own internally developed processors?

A quick look at the latest Apple silicon shows the company is on the right track. The A6X is a serious piece of silicon that makes the newest gen 4 iPad … Read more

Citizen scientists map 1,400 defibrillators in Philly contest

After researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine called on the general public to find as many of Philadelphia's estimated 5,000 automated external defibrillators as possible, more than 300 "citizen scientists" stepped up and located 1,429 of them in more than 525 buildings across the city.

The eight-week crowdsourcing contest, called MyHeartMap Challenge, is part of what the researchers hope will be a national effort to catalog as many AEDs as possible and develop an interactive app of the registry so that laypeople can act quickly in the event someone nearby … Read more

Analysts: iPad 4's graphics upgrade packs a punch

At its silicon core, the fourth-generation iPad is hardly an incremental upgrade, according to chip analysts.

The new iPad's A6X chip packs a brand-new graphics engine that boasts a serious step up in horsepower from the third-generation iPad's A5X.

"Nothing's incremental about this. The A6X is one massive processing machine," Jim Morrison, a product manager at Chipworks, which does reverse engineering and patent-infringement analysis of semiconductors and electronic systems, told CNET.

Chipworks posted an analysis of the A6X's circuit layout today.

Apple's newest chip is a full 30 percent larger than the A6 … Read more

Unlocked fin likely brought down X-51A in August crash

The U.S. Air Force said today that an experimental test in August of its hypersonic X-51A Waverider failed due to a fin inadvertently unlocking and sending the aircraft into a corkscrew that ended in a crash into the Pacific Ocean.

At the time, the Air Force said only that the August flight had ended with the crash, but didn't reveal what had been at fault. But in a conference call today, X-51A program manager Charlie Brink explained what he and his colleagues have learned over a couple of months of investigation.

The August flight was the third of … Read more

Why did Apple launch the iPad 4 now?

Apple's release of another new iPad this year has many scratching their heads. But Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty sees method behind the madness.

In an investors note out yesterday, Huberty ticked off three reasons why the company unveiled the iPad 4 so soon after its predecessor, which arrived earlier this year.

First, the 3rd-generation iPad, which the analyst calls a "stale product," could have seen its sales cannibalized by the cheaper iPad Mini.

Second, sales for the 3rd-gen iPad were not as high as expected, which Huberty blamed on limited improvements over the iPad 2. Adding … Read more

That was fast: The iPad gets a new chip, the A6X

Apple was quick to obsolete the "new" chip in the third-generation Retina iPad -- not to mention the iPad itself. So the question is, why so fast?

But before we answer that question, let's look at some of the improvements. Apple says the A6X "delivers up to twice the CPU [central processing unit] and graphics performance of the A5X chip" -- the A5X being the processor Apple just announced back in March when it rolled out the first Retina iPad.

A lot of that improvement comes from the goodness of Apple's new A6 chip … Read more

Acer intros 7-inch 'mini' Iconia A110 Tablet

Fans of the iPad can keep guessing about the iPad Mini, but if you want a more concrete option to set your mind on now, Acer's offering its own mini tablet, with specs similar to Google's Nexus 7.

The company today announced the Iconia Tab A110, a lightweight pocket-size tablet with a 1,024x600-pixel-resolution 7-inch multitouch screen. This is in a way the mini version of the recently reviewed 10.1-ich Iconia Tab A700, sharing the same Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor and 1GB of system memory. The new tablet, however, will run the latest version of the Android operating system, version 4.1 aka Jelly Bean.… Read more

Government-funded battery maker A123 files for bankruptcy

A123 Systems, a lithium-ion battery maker that has received hundreds of millions in government support, filed for bankruptcy protection today.

The move makes A123 the latest government-backed energy company to file for Chapter 11. Many of these companies have struggled to make money as demand slows for their products. A123 received more than $250 million in state and federal funding to help it run its operations providing batteries for electric cars and other products. But it has also faced many problems, including defective products.

A123 today said Johnson Controls will help finance the filing by buying A123's automotive business … Read more

On the Moore's Law hot seat: Intel's Mike Mayberry (Q&A)

Mike Mayberry, perhaps more than anyone, is the guy who keeps Moore's Law ticking.

As the vice president who leads Intel's research team, he bears responsibility for making sure his employer can cram ever more electronic circuitry onto computer chips. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore 47 years ago observed the pace at which microchips' transistor count doubled, and Mayberry is in charge of keeping that legacy intact.

A lot rests on Moore's Law, which in a 1975 update to Moore's original 1965 paper predicted that the number of transistors will double every two years. That means a … Read more