First insider build of Windows Server arrives with new virtualization features

Enlarge / Server administrator kaiju hates user password reset requests. (credit: Bandai Namco Entertainment America (CC) ) Back in May , Microsoft announced that Windows Server would be joining the Windows Insider Program. Late last night, the first preview release of Windows Server was published. The biggest areas of improvement in the new build are around virtualization and containers. The preview allows exposing more of the underlying hardware capabilities to virtual machines, with support for virtualized non-volatile memory and virtualized power/battery status. For both containers and virtual machines, networking capabilities have been enhanced to enable a wider range of virtual network capabilities with greater performance. The focus on containerization has also seen the Nano Server deployment of Windows Server change. Presently, Nano Server is still a full operating system, but with the Redstone 3 release of Windows later this year, that’s going to change. It’s going to be a strictly container-only deployment. Upgrading and maintaining Nano Server will be done through updating the container image. This has enabled Microsoft to strip down the Nano Server installation. It no longer requires, for example, the Windows servicing stack. Because it’s upgraded simply by replacing the image, Nano Server no longer needs to use Windows Update itself. The result is a 70 percent reduction in the image’s footprint. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First insider build of Windows Server arrives with new virtualization features

AMD’s R9 Nano crams a full Fury X into a tiny 6-inch form factor

12 more images in gallery Earlier this year, AMD unveiled three new graphics cards: the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, and R9 Nano. While the top-of-the-line water-cooled R9 Fury X and air-cooled R9 Fury have both since been released to positive reviews, the mini-ITX sized R9 Nano has remained something of a mystery. Fortunately, the Nano appears to have been worth the wait. While the Nano costs the same as a Fury X—$649, or about £530 (UK pricing is unconfirmed)—the diminutive card also sports same full-fat Fiji chip, which is crammed into its teeny 6-inch form factor. With the R9 Nano you get a full 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of 4096-bit memory high-bandwidth memory operating at 1000MHz. AMD claims performance is around 8.2 TFLOPS, which is only five percent below that of the Fury X. Even better, the Nano needs just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, with a typical power consumption of 175W, which is miles below the 275W of the Fury X. Of course, such dramatic power savings have to come from somewhere, and for the Nano that means a reduction in clock speed. The Nano’s GPU is rated for “up to 1000MHz,” with AMD saying that under typical usage in most games it runs between 850MHz and 900MHz. That’s around a 14 percent decrease over the 1050MHz of the Fury X, but it’s still impressive given the Nano’s size. AMD puts performance somewhere between the Fury and Fury X, with the full shader count helping to mitigate the drop in clock speed versus the Fury. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s R9 Nano crams a full Fury X into a tiny 6-inch form factor

World’s Strongest Material Goes from Conductor to Insulator When Stretched

You’ve heard all about the wonder properties of graphene, so come meet its one dimensional cousin, carbyne. A chain of single carbon atoms to graphene’s two-dimensional layer of atoms, carbyne has some pretty amazing properties of its own. By one measure, it’s the strongest material in the world (over graphene!), and a new study finds it has the strange ability to go from conductor to insulator with a small stretch. Read more…

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World’s Strongest Material Goes from Conductor to Insulator When Stretched