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  • Anandtech.com changing hands, long live Anandtech

    To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I’ve received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8456/the-road-ahead

     

    Dear Anand,

    It was a sad day for me to see both the published print version of Byte magazine and subsequent to that Byte.com slowly disappear. I turned to other news sites over time Tom’s Hardware being one example and Anandtech being a another. Over time you guys filled that gap left behind by the likes of Jerry Pournelle, Tom Halfhill and Jon Udell. Kudos to you and the team doing real writing about not just consumer tech, data center stuff and cutting edge tech like UltraDIMMs and converged DIMM/Flash technologies like that. You guys rock and will keep rocking. It’s been a great ride and you all are doing good work. Good Luck and have fun, no matter what you do.

    Sincerely,

    Carpetbomberz.com

  • Resistance is not futile: Here’s a cookie sheet of luke-warm RRAM that proves it • The Register

    Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA - Statue ...
    Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA – Statue of founder William Marsh Rice with Lovett Hall in background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Tour said: “Our technology is the only one that satisfies every market requirement, both from a production and a performance standpoint, for nonvolatile memory. It can be manufactured at room temperature, has an extremely low forming voltage, high on-off ratio, low power consumption, nine-bit capacity per cell, exceptional switching speeds and excellent cycling endurance.”

    via Resistance is not futile: Here’s a cookie sheet of luke-warm RRAM that proves it • The Register (Chris Mellor).

    Rice University is continuing research on it’s ReRAM (resistive RAM) and has come up with some new ways to manufacture it. That’s the key to adopting any new discovery first done in a lab environment. You have to keep tweaking it to find out the best way to manufacture it at scale and at a reduced cost. So in the four years since the original announcement was made, now it’s possible to manufacture the Rice U ReRAM. And at the end of the article there’s a note that some people are already buying up licenses for the technology. Hopefully that’s not just for patent trolling protection insurance, no. Instead, I’m  hoping some small Fabless chip design house takes this up and tries out some batches of this and qualifies it for manufacture at a large scale contract manufacturer of silicon chips. When that happens, then we’ll have the kind of momentum required to make ReRAM a real shipping product. And with any like Rice U. will continue work on improving the basic science behind the product so it more companies will find it attractive and lucrative. Keep your eye on ReRAM.

     

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  • Batteries take the lithium for charge boost • The Register

    Embed from Getty Images

    To do that, the researchers coated a lithium anode with a layer of hollow carbon nanospheres, to prevent the growth of the dendrites.

    via Batteries take the lithium for charge boost • The Register.

    As research is being done on incremental improvements in Lithium Ion batteries, some occasional discoveries are being made. In this instance, the anode is being switched to pure lithium with a coating to protect the very reactive metal surface. The problem with using pure lithium is the growth of micro crystalline “dendrites”, kind of like stalagmites/stalactites in caves, along the whole surface. As the the dendrites build up, the anode loses it’s efficiency and that battery slowly loses it’s ability to charge all the way. This research has shown how to coat a pure lithium anode with a later of carbon nanotubes to help act as a permeable layer between the the electrolytic liquid in the battery and the pure lithium anode.

    In past articles on Carpetbomberz.com we’ve seen announcements of other possible battery technologies like Zinc-Air, Lithium-Air and possible use of carbon nanotubes as a anode material. This announcement is promising in that it’s added costs might be somewhat smaller versus a wholesale change in battery chemistry. Similarly the article points out how much lighter elemental Lithium is versus the current anode materials (Carbon and Silicon). If the process of coating the anode is sufficiently inexpensive and can be done on a industrial production line, you will see this get adopted. But with most experiments like these, scaling up and lowering costs is the hardest thing to do. Hopefully this is one that will make it into shipping products and see the light of day.

     

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  • Building the NSA’s Tools

    Ya’ know, there’s a whole world of contract manufacturers out there and the NSA lets them all bid on these. They do not do all this work on their own in house, they like CIA have front companies that go around seeding the ideas, bids, RFPs that eventually lead to these devices. It’s a cottage industry of sorts of small COMMs outfits making small runs of very sophisticated devices. All in the name of National Security.

  • Resentment, Jealousy, Feuds: A Look at Intel’s Founding Team – Michael S. Malone – Harvard Business Review

    English: Michael S. Malone is a U.S. author, a...
    English: Michael S. Malone is a U.S. author, a former editor of Forbes magazine and host of a talk show on PBS. Español: Michael S. Malone es un escritor y guionista estadounidense. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Just when you think you understand the trio (as I thought I did up until my final interview with Grove) you learn something new that turns everything upside-down. The Intel Trinity must be considered one of the most successful teams in business history, yet it seems to violate all the laws of successful teams.

    via Resentment, Jealousy, Feuds: A Look at Intel’s Founding Team – Michael S. Malone – Harvard Business Review.

