Tag: earliest

IBM squeezes 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip

Who said Moore’s Law was dead? Certainly not IBM or its chip partners Globalfoundries and Samsung. The trio has developed a transistor manufacturing process that should pave the way for 5-nanometer chips . While the team etched the chip using the same extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) used for the breakthrough 7nm chip , it ditched the common FinFET (fin field effect) transistor design in favor of stacks of silicon nanosheets. The switch makes it possible to fine-tune individual circuits to maximize their performance as they’re crammed into an incredibly small space. How small? At 5nm, the group says it can squeeze 30 billion transistors into a chip the size of a fingernail (see below) — not bad when the 7nm chip held 20 billion transistors a couple of years ago. IBM sees the technique helping its own cognitive computing efforts as well as the Internet of Things and other “data-intensive” tasks. However, it’s also painting a rosy picture for the future of mobile devices — it imagines phones having “two to three times” more battery life than current devices . That’s likely optimistic (phone makers tend to focus on speed over longevity), but it won’t be shocking if future hardware is both faster and wrings out a little more from every charge. Just don’t expect to see real-world examples of this for a while. We haven’t even seen devices shipping with 7nm chips (they’re not expected until 2018 at the earliest), so it could easily be a couple of years or more before 5nm arrives. Still, that 5nm is even on the roadmap is important. Chip designers won’t have to reinvent the wheel to get meaningful improvements, and you won’t have to worry about device performance growing stale for at least the next few years. Source: IBM

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IBM squeezes 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip

Stanford students recreated a 5,000-year-old Chinese beer

Homebrewing is a niche hobby today, but before the industrialization of the industry, a lot of beer was made in people’s kitchens. Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford, was part of a team that recently discovered a 5, 000-year-old beer recipe that she figured could be recreated at home. The process was approachable enough for students in her Archaeology of Food: Production, Consumption and Ritual course to make in the classroom, so that’s what they did. The recipe, found during research that presents the earliest known evidence of beer production in China, consists primarily of grains like millet and barley, as well as Job’s tears (a type of grass native to southeast Asia) and traces of yam and lily root. The concoction produced is thicker than modern beers, and one student said it had “a pleasant fruity smell and a citrus taste, similar to a cider.” Liu said she was surprised to find that barley was part of the recipe, since the earliest evidence of barley seeds in China dates back to about 4, 000 years ago. This could mean that barley was first brought to China for alcoholic uses, rather than other food purposes. “Archaeology is not just about reading books and analyzing artifacts, ” Liu said . “Trying to imitate ancient behavior and make things with the ancient method helps students really put themselves into the past and understand why people did what they did.” Ancient drinks have captured the imaginations of many consumers and enthusiasts, which is why breweries like Dogfish Head make their own throwback beverages based on the traditions of yesteryear. For those wanting to learn more about the process, watch Liu explain the process in the video below. Source: Stanford

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Stanford students recreated a 5,000-year-old Chinese beer

Apple reportedly wants to use changeable E Ink keyboards

Apple’s plans for advanced laptop controls may extend beyond that rumored OLED touch strip . Both 9to5Mac and TrustedReviews report that Apple has been in talks to use a laptop version of Sonder Design’s dynamic keyboard technology, which uses E Ink to change key labels on the fly. Just how Tim Cook and company would implement the hardware isn’t clear, but it might work the way these keyboards have operated since the days of Art Lebedev’s Optimus Maximus . If so, you’d get handy labels on keys as you switch contexts, such as brushes in an image editor or different characters when you switch languages. Although Sonder has confirmed that talks have taken place, it’s not saying whether or not it has a deal. It only adds that it’s “closing B2B procurement contracts” with three laptop makers, and that Foxconn (which helped get Sonder off the ground) and E Ink are helping. Given the timing, you probably aren’t going to get a MacBook with this keyboard any time soon. Even if Apple has a contract in place (there’s no guarantee that it has), you probably wouldn’t see these livelier keyboards until 2017 at the earliest. Source: 9to5Mac , TrustedReviews

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Apple reportedly wants to use changeable E Ink keyboards