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DigiTimes says that AMD's recent price cuts have surprised motherboard makers but the main concern of these companies is AMD's production ability. The news items also talks of quad-core price cuts from Intel soon too. Intel plans to drop its quad-core processor, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 (launched on January 7, 2007) from US$851 to US$530 for 1000 unit trays in the second quarter of 2007, a drop close to 37%, which should impact prices and shipments of quad-core processors in third quarter, according to motherboard makers. On the other hand, AMD's quad-core processors, the Athlon 64 FX70 to FX74 range, will remain priced between US$599 and US$999 meaning AMD will face pressure trying to compete with Intel in the quad-core sector, added the sources.
As promised, Canadian firm D-Wave Systems unveiled and demonstrated today what it calls "the world's first commercially viable quantum computer." Company officials announced the technology at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California in a demonstration intended to show how the machine can run commercial applications and is better suited to the types of problems that have stymied conventional (digital) computers. The demonstration of the technology was held at the Computer History Museum, but the actual hardware remained in Burnaby, BC where it was being chilled down to 5 millikelvin, or minus 273.145 degrees Celsius (colder than interstellar space), with liquid helium.
Quantum computers rely on quantum mechanics, the rules that underlie the behavior of all matter and energy, to accelerate computation. It has been known for some time that once some simple features of quantum mechanics are harnessed, machines will be built capable of outperforming any conceivable conventional supercomputer. But D-Wave explains that its new device is intended as a complement to conventional computers, to augment existing machines and their market, not to replacement them.
To make the technology commercially applicable, D-Wave used the processes and infrastructure associated with the semiconductor industry. The D-Wave computer, dubbed Orion, is based on a silicon chip containing 16 quantum bits, or 'qubits,' which are capable of retaining both binary values of zero and one. The qubits mimic each others' values allowing for an amplification of their computational power. D-Wave says that its system is scalable by adding multiples of qubits. The company expects to have 32-qubit systems by the end of this year, and as many as 1024-qubit systems by the end of 2008
The NVIDIA demo team have released a DirectX 10 demo (186MB), and those of you with Vista, a GeForce 8800, and the newest 100.64 drivers can have a go here. The Cascades demo implements all kinds of graphical goodies, including procedural geometry creation (the GPU generates an endless vertical rock formation on-the-fly), dynamic particle physics (the GPU performs physics calculations for water falling down the rock formation), and displacement mapping (bumps and crevices in the rock surface occlude each other). Judging by the few screenshots on Nvidia's website, the result is quite pretty indeed.
