IBM Roadrunner

The fastest computer on earth... at a peak of 1.7 petaflops the processing power of about 1000 PCs.

Super Mario etched onto a PC

Details at: Kotaku.com (which incidentally has 1320 blog entries labeled 'Super Mario'!)

Complexification

I have long been a fan of www.complexification.net, a website devoted to artistic computer programming. It uses a free computer language (specialized for visual programming) called Processing that I have always wanted to spend some time learning. There are many more examples here.

Jack Kilby quote [see next blog entry]

"What we didn't realize then was that the integrated circuit would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one. Nothing had ever done that for anything before."
Jack Kilby
From: About.com's 'Inventors of the microchip'. Image of Jack Kirby from Wikipedia.

Microchip turns 50 today!

The microchip that drives all our computers was invented 50 years ago today. This is a picture of the very first one, constructed by a guy named Jack Kilby working at Texas Instruments. He also invented the hand-held calculator.
Via: Gizmodo, which has more details if you want'em.

OLPC News

For all your One Laptop Per Child needs visit OLPC News and find out there is a newer version of the XO-1:(. Photo of the beta version of XO-2 found here with a great article about the cheat new laptop coming in 2010.

Ds Lite /Mac Air Ad

A few parodys: here, here, here and (the best one) here all funny and a list of more here. The true ad here.

Cost per gigFlOPS: REALLY cheap now!

I love this table (adapted from Wikipedia) on how the cost per gigaFLOPS has changed in the last 50 years or so:

Hardware costs:

* 1961: about US$1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion) per GFLOPS
* 1997: about US$30,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, April: $1,000 per GFLOPS
* 2000, May: $640 per GFLOPS
* 2003, August: $82 per GFLOPS
* 2006, February: about $1 per GFLOPS
* 2007, March: about $0.42 per GFLOPS
* 2007, October: about $0.20 per GFLOPS (in a Sony PS3 console).

Imagine: we pay twenty cents today for something that cost over a trillion dollars around the time I was born! Now that's a bargain!

Petaflop barrier soon to go down?

Computer speeds are often measured in 'FlOPS' = floating point operations per second, essentially a measure of how many calculations the machine can do in a second (skipping over some technical details). A megaFlOPS is about one million floating-point operations per second. A gigaFlOPS is one thousand times faster (actually, 1024 times faster = 2 to the 10th power), or (roughly) one billion floating-point operations per second. Most desktop PCs can do a few (< 50) gigaFlOPs now. A teraFlOPS is one thousand (1024) times faster: roughly one trillion floating-point operations per second. Only a few machines in the world can do a teraFlOPS. Now IBM says their RoadRunner computer (pictured above) will soon bust through the petaFlOPS barrier, which is again 1024 times faster, or 1024 trillion FlOPS. You could play some cool video games on that baby.

Via: dvice.com

Spore

Spore sounds like a great evolution game. A video here. Photo here. Gamespot game page here. Coming out September 7th 2008.

The Style Machine

Visit The Style Machine just because they were the creators of a cool game: Bash the computer.