    Agreed, this is a topic near and dear to my heart as I’ve collectively read a number of the stories published over the years from the Tech Press. From Tracy Kidder‘s, Soul of a New Machine, to Fred Brook’s The Miracle Man Month, Steven Levy’s Insanely Great. The story of Xerox PARC as told in Dealer’s of Lightning, the Arpanet Project as told in Where Wizards Stay Up Late. And moving somewhat along those lines, Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab and Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality. All of these are studies at some level of organizational theory in the high technology field.

    And one thing you find commonly is there’s one charismatic individual that joins up at some point (early or late doesn’t matter) who then brings in a flood of followers and talent that is the kick in the pants that really gets momentum going. The problem is with a startup company say like Intel or its predecessor, Fairchild Semiconductor, there’s more than one charismatic individual. And keeping that organization stitched together even just loosely is probably the biggest challenge of all. So I’ll be curious to read this book Michael Malone and see how it compares to the other books in my anthology of organization theory in high tech. Should be a good, worthwhile read.

     

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  • A TV Show About Online Videos Shows Us We’re In A Weird Place With Content Right Now

    Unless its broadcast OTA, I’ll never see it. And that’s fine by me as the HD quality I get OTA exceeds the overly compressed digital cable most friends I have pay extra to receive. So I’ll be sitting out this bit of weirdness and pop-culture recursiveness.

  • AMD Clears the Air Around Project FreeSync

    examples of video connectors
    A/V Connectors currently in the market

    AMD has been making lots of noise about Project FreeSync these past few months, but has also left plenty of questions unanswered.

    via AMD Clears the Air Around Project FreeSync.

    FreeSync, and nVidia G-sync both are attempting to get better 3D rendering out of today’s graphics cards no matter what part of the market they are aimed at. But like other “features” introduced by graphics card manufacturers there’s a drive now to set a standard common to the manufacturers of cards and hopefully too, the manufacturers of display panels.

    Adaptive-Sync is the grail for which AMD is searching, promoting and lobbying for going forward. It’s not too manufacturer specific and is just open enough to be adopted by most folks. The benefits are there too, as the article states Tom’s Hardware has tried out nVidia’s G-sync and it works. Which is reassuring given that sometimes these “features” don’t always appear as big revolutionaries strides in engineering so much as marketing talking points.

    AMD has been successful so far in pushing adoption by the folks who make RAMDACs and video scaler circuits for the display manufacturers. That’s the real heavy lifting in driving the standard. And with some slight delays you may see the display panel manufacturers adopt this ActiveSync standard within the next year.

     

  • A Better Google Glass For $60 (This One Folds)

    At $60, this is right-sizing the price for what is essentially a second screen for your smartphone. Take THAT! Google Glass(es). That’s what I’m calling them,… Google Glasses, because that’s what they are. Glasses with a head mounted display.

  • The CompuServe of Things

    English: Photo of two farm silos
    English: Photo of two farm silos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Summary

    On the Net today we face a choice between freedom and captivity, independence and dependence. How we build the Internet of Things has far-reaching consequences for the humans who will use—or be used by—it. Will we push forward, connecting things using forests of silos that are reminiscent the online services of the 1980’s, or will we learn the lessons of the Internet and build a true Internet of Things?

    via The CompuServe of Things.

    Phil Windley as absolutely right. And when it comes to Silos, consider the silos we call App Stores and Network Providers. Cell phones get locked to the subsidizing provider of the phone. The phone gets locked to the app store the manufacturer has built. All of this is designed to “capture” and ensnare a user into the cul-de-sac called the “brand”. And it would seem if we let manufacturers and network providers make all the choices this will be no different than the cell phone market we see today.

     

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  • Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Apple’s OS X Yosemite Beta Preview

    Looking forward to the next version of Mac OS X? I’m curious to see how well it performs on older graphics card and desktop hardware that’s for sure. As far as User Experience goes and the Interface Design changes, I’m going to hold judgement. As long as everything works as intuitively as the older version I’m fine with that. I don’t care what the icons look like or the title bar or menu bars, none of that really impacts my experience. But speed, and the sense of speed does. I’m hoping the Swift programming language has some big returns on investment for this release of the Desktop OS and we see the iLife Suite slowly migrated into Swift to gain further efficiencies in the use of the graphics accelerator card and the CPU and the SSD.