If you’ve seen the movie Elysium, then this rotating space colony concept probably is still fresh in your mind, but did you know that this concept was first brought up in the 1970s, by NASA? The Stanford torus is a proposed design for a space habitat capable of housing 10,000 to 140,000 permanent residents.
The Stanford torus was proposed during the 1975 NASA Summer Study, conducted at Stanford University, with the purpose of speculating on designs for future space colonies.
MediaTek, a chipset manufacturer based out of Taiwan, has been making some huge moves lately. Just over two months ago, it came out with the „world’s first true octa-core“ processor, which consisted of eight Cortex-A7 cores capable of operating simultaneously. Now that ARM has announced Cortex-A17 technology, however, MediaTek is ready to start sampling a new octa-core chip that consists of four 2.2-2.5GHz A17 cores and four 1.7GHz A7s, and comes with a Rogue PowerVR Series6 GPU to take care of any graphical needs you might have.
As an aside, the A17 cores come with a 60 percent improvement in performance over the current-gen A9s, and are primarily designed to make midrange smartphones and tablets even faster. That said, MediaTek tells us that its new chips, known as the MT6595, are actually meant to be featured in premium devices and will square off directly against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 and 805. And it’s certainly got a few noteworthy features: first, the chip will use ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture and Heterogeneous Multi-Processing, which means you can use all eight cores for the most intense tasks, or you can use just one or two at a time for incredibly basic activities. The company claims that this chip will be faster and more power efficient than the octa-core Exynos options, which feature four A15 cores and four A7s at lower frequencies.
Additionally, the MT6595 claims to be the first octa-core LTE system-on-chip with an H.265 Ultra HD Codec built-in to the platform, which offers 4K2K video recording and playback capabilities. In much the same way that most manufacturers don’t enable all of a chip’s features, however, it’ll be up to each individual company to add it in. The chips will begin sampling to phone makers and carriers in the first half of this year, and it’s expected to arrive in products during the second half. And while it should find its way into smartphones and tablets around the world, MediaTek wants the MT6595 to enjoy a huge presence in the US.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/11/mediatek-octa-core/
The newest branch line of the London Underground doesn’t go anywhere. But it does produce a lot of nice food to eat. It’s an aquaponic farm, 100 feet below the surface, set to open this March.
With sky-high rents in central London, it made sense for the startup behind the project, Zero Carbon Food, to look for an unconventional farm site. And the location, beneath the Northern line, puts the produce near a lot of restaurant customers. That reduces the miles that food has to travel to reach the table. Zero Carbon Food is now selling stock online–you can see its full pitch below:
The good part of the teardown of a product is that we know much more about it than when looking only at the „official“ specs tables. This is what happened exactly with the Playstation 4 showing a secondary processor and extra RAM chips that weren’t on any „official“ specs list.
The secondary processor seems a low-power ARM one and the RAM is GDDR3 of 2 Gigabits (256 MB). The specific functions are yet to be discovered but experts think that both could be used to liberate the main processos and RAM from secondary task such as processes in the background (standby, downloads etc…).
According to vr-zone.com:
The newly revealed components include a low-power processor and 2 Gb (gigabits, not gigabytes) of GDDR3 SDRAM memory, stacking up to a total of 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM. The auxiliary processor, which is known as “SCEI CXD90025G”, has been revealed as a low-power ARM solution–however its specific functions aren’t known yet.
There are many ways that the SCEI CXD90025G could compliment the PlayStation 4′s robust environment, and the gaming community has speculated a few interesting possibilities.
Since it’s a low-power processor, it’s likely to be associated with background functions like standby processes and downloads. Another guess is that it might be utilized for DRM, and some have suggested the ARM core processor allocates resources for the PS4′s automatic gameplay recording feature as well.
The unveiled processor might also help out with the PS4′s transitions from gaming to other apps, and is likely to aid in preserving game progress when switching to other apps or menus. It may also have something to do with saving the current state of the console in sleep mode–not to mention the downloads and updates during the system’s slumber.
Official Source: http://vr-zone.com/articles/second-ps4-processor-extra-gddr3-ram-revealed/64081.html
In an interview with Japanese tech site AV Watch, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Asia Senior Vice president and Director of Business Unit 1 Masayasu Ito shared more info about some technical aspects of the PlayStation 4, including the console’s noise level, its power consumption, etc.
While being always online is not necessary, a network connection is important to fully enjoy the features of the PS4.
• The PS4 will initially act as a stand-alone web server for the PlayStation App. In the future there’s the possibility of this to be expanded through the cloud, with the PS4 and PlayStation App interacting through the cloud, allowing cooperative play between multiple players.
• The secondary chip for ultra-low power operation will mostly activate at night from 1 to 4 AM and download any required update automatically. It will also activate when software is purchased through external means like the PlayStation App.
• Power consumption will vary greatly depending on the performance of the game played.
• The noise level of the console during operation is generally much lower than it was on the PS3.
• The PS4′s cooling fan has a low noise level and stepless speed control (meaning that it will increase its speed to match heat smoothly and not in sudden steps like the one on the PS3).
• Since the Blu-Ray player is 6x instead of 2x (like the one on the PS3 was), the spinning noise is actually louder. Ito-san feels it’s not annoyingly louder and it will be countered by caching data on the hard disk drive. It’ll be mostly audible during the initial spin-up.
• The Audio/Video performance (for movies and music) of the PS4 will target PS3 levels at launch, but will be improved through updates, for instance with the addition of 4K, as Sony is also an Audio/Video company.
• The theme of the PS4 is “Personalization”, meaning that it will offer an experience tailored to each individual.
Official Source: http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/09/24/sonys-svp-gives-new-info-on-the-ps4s-noise-level-power-consumption-media-performance-and-more/