Extreme Tech- Computing

• 

  Software on your smartphone can speed up lithium-ion battery charging by up to 6x August 14, 2014 at 11:01 am

  A startup in California, with the rather odd name of Qnovo, says it has developed a new way of rapidly recharging conventional lithium-ion batteries. With Qnovo’s technology, you can get six hours of phone life from just 15 minutes of charging — compared to just 1-2 hours from conventional charging. The secret, according to Qnovo, is that no two batteries are identical — and knowing exactly how much power you can pump into the battery without damaging it can significantly improve recharge times.
• 

  Snowden went too far by revealing the NSA’s MonsterMind cyber weapon August 14, 2014 at 10:02 am

  The latest NSA program to come out of Edward Snowden is MonsterMind, an autonomous cyber warfare program that signals a sharp turn for the whistleblower.
• 

  By 2025, ‘sexbots will be commonplace’ – which is just fine, as we’ll all be unemployed and bored thanks to robots stealing our jobs August 14, 2014 at 9:04 am

  According to a new report that looks at how continuing improvements to artificial intelligence and robotics will impact society, ‘robotic sex partners will become commonplace’ by 2025. A large portion of the report also focuses on how AI and robotics will impact both blue- and white-collar workers, with about 50% of the polled experts stating that robots will displace more human jobs than they create by 2025.
• 

  DirectX 12 reduces power consumption by 50%, boosts fps by 60% in new tech demo August 13, 2014 at 1:32 pm

  At its Siggraph 2014 booth, Intel is showing off one of the first public demos of DirectX 12 and Direct3D 12 — and the improvement over older graphics APIs, such as DirectX 11, is really quite startling. The exact same demo under DirectX 12 consumed 50% less power than the DirectX 11 version. In a similar demo, the higher efficiency and lower overheads of DX12 allowed for a 60% increase in frame rate over DX11 while consuming the same amount of power. After an awful lot of talk about the benefits of Mantle, DirectX 12, and OpenGL NG, it’s very exciting to see an example of the actual real-world gains of these new graphics APIs.
• 

  Brace for the BGPocalypse: Big disruptions loom as internet overgrowth continues August 13, 2014 at 11:10 am

  Over the past 24 hours, you may have felt some tremors of high latency and dropped connections as you surfed the internet. Usually these tremors would be nothing to worry about — they’re usually just the standard low-level interference caused by the occasional router reboot or similar — but in this case they’re actually the early rumblings of a much larger networking earthquake that could cause major outages and disruptions across the global internet. You’ve heard of the IPocalypse caused by the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses — now it’s time to learn about the BGPocalypse.
• 

  Alienware Alpha is the first Steam Machine … but it runs Windows, and comes with a normal Xbox 360 gamepad August 13, 2014 at 9:01 am

  Alienware has announced that its Steam Machine — the Alienware Alpha — will be available in November for $550. Curiously, though, the Alpha — which should be the first commercially available Steam Machine — won’t ship with Valve’s purpose-built Steam Controller. The Alpha also won’t ship with SteamOS. In fact, the Alienware Alpha is basically just a mid-spec Windows 8.1 PC that boots straight into Steam Big Picture Mode. Considering Steam Machines were meant to usher in a new era of Linux-based living room game consoles, with a magical gamepad that makes PC games playable from your couch, what exactly is Alienware playing at?
• 

  Reversible USB Type-C connector finalized: Devices, cables, and adapters coming soon August 12, 2014 at 12:25 pm

  The USB Promoter Group has announced that the greatest invention in the known universe — the reversible Type-C USB connector — is finally ready for mass production. The USB Implementers Forum will now take the Type-C spec and start building devices, cables, and adapters that support the new reversible connector. We could begin seeing Type-C USB devices over the next few months, but it may take a little while for Type-C to reach critical mass.
• 

  The 270TB storage pod: Does Seagate or WD make the ultimate 6TB hard drive? August 12, 2014 at 10:59 am

  Signaling that 6TB hard drives are no longer for the exclusive enjoyment of expensive enterprise-level setups, Backblaze has crammed 45 of the drives into a single enclosure to create what we believe to be the highest-density storage pod ever created — 270 terabytes of spinning platter joy in a 4U rack-mount chassis. Better yet, if you have about $15,000 to hand and a penchant for computer building, you could even build your own 270TB storage pod — Backblaze open-sources its hardware designs, so you can simply follow along.
• 

  Google invests in 60-terabit $300-million trans-Pacific cable to protect its growth in Asia August 12, 2014 at 10:18 am

  Google has joined forces with a number of Asian telecoms giants to deploy the world’s fastest trans-Pacific submarine cable. The cable, which is lumbered with the rather unimaginative name “Faster”, will have an initial capacity of 60 terabits per second. Faster (it’s not even an acronym!) will provide an important high-speed link from the west coast of the US to landing points in Japan, and then on to rapidly growing markets in China, India, Indonesia, and other Asian countries. The cable will be deployed by NEC at a total cost of $300 million.
• 

  Nvidia details 64-bit Denver Tegra K1, claims Haswell-class performance for first 64-bit Android chip August 12, 2014 at 7:38 am

  Nvidia has finally taken the wraps off its 64-bit Denver CPU core — and, well, let’s just say that the 64-bit Android race just got a lot more interesting. The Denver CPU will be available later this year in the Tegra K1 SoC, where you’ll get two Denver cores and a 192-core Kepler GPU. Nvidia says this will be the first 64-bit ARM chip for Android, and that it “completely outpaces” other ARM SoCs. The Denver CPU is so beastly that it even beats out some PC-class chips (the low-end Haswell Celeron), while consuming much less power. The secret behind this performance boost is a novel technology called Dynamic Code Optimization.

OLDER Storie