Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the core R&D incubator for Samsung Electronics, has developed a new transistor structure utilizing graphene, touted as the “miracle material.” As published online in the journal Science on Thursday, 17th May, this research is regarded to have brought us one step closer to the development of transistors that can overcome the limits of conventional silicon.

Currently, semiconductor devices consist of billions of silicon transistors. To increase the performance of semiconductors (the speed of devices), the options have to been to either reduce the size of individual transistors to shorten the traveling distance of electrons, or to use a material with higher electron mobility which allows for faster electron velocity. For the past 40 years, the industry has been increasing performance by reducing size. However, experts believe we are now nearing the potential limits of scaling down.

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Since graphene possesses electron mobility about 200 times greater than that of silicon, it has been considered a potential substitute. Although one issue with graphene is that, unlike conventional semiconducting materials, current cannot be switched off because it is semi-metallic. This has become the key issue in realizing graphene transistors. Both on and off flow of current is required in a transistor to represent “1″ and “0″ of digital signals. Previous solutions and research have tried to convert graphene into a semi-conductor. However, this radically decreased the mobility of graphene, leading to skepticism over the feasibility of graphene transistors.

By re-engineering the basic operating principles of digital switches, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology has developed a device that can switch off the current in graphene without degrading its mobility. The demonstrated graphene-silicon Schottky barrier can switch current on or off by controlling the height of the barrier. The new device was named Barristor, after its barrier-controllable feature.

In addition, to expand the research into the possibility of logic device applications, the most basic logic gate (inverter) and logic circuits (half-adder) were fabricated, and basic operation (adding) was demonstrated.

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology owns 9 major patents related to the structure and the operating method of the Graphene Barristor.

As demonstrated in this research, the institute has solved the most difficult problem in graphene device research and has opened the door to new directions for future studies. This breakthrough continues to keep Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology at the forefront of graphene-related industries. Jonathan Horne

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The ASUS P8C WS motherboard combines the advantages of several product classes. While mainly a workstation board, it also incorporates server readiness, and can be easily used in high end standard desktop builds.

As a flexible choice for system integrators, its compact design and Intel C216 chipset offer better convenience and compatibility. It is fully Independent Software Vendor certified, and supports Intel Xeon E3-1200/12×5 v2 series processors as well as 2nd and 3rd generation Intel Core i3 processors. The board also works equally well with non-ECC and ECC DDR3 memory. Four USB 3.0 ports cover both the rear I/O and front panel to enhance user-friendly connectivity, while dual Intel® Ethernet ports double networking capabilities and reduce CPU workload.

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High end performance in a compact workstation form factor
The P8C WS utilizes the workstation-specific Intel C216 chipset, and supports Socket LGA1155 Intel Xeon E3-1200/12×5 v2 processors. These features allow for accelerated OpenGL performance, a benefit much sought by workstation users. The board is Independent Software Vendor (ISV) certified, and enables optimized output with Intel integrated graphics. Popular workstation applications such as AutoDesk AutoCAD 2013 and Inventor 2012 all tap the performance of the P8C WS, ensuring users a smooth start to their professional workstation build.

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Flexible support for multiple processor and memory types
Users get more flexibility and choice with the P8C WS, which natively accommodates both Intel Xeon E3-1200 series server and workstation processors and mainstream Core i3 2nd/3rd generation processors. Additionally, users can opt for widely available unbuffered non-ECC DDR3 memory or server-grade unbuffered ECC (or error-correcting) memory. The more open design of the P8C WS makes it a multi-purpose board, which affords diverse workstation builds for every need.

Full USB 3.0 integration for easy accessibility
The P8C WS ships with four USB 3.0 ports for easy accessibility – two on the front panel, and two on the back. This is double the USB 3.0 ports previously offered by the P8B WS motherboard. USB 3.0 works up to ten times faster than USB 2.0, offering customers quicker data transfers, which are especially useful for the large-scale content handled by workstation operators. To make the most of the advantages offered by USB 3.0, exclusive ASUS USB 3.0 Boost technology supports the newer UASP (USB-Attached SCSI Protocol), increasing maximum USB 3.0 speeds by up to 170%. USB 3.0 Boost also automatically detects the best USB protocol for every connected device, ensuring optimal data performance.

