Items tagged with Future
Microsoft's research labs have been known to create some pretty wild projects. Granted, not all of them have hit the market or anything, but there's a good chance that something huge down the road will spring up. Project Natal is already proof that Redmond has quite a few out-of-the-box thinkers on staff, and while we can't say it with any real degree of certainty, we're guessing that this stuff is what techie dreams are made of.During the company's College Tour 2009, Microsoft showed off what it's describing as a "mindblowing natural user interface." In essence, this is really just a supercomputer with loads of intellect. Microsoft Chief Research & Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, demonstrating...
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NVIDIA has built its brand and reputation as a GPU designer since the company was founded in 1993, but recent comments by the company have implied that it believes platforms like Tegra and ION will be key revenue generators in the future. We've previously discussed NVIDIA's ongoing emphasis on the GPU as a massively parallel processor capable of handling workloads and programs far outside the realm of video games, but to date, reviewers and analysts alike have treated Tegra as more of a side project than a future core competency. Given how difficult the last twelve months have been for NVIDIA, it's easy to wonder if the company's decision to focus on Tegra is correct. To date, the GPU designer...
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It appears that the military brain trust over in Korea might have seen Iron Man or Star Wars: Clone Wars too many times. It's difficult to say exactly where the inspiration came from for their concept for a new battle-dress uniform (BDU), but it definitely looks like something right out of the realm of science fiction. The Korea Times reported on the concept design for a new BDU and related gear that Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD) will allegedly start developing next year. "The agency has completed studies on the concept of the future combatant uniform and equipment... From next year, we plan to begin developing related technology and equipment after getting approval from...
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From pre-paid calling cards to minute plans with so-called "free phones", sometimes it's painfully obvious that, although we hate to admit it here, it's not always completely about the hardware. More than a few industry analyst have predicted that the mainstream PC of tomorrow will be nothing more than a thin client connected to the "grid" for services and applications. Now, Computerworld's Mike Elgan ruminates about what will likely be the new frontier for affordable, mobile computing; the $99 Netbook with a "plan"..."Subnotebooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-Note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You'll need to commit to a two-year...
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In the final IDF keynote address on Wednesday, Vice President and General Manager for Software and Solutions at Intel, Renee James, spoke about the "digital revolution" and what sort of opportunities the recent advances in Intel technology will enable. Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks and John Carmack of id software were among the guest speakers in this keynote... IDF Day 2: Renee James: "Developing for the Future of Computing"...
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In the final IDF keynote address on Wednesday, Vice President and General Manager for Software and Solutions at Intel, Renee James, spoke about the "digital revolution" and what sort of opportunities the recent advances in Intel technology will enable. Just as the Pentium processor helped shepherd in multimedia on the PC, multi-core processors are opening the door further for HD and 3D worlds on computers. James stated that all of Intel's platforms will be multi-core by 2010. As an example of the kind of real-world, immersive environment recent processor improvements are enabling, James showed a preview of Ubisoft's FarCry 2, which is due out this November....
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It was about a month ago that NVIDIA released drivers that included PhysX support, leading to multiple allegations of cheating. Why? Well, quite naturally the CPU physics test (3DMark Vantage) shows much higher results with PhysX in the mix, as the CPU load moves greatly to the PPU.According to a forum post, Futuremark hasn't been asleep, and has decided any such results will be deemed invalid and removed. I've changed (sic) a couple of e-mails between Futuremark CEO Tero Sarkkinen who quickly commented current confusing situation in ORB and Hall of Fame. NVIDIA's GPU PhysX was launched in the middle of summer and most of FM's staff are on holidays (Most people are here in Finland)....
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You've probably heard the buzz-word "Cloud Computing" tossed around recently. Cloud Computing is the next big thing in remote and distributed computing and is very much in fashion now for many industry bellwethers like IBM, Sun, Amazon, Google and storage giants like EMC. You don't have to have a degree in IT to see it coming together. If you've played around with Gmail or Google Docs, even as an end user, you've already seen the beginnings of something big, really big. As with any budding new market however, there are a lot more questions than answers these days, perhaps because the possibilities are seemingly infinite. Let's take a quick gander at...
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The idea of being invisible has captivated scientists and comic-book writers alike for many years. As Einstein told us, it's going to be pretty hard to do. But it's somewhat easier to make something invisible to sound waves. Researchers in Spain have developed a material that directs sound waves around an object so that they re-form on the opposite side with no degradation. Of course the military would be interested in the material; your submarine would be invisible to Sonar if it used such a material, for instance. But think of the civilian uses of the stuff. You could live next door to an airport or an Wu-Tang Clan aficionado and never know it. In order for a material to work as...
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Freescale Semiconductor has a new kind of Random Access Memory they'd like you to consider soon: MRAM. They've spun off the part of their business that's been developing MRAM chips and gotten $20 million in funding from a handful of VCs to push the technology forward enough to make it commercially available. What's MRAM, you ask?MRAM stands for magnetoresistive Random Access Memory. MRAM uses tiny magnets combined with conventional silicon circuits to create a combo memory. It is a single chip with the speed of static RAM and the permanence, or non-volatility, of flash memory. Typically, flash is slow and permanent, while SRAM is fast but temporary.With MRAM powering a portable device, you could...
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With each passing year, access, management and security of data storage has become exponentially more important to end users and in the enterprise space, as volumes of data grow with ever-more connected global economies, businesses and communities. It is no surprise that technologies that are key to the enablement of more intelligent and powerful mass storage are also evolving at a break-neck pace. From relatively simple hard disk technologies, like SATA, SAS, iSCSI and SSD, to more resilient RAID structures and Storage Area Networks, we here at HotHardware.com are keeping a watchful eye on what we feel will be a critical aspect of empowering compute resources for systems and new...
