By Paul Taylor: Wednesday, 18 June 2008
THERE’S A GEEK-FEST TAKING PLACE in Hawai’i, of all places, and it’s called the VLSI Symposia – that’s fine by us, give us a working vacation any day over…uhm… work. The crammed brains-in-attendance have been able to show some interesting developments in the field of semiconductor research – including Intel’s own slideware which they’ve so graciously sent us for analysis. If you’ve been following Intel’s achievements over the past few years, you’ll have noticed that Chipzilla is they are repeatedly reaching the design limit on a few elements in their chips. The latest example had been the leaky 45nm process, which they bathed in Hafnium and gave high-K metal gates. Now Intel is trying to push cache to a guesstimated 3 to 4 times its current capacity by using Floating Body Cells (FBC). Floating Body Cells have nothing to do with corpses bobbing up and down in the Hudson River. It’s all about SOI, and although Intel didn’t like IBM/AMD’s SOI back in the daze they like it enough now that they need it. The FBC (your bit of storage) hangs under the gate and over the 10nm thin buried oxide (BOX) layer, meaning its small, simple (ie: cost effective) and – from what we garner, won’t suffer from the electric shortcomings of current DRAM designs. Intel also says it’s a bit more scalable than previous caches. This would also, potentially, lead to a new species of DRAM some time down the line, but Intel’s business isn’t about building DRAM, it’s about building CPUs.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Skype's latest puts focus on watching who you call
By Eric Auchard Jun 18, 2008
Web communications leader Skype begins public testing on Wednesday of a new version of its software for making free or low-cost phone calls that aims to make casual video chatting more common. The Luxembourg-based unit of online auction leader eBay Inc said that public testing of Skype version 4.0 would begin making video a more integral part of the service. The 4.0 test version invites users to post bigger photos of themselves, instead of just thumbnail images, to encourage callers to see and be seen. It also incorporates features for non-technical users that detect computer settings, available bandwidth and connected audio or video devices to make getting started easier.
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Web communications leader Skype begins public testing on Wednesday of a new version of its software for making free or low-cost phone calls that aims to make casual video chatting more common. The Luxembourg-based unit of online auction leader eBay Inc said that public testing of Skype version 4.0 would begin making video a more integral part of the service. The 4.0 test version invites users to post bigger photos of themselves, instead of just thumbnail images, to encourage callers to see and be seen. It also incorporates features for non-technical users that detect computer settings, available bandwidth and connected audio or video devices to make getting started easier.
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The coming 3D revolution: Hype or reality?
by Steve Tobak June 18, 2008
One of the benefits of being a consultant is that you sometimes get to see really cool stuff before it hits the market. I recently visited Kerner Optical - the stealthy special effects unit that split off from Industrial Light & Magic a couple of years ago. Among other things, Kerner is now focused on developing disruptive technology for a broad range of 3D applications. Without getting into specifics (because I can't) or technical gobbledygook - which you can get by checking out the company's research website - this stuff goes way beyond the current state of 3D movies, video games, virtual reality, and TV. A recent James Cameron presentation provided some hints on what might be coming, but as some readers of this story observed, he stopped short of getting into any real specifics. Make no mistake, just like Kerner and others, Cameron has a lot invested in the 3D world. Still, I viewed his talk as more of a "heads-up and be prepared for what's coming" sort of thing. And something is indeed coming. But before we get into that, a brief caveat.
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One of the benefits of being a consultant is that you sometimes get to see really cool stuff before it hits the market. I recently visited Kerner Optical - the stealthy special effects unit that split off from Industrial Light & Magic a couple of years ago. Among other things, Kerner is now focused on developing disruptive technology for a broad range of 3D applications. Without getting into specifics (because I can't) or technical gobbledygook - which you can get by checking out the company's research website - this stuff goes way beyond the current state of 3D movies, video games, virtual reality, and TV. A recent James Cameron presentation provided some hints on what might be coming, but as some readers of this story observed, he stopped short of getting into any real specifics. Make no mistake, just like Kerner and others, Cameron has a lot invested in the 3D world. Still, I viewed his talk as more of a "heads-up and be prepared for what's coming" sort of thing. And something is indeed coming. But before we get into that, a brief caveat.
Read more here -->Link
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