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Dual Intel Ethernet and server-grade reliability
Twin Intel Ethernet ports cut down on CPU utilization while increasing bandwidth and packet transmission rates, thus raising networking reliability – another critical benefit for professional and commercial users. The twin ports support teaming and fault-tolerance functions, effectively doubling bandwidth compared to standard Gigabit Ethernet and ensuring server-grade networked performance. This hardware LAN configuration works with several operating systems, including Windows, CenOS, and Ubuntu. The onboard Intel 82574L controller features VMware certification for native virtualization technology support, allowing users to more readily create virtual systems for expanded productivity. Jonathan Horne

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Players will be thrust into the dark, war-torn world of Cairn where a once proud empire has been brought to ruin and the human race driven to the edge of extinction. Cairn has become ground zero of an eternal war between two otherworldly powers, one seeking to use human bodies as a resource, the other intent upon destroying the human race before that can happen. This cataclysmic war has not only decimated human civilization but is warping the very fabric of reality and, in its wake, giving life to new horrors.

For humankind it is the dawn of a grim new age where iron has replaced gold as currency and the importance of salt as a weapon makes it far too valuable to waste on food. Small enclaves of human survivors exist scattered throughout the world, holed up in hidden refuges. These humans have quietly watched the warring invaders destroy one another and have become wise to the strengths and vulnerabilities of their otherworldly foes. A few survivors have begun to exhibit strange new abilities after surviving possession or exposure to the warp. These unnatural powers are feared by some but give many new hope of launching a resistance to fight the “outsiders” and reclaim what’s left of their world.

The developers are currently collecting pledges to help fund development, and any pledge of US $18 or more will receive the full game (to be sold for $49.99) upon release. To back this project, please visit the Kickstarter page for Grim Dawn. The greater the amount you pledge, the higher the reward you will receive as can be seen on the following chart.

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As of the time at which this article was published, the developers had been pledged over US $450,000 out of an ultimate goal of US $520,000. Smaller goals are included, with the following being added to the game as each goal is reached:

• US $350k – Dual wielding pistols (feature tech and new animation set)
• US $360k – 25 extra pieces of unique item art
• US $375k – Additional end-game boss monster (total of 2) lurking somewhere out there in the darkness for you to find…
• US $385k – 25 more pieces of unique item art
• US $400k – A new environment set that you’ll get to decide on. We’ll create a thread on the Grim Dawn forums to discuss ideas with fans, then select the best ideas and create a poll for you to vote the one you want most.
• US $412k – 2 additional monster types (models and animations)
• US $425k – Three large, high-level dungeons, each with its own theme and named hero monster. The dungeon entrances will randomly appear in the world.
• US $450k – Savage two-handed melee weapons (includes animations and all the art required to create an entirely new item type)
• US $465k – Additional end-game boss (total of 3) to encounter in some dark and dangerous corner of the world.
• US $480k – New survivor town hidden in the remote wilderness for you to discover. Will include a new faction group and new quest-lines to unlock once you’ve gained their trust.
• US $490k – 2 additional monster types (models and animations) and another 25 extra pieces of unique item art
• US $500k – A new dungeon art-set with a choice of catacombs or sewers that you’ll get to vote on.
• US $520k – SURVIVAL MODE! We’ll create a new gameplay mode that will be free for all backers (KS or Website Pre-order). In survival mode players will fight to stay alive against increasingly difficult waves of monsters. It will release sometime after the game so as not to delay development.

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Pledges towards this project close on Friday May 18, 11:59pm EDT., so hurry and grab your pre-order for less than half-price while you still can! For more information on Grim Dawn, please visit the website. Jonathan Horne

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First appearing as the Tesla K20, the GK110 core features a whopping 7.1 billion transistors spread across 15 SMX (streaming multiprocessor) units. Each SMX unit will contain 192 CUDA cores (as with the GK104 before it) which translates to a total of 2880 CUDA cores, or an 87.5 % increase over the GeForce GTX 680. The chip should also have six ROPs, six GDDR5 PHYs for a 384-bit memory bus and a PCI-Express 3.0 interface to the motherboard. Jonathan Horne

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Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X OC Edition is the first card based on the revolutionary new graphics GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture from AMD to feature the SAPPHIRE exclusive and world acclaimed Vapor-X cooling technology.

The Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X OC Edition is the first card in this generation to use the Sapphire exclusive implementation of Vapor chamber cooling technology. Previous products with Vapor-X have received world wide acclaim for delivering very efficient cooling that allows the card to run at higher speeds but with very low noise levels. Based on the latest GPU technology from AMD, the Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X OC Edition has 1 GB of the latest DDR5 memory, and is factory overclocked with core clocks of 1100 MHz and memory clocks of 1300 MHz (5.2 GB/s effective) to deliver excellent performance.

Working or gaming with multiple monitors is becoming increasingly popular, and the Sapphire HD 7700 series supports this with AMD Eyefinity, now in its second generation. The Sapphire HD 7770 Vapor-X OC Edition has two DVI ports (DVI-I and DVI-D), HDMI and a single DisplayPort output, supporting up to four monitors. In addition, the Sapphire HD 7700 series cards can output multiple, independent audio streams allowing the correct audio content to be associated with different applications on different screens.

HDMI specifications have increased in the HD 7000 series. Fast HDMI 1.4a supports Stereoscopic 3D with enhanced frame rates of 60 Hz per eye – 120 Hz total. It is also ready for the next generation of 4K displays that can be driven from a single high speed input of 3GHz HDMI 1.4a or DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2.

APP Acceleration is the name given to the enhanced performance of a wide range of applications using the stream processing capabilities and specific hardware features of the graphics architecture. The HD 7000 series has been optimised for this type of task. Typical applications include Video encoding and decoding, compression and multiplexing for media distribution, gaming or video conferencing. APP acceleration can also enhance everyday tasks such as Internet browsing, Office applications and file compression with supported software suites.

The HD 7000 series is the third generation of DirectX 11 compatible solutions from the graphics division of AMD – formerly ATI. The new Sapphire HD 7700 series is ready for DirectX 11.1 and the new Windows 8 operating system as well as delivering all the features of the current DirectX 11 such as DirectCompute11 and multi threaded communications with the CPU. Communication with the host PC is optimised with the implementation of the latest high speed PCI-Express Gen 3.0 interface, and multiple cards can be used to further enhance performance in CrossFireX mode on a suitably specified mainboard. Jonathan Horne

Researchers have unveiled an “inexact” computer chip that challenges the industry’s 50-year pursuit of accuracy. The design improves power and resource efficiency by allowing for occasional errors. Prototypes unveiled this week at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers in Cagliari, Italy, are at least 15 times more efficient than today’s technology.

The research, which earned best-paper honors at the conference, was conducted by experts from Rice University in Houston, Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Switzerland’s Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) and the University of California, Berkeley.

“It is exciting to see this technology in a working chip that we can measure and validate for the first time,” said project leader Krishna Palem, who also serves as director of the Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID). “Our work since 2003 showed that significant gains were possible, and I am delighted that these working chips have met and even exceeded our expectations.”

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ISAID is working in partnership with CSEM to create new technology that will allow next-generation inexact microchips to use a fraction of the electricity of today’s microprocessors.

“The paper received the highest peer-review evaluation of all the Computing Frontiers submissions this year,” said Paolo Faraboschi, the program co-chair of the ACM Computing Frontiers conference and a distinguished technologist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. “Research on approximate computation matches the forward-looking charter of Computing Frontiers well, and this work opens the door to interesting energy-efficiency opportunities of using inexact hardware together with traditional processing elements.”

The concept is deceptively simple: Slash power use by allowing processing components — like hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes. By cleverly managing the probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors, the designers have found they can simultaneously cut energy demands and dramatically boost performance.

One example of the inexact design approach is “pruning,” or trimming away some of the rarely used portions of digital circuits on a microchip. Another innovation, “confined voltage scaling,” trades some performance gains by taking advantage of improvements in processing speed to further cut power demands.

In their initial simulated tests in 2011, the researchers showed that pruning some sections of traditionally designed microchips could boost performance in three ways: The pruned chips were twice as fast, used half as much energy and were half the size. In the new study, the team delved deeper and implemented their ideas in the processing elements on a prototype silicon chip.

“In the latest tests, we showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct value by an average of 0.25 percent,” said study co-author Avinash Lingamneni, a Rice graduate student. “When we factored in size and speed gains, these chips were 7.5 times more efficient than regular chips. Chips that got wrong answers with a larger deviation of about 8 percent were up to 15 times more efficient.”

Project co-investigator Christian Enz, who leads the CSEM arm of the collaboration, said, “Particular types of applications can tolerate quite a bit of error. For example, the human eye has a built-in mechanism for error correction. We used inexact adders to process images and found that relative errors up to 0.54 percent were almost indiscernible, and relative errors as high as 7.5 percent still produced discernible images.”

