In a move that is likely to remind AMD and their Puma platform who is the best in laptop processor war, Intel unveiled their Centrino 2 Processor Technology products for laptops powered by five new Core 2 Duo processors. The new processors support both WiFiN and WiMax wireless capability. The new processors come with a faster 1066MHz front side bus and up to 6MB of L2 cache, and three versions reduce laptop processor wattage about 30 percent, down to just 25 watts. Another exciting feature is the Deep Power Down Technology that turns off processing components such as core clocks and cache memory when the laptop is idle for greater energy savings.

The U.S. Department of Energy and IBM announced the “Roadrunner”, a $100 million supercomputer which is the first machine capable of executing more than 1 quadrillion (1,000 trillion) floating point operations per second or one petaflop. The roadrunner is about twice as fast as the current supercomputing record holder.

The U.S. Department of Energy said that Roadrunner will provide calculations for nuclear security and scientific research. The Roadrunner computer, now housed at the IBM research laboratory in Poughkeepsie, New York, will be moved next month to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. The roadrunner consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 IBM cell engines which power Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game machine, it has 80 terabytes of memory and it runs Red Hat Linux.

It would take 100,000 of today’s fastest laptops — which would reach 1.5 miles into the sky if you’re the stacking sort — to equal Roadrunner’s computational power. Engineering difficulties, zoning issues, and insurance costs would probably preclude the creation of such a laptop tower, however.

The folks at AnandTech were able to run some tests on the Nehalem Processor, Intel’s successor to the Core micro-architecture which is expected to hit the market later this year. While the test did not exactly turn out to be the most reliable, it was good enough to run some early benchmarks on a 2.66GHz Nehalem CPU despite the problems encountered during the test. Excluding all the problems, Nehalem posted up to 50% performance gain over the Penryn based CPU while driving up power consumption at 10%.

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While water-based CPU coolers attached to the surface of a CPU has been around for a while now, researchers at IBM’s Zurich lab have come up with a very interesting idea for cooling the CPU with water from the inside. They have demonstrated three-dimensional chip stacks that are water-cooled layer by layer from the inside via pipes that are as thin as a human hair. The CPU designs call for multiple layers of silicon and in between these layers, water is piped through.

“As we package chips on top of each other to significantly speed a processor’s capability to process data, we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don’t scale. In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3-D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling,” Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory, was quoted as saying. “Until now, nobody has demonstrated viable solutions to this problem.”

Proper cooling mechanism is still the biggest problem in keeping up with the exponential increases in computational power of transistors inside the CPU, including their density. While most of the CPU coolers available in the market today can solve this problem, they basically have limitations since they are just cooling the outside surface of the CPU, the new cooling mechanism idea of cooling the CPU with water from the inside is definitely a breakthrough.

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AMD has unveiled its third-generation “Puma” platform, a notebook platform which is coupled with the following technologies:

• Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core Processor
• Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series GPU
• AMD M780 series chipset sporting Hybrid graphics
• 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi

The main appeal of Puma will be its performance compared to other notebooks. Below are AMD’s performance comparisons:

• An AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80 system with Radeon HD 3200 achieves a 3DMark06 three times higher than an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 system with Intel GMA X3100.
• An AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-86 system with Radeon HD 3200 achieves five times the HD image quality of an Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 system with Intel GMA X3100.
• The Athros AR9280 WiFi chipset beats Intel’s 4965AGN by 62%.

AMD is hoping that its third-generation “Puma” platform will position the company to take advantage of the growing notebook sales market.

The Intel Atom (formerly known as Silverthorne) processor Z5 series is made up of five processors based on Intel’s high-k technology. These processors are specifically designed for mobile devices. The five models have a 400 or 533 MHZ Front Side Bus (FSB), 800 to 1.8GHz frequencies, L2 cache of 512M and TDP from 0.65W to 2.4W. The pricing starts from $45 for the basic models and $160 for the Z540.

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