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Amazonian beetles, to be more precise. Researchers have long understood that if they could produce a photonic crystal, a diamond-like structure that would allow light to be shunted around inside instead of electricity, that they would be able to make superfast optical computers that used little power and wouldn't generate heat the way your current chip does. They could even envision the structure necessary, they just couldn't produce it. But then someone noticed that the iridescent scales of a lowly beetle had the structure they were seeking all along. When the researchers scoped the scales, they noticed something strange: No matter the angle of viewing, the scales always appeared in the same...
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Futuremark has just officially unveiled the latest version of their 3DMark benchmark suite, 3DMark Vantage. Like PCMark Vantage which was released a few months ago, this latest version of 3DMark was designed for testing Windows Vista-based systems. This latest version of the 3DMark, however, is specifically bound to Windows Vista because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which you may know isn't available on previous versions of Windows. We've put together a quick overview of 3DMark Vantage and its individual test and have it available for viewing right here:Futuremark Unveils 3DMark Vantage...
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Futuremark has just officially unveiled the latest version of their 3DMark benchmark suite, 3DMark Vantage. Like PCMark Vantage which was released a few months ago, this latest version of 3DMark was designed for testing Windows Vista-based systems. This latest version of the 3DMark, however, is specifically bound to Windows Vista because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which you may know isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests,...
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The President of Toshiba, Shozo Saito, delivered a fascinating look at near future of solid-state memory last week. He's in a position to know about NAND flash memory and Solid State Drives, and the future not only looks bright, it looks like the future is right now. He predicted one-quarter of notebook PCs will have a solid state drive within three years. Toshiba cited notebook PCs as the most likely market where demand for NAND flash memory will strengthen. The global market for SSD for notebook PCs will expand 313% every year from 2008 to 2011, the company said.Toshiba is planning to extend its SSD lineup, which currently ranges from 32 to 128 Gbytes, up to 512 Gbytes in the future....
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It has been predicted that existing manufacturing materials used in microchips will eventually hit a wall that no amount of R & D can overcome. As a result researchers are looking into several other technologies such as Graphene."When current silicon transistor technology goes below 10 nanometers in size, it's predicted it will run into the laws of physics and will no longer be able to create reliable transistors.??Graphene, on the other hand, is already seeing working transistors in the sub-10 nanometer range. The researchers say their latest, unpublished work has used graphene to make transistors a single nanometer across."To understand just how amazing this is, consider the amazing amount...
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Your computer memory is magnetic affair of one sort or another. (We're assuming you've stopped using Punch Cards by now)Your processor is an electrical festival. The two have developed into a very powerful computing/storage machine indeed, but they have essentially always run on two separate tracks, one relying on the other to handle any increased capacity. Now researchers at the University of Copenhagen have come up with a way to blur the line and combine electricity and magnetism into a new transistor concept. Jonas Hauptmann, PhD student, has carried out the experiments under supervision of Professor Poul Erik Lindelof.Jonas Hauptmann says: "We are the first to obtain direct electrical...
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Global warming got you down? Concerned about rising gas prices and our over-dependency on fossil fuels? Before you declare that the sky is falling and reach for your favorite tree to hug in what some call the last few days of earth's existence, remember there are some pretty smart cookies and valiant visionaries still working on some of heavy lifting that will provide solutions for ensuring mankind doesn't strip the earth down to a baron wasteland... "IwamotoScott envisions the city as Hydro-Net, using “Geothermal Mushroom” structures to extract heat and water from deep in the earth, and whimsical “Fog Flowers” to render moisture from the air and grow algae, which would then be turned...
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In the strangest trademark application we've seen since Fark tried to trademark NSFW, Futuremark is attempting to trademark PWNAGE.If it is approved, Futuremark's request will cover an extremely wide slice of the digital entertainment market, including (but not limited to) the following:"Computer game software for communication devices; computer game software and computer game programs enabling users to play games with mobile phones and personal digital assistants; computer software and programs enabling users to communication devices to simultaneously access databases and global computer networks; software enabling transfer of data between mobile communication apparatus..."If Futuremark can...
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Apple has applied for patents on a series of single and multiple touch gestures that will undoubtedly show up in some iteration on their Mac OS X sometime in the future. Of course Apple already uses a limited number of touch commands on some of their hardware, but the series of gestures outlined in the application indicate an enormous amount of possible gesture commands. They also claim to be able to distinguish between various combinations of fingers, including adjacent and non-adjacent finger presses. In particular, they point out that the pinky finger when applied sideways to the trackpad (as in the bottom of a fist) generates a unique pattern and could be used for its own customizable...
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By now just about everyone has heard of the RIAA and their law suits against people who have allegedly pirated music over the Internet. The stories of the RIAA suing grandmothers, minors, and the deceased are common place, but it seems that the RIAA's latest step might have taken things too far: they're asking that a new law be passed that will require schools seeking federal funding for their programs and student body to police their own networks and keep them piracy-free.The request isn't unreasonable, and ought to be a goal of any IT staff at an organization where piracy is probable, but the repercussions of failure (not to mention what constitutes failure) could have a major impact...
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Recent IDF attendees might have overlooked such acronyms as ONFI and NVMHCI, but these two acronyms could very well be the future of flash based storage and possibly even a look at the future of Intel Robson-like technologies.So what exactly are these acronyms, and how are they planning on changing the PC landscape?“It [NONFI] is a part of an initiative to optimise the flash memory integration and performance in the PCs, starting with NVMHCI "Non Volatile Mem Host Controller Interface" akin to SATA AHCI.NVMHCI is a standard programming interface for multiplatform OS support for flash as native storage at low level, enabling a single driver for both hard disks and flask memory. It can be used...
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