Palem, the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice, who holds a joint appointment at NTU, said likely initial applications for the pruning technology will be in application-specific processors, such as special-purpose “embedded” microchips like those used in hearing aids, cameras and other electronic devices.

The inexact hardware is also a key component of ISAID’s I-slate educational tablet. The low-cost I-slate is designed for Indian classrooms with no electricity and too few teachers. Officials in India’s Mahabubnagar District announced plans in March to adopt 50,000 I-slates into middle and high school classrooms over the next three years.

The hardware and graphic content for the I-slate are being developed in tandem. Pruned chips are expected to cut power requirements in half and allow the I-slate to run on solar power from small panels similar to those used on handheld calculators. Palem said the first I-slates and prototype hearing aids to contain pruned chips are expected by 2013.

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This comparison shows frames produced with video-processing software on traditional processing elements (left), inexact processing hardware with a relative error of 0.54 percent (middle) and with a relative error of 7.58 percent (right). The inexact chips are smaller, faster and consume less energy. The chip that produced the frame with the most errors (right) is about 15 times more efficient in terms of speed, space and energy than the chip that produced the pristine image (left). Jonathan Horne

For the 2nd consecutive quarter, G.SKILL topped the ranking list by internationally renowned overclocking website, HWBOT, as the most popular DDR3 memory brand used within the overclocking community since 2011-Q4. During the 1st quarter of 2012, figures showed more than 1/3 of users within the community have chosen G.SKILL DDR3 kits as their memory solution for breaking overclocking records and benchmarking, while gaining a total of 7.4% of popularity share since Q1, 2011.

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As Bill Wang, VP at G.SKILL, stated “G.SKILL memory is widely known for its superior quality and unlimited overclocking headroom. We are excited and thankful that our products are highly recognized by overclocking community and we will continue to strive for ultimate customer satisfaction in the years to come.” For more detail, please refer to this page. Jonathan Horne

RunCore, leading supplier of high-performance solid-state drives, announces the global launch of its InVincible Solid State Disc drive. This SATA SSD solution provides for highest data security through a special button device that allows for total physical destruction with a single click.

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The RunCore InVincible SSDs allow you to protect sensitive data from third party access in two ways with a single click. One method is the intelligent elimination of all your data through overwriting the entire disk with meaningless code. This overwrite-deletion method ensures that there is no way to potentially recover previous data stored to the device, effectively setting you SSD back to factory default.

A less subtle method is the physical destruction of your SSD by applying an over-current to the NAND flash memory and thereby physically destroying these. The RunCore InVincible product series is catering to embedded computer systems requiring high-speed serial switched fabric interconnects for rugged design implementation and more flexible power ranges. Delivering optimized storage options particularly in mission-critical fields such aerospace, military and general industrial applications.

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With these devices your private data protection is entering an entirely new stage of security. This is especially important in an ever more mobile environment were sensitive data and information are frequently being carried along, making it a potential risk to being used by unauthorized 3rd parties. With the RunCore InVincible you now have a highly advanced data protection solution for most demanding professional usage which is also suited for the private sector where data security is becoming an ever more important concern.

For more information, visit the RunCore website. Jonathan Horne

NVIDIA today unveiled a new family of Tesla GPUs based on the revolutionary NVIDIA Kepler GPU computing architecture, which makes GPU-accelerated computing easier and more accessible for a broader range of high performance computing (HPC) scientific and technical applications.

The new NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs are computing accelerators built to handle the most complex HPC problems in the world. Designed with an intense focus on high performance and extreme power efficiency, Kepler is three times as efficient as its predecessor, the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, which itself established a new standard for parallel computing when introduced two years ago.

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“Fermi was a major step forward in computing,” said Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at NVIDIA. “It established GPU-accelerated computing in the top tier of high performance computing and attracted hundreds of thousands of developers to the GPU computing platform. Kepler will be equally disruptive, establishing GPUs broadly into technical computing, due to their ease of use, broad applicability and efficiency.”

The Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs were introduced at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), as part of a series of announcements from NVIDIA, all of which can be accessed in the GTC online press room.

NVIDIA developed a set of innovative architectural technologies that make the Kepler GPUs high performing and highly energy efficient, as well as more applicable to a wider set of developers and applications. Among the major innovations are:

• SMX Streaming Multiprocessor — The basic building block of every GPU, the SMX streaming multiprocessor was redesigned from the ground up for high performance and energy efficiency. It delivers up to three times more performance per watt than the Fermi streaming multiprocessor, making it possible to build a supercomputer that delivers one petaflop of computing performance in just 10 server racks. SMX’s energy efficiency was achieved by increasing its number of CUDA architecture cores by four times, while reducing the clock speed of each core, power-gating parts of the GPU when idle and maximizing the GPU area devoted to parallel-processing cores instead of control logic.
• Dynamic Parallelism — This capability enables GPU threads to dynamically spawn new threads, allowing the GPU to adapt dynamically to the data. It greatly simplifies parallel programming, enabling GPU acceleration of a broader set of popular algorithms, such as adaptive mesh refinement, fast multipole methods and multigrid methods.
• Hyper-Q — This enables multiple CPU cores to simultaneously use the CUDA architecture cores on a single Kepler GPU. This dramatically increases GPU utilization, slashing CPU idle times and advancing programmability. Hyper-Q is ideal for cluster applications that use MPI.

“We designed Kepler with an eye towards three things: performance, efficiency and accessibility,” said Jonah Alben, senior vice president of GPU Engineering and principal architect of Kepler at NVIDIA. “It represents an important milestone in GPU-accelerated computing and should foster the next wave of breakthroughs in computational research.”

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NVIDIA Tesla K10 and K20 GPUs
The NVIDIA Tesla K10 GPU delivers the world’s highest throughput for signal, image and seismic processing applications. Optimized for customers in oil and gas exploration and the defense industry, a single Tesla K10 accelerator board features two GK104 Kepler GPUs that deliver an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of peak single-precision floating point and 320 GB per second memory bandwidth.

The NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU is the new flagship of the Tesla GPU product family, designed for the most computationally intensive HPC environments. Expected to be the world’s highest-performance, most energy-efficient GPU, the Tesla K20 is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The Tesla K20 is based on the GK110 Kepler GPU. This GPU delivers three times more double precision compared to Fermi architecture-based Tesla products and it supports the Hyper-Q and dynamic parallelism capabilities. The GK110 GPU is expected to be incorporated into the new Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Blue Waters system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“In the two years since Fermi was launched, hybrid computing has become a widely adopted way to achieve higher performance for a number of critical HPC applications,” said Earl C. Joseph, program vice president of High-Performance Computing at IDC. “Over the next two years, we expect that GPUs will be increasingly used to provide higher performance on many applications.”

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Preview of CUDA 5 Parallel Programming Platform
In addition to the Kepler architecture, NVIDIA today released a preview of the CUDA 5 parallel programming platform. Available to more than 20,000 members of NVIDIA’s GPU Computing Registered Developer program, the platform will enable developers to begin exploring ways to take advantage of the new Kepler GPUs, including dynamic parallelism.

The CUDA 5 parallel programming model is planned to be widely available in the third quarter of 2012. Developers can get access to the preview release by signing up for the GPU Computing Registered Developer program on the CUDA website. Jonathan Horne

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ORIGIN PC is celebrating the launch of Blizzard Entertainment’s highly anticipated action–role-playing game, Diablo III. For launch day only, every ORIGIN high-performance PC will come bundled with a free Diablo III Standard Edition and on ORIGIN PC’s Facebook page you can enter to win the highly coveted, sold-out-everywhere DIABLO III Collector’s Edition. ORIGIN PC owners around the world will be able to return to Tristram to discover the dark secrets of the fallen star and begin their new quest to save the Sanctuary from the inevitable demonic invasion.

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The Diablo III Collector’s Edition comes with:

• Diablo III for PC/MAC
• Behind the scenes DVD
• Collector’s Edition soundtrack
• The Art of Diablo art book
• Diablo Skull and 4 GB USB Soulstone
• Exclusive digital content:
  • Diablo III Aesthetic Artifacts
  • World of Warcraft Pet Fetish Shaman
  • Starcraft II Battle.net portraits

“We’ve been patiently waiting for Diablo III for as long as we can remember so to celebrate this glorious day we wanted to do something special with the ORIGIN PC community.” says Kevin Wasielewski, CEO/Co-Founder of ORIGIN PC. “I was addicted to playing the beta on my EON11-S laptop and I’m thrilled that we are sharing Blizzard Entertainment’s latest masterpiece by giving away free copies today!” Jonathan Horne