Monday, 26 May 2008 10:26 AM
Web users 'getting more selfish'
Original article taken from BBC News.
Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.
The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.
Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.
Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.
Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.
Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.
There were two reasons for this, he said.
"The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment," Dr Nielsen told BBC News.
Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.
This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.
"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.
"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience," he said.
"I do not think sites appreciate that yet," he added. "They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."
Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.
Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.
There has also been a big change in the way that people get to the places where they can complete pressing tasks, he said.
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
"Basically search engines rule the web," he said.
But, he added, this did not mean that the search engines were doing a perfect job.
"When you watch people search we often find that people fail and do not get the results they were looking for," he said.
"In the long run anyone who wants to beat Google just has to make a better search," said Dr Nielsen.
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under: News | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 13 May 2008 8:58 AM
View the original article at washingtonpost.com
Making Web Pages Social
To socialize these days, hundreds of millions of people every month turn to social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook.
But what if the Web itself worked as a social network?
Google announced today another step in what its engineers see as that inevitable evolution. A new free service from the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant will allow any Web site to become a social site.
Using Google's new Friend Connect product, any Web page, whether it is devoted to curling or pizza or a folk singer, can allow visitors to make and connect with other "friends" who visit that site. Like any major social network today, any Web page using Friend Connect could easily present to each user the names and pictures of friends and potential friends. Those people could then post messages to one another.
The announcement from Google comes at a time of ferment and speculation over how people will socialize on the Web.
While large social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are judged to be worth billions, they have also drawn criticism for being "walled gardens" -- places that allow members to connect easily only while at those sites.
The Friend Connect service raises the possