IBM has shifted cell processors to 65 nanometers and improved double precision performance by up to five times (PowerXCell 8i processors). Double precision performance is very important for scientific and supercomputing applications. New PowerXCell 8i processors in QS22 blades have :● 460 single precision (SP) GFLOPS/217 double precision (DP) GFLOPS per blade ● 6.4/3.0 TFLOPS …
Martin Jarrold,Indiana University in Bloomington, is claiming to have found evidence of superconductivity in aluminium nanoclusters at 200 K. Two years ago Yuri Ovchinnikov at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow and Vladimir Kresin at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California predicted that metal nanoclusters with exactly the right number of delocalised electrons …
In response to the 2008 Edge question “when did facts change your mind”, Freeman Dyson describes the facts that changed his mind about the role of nuclear weapons in ending world war 2 I agree with the assessment that nuclear weapons are overrated and excessively feared. Nuclear weapons are devastating but conventional weapons and all …
China’s taken six years to achieve 40 percent of a 20-year target of quadrupling per-capita GDP by 2020 with an increase to 16,084 yuan this year (2007). The yuan rose to as much as 7.4834 versus the dollar from 7.4926 yesterday, heading for the biggest weekly gain in five weeks. It has climbed more than …
In conventional solar cells (a), light (dashed line) enters an antireflective layer (yellow) and then a layer of silicon (green) in which much of the light is converted into electricity. But some of the light (solid arrows) reflects off an aluminum backing, returns through the silicon, and exits without generating electricity. A new material (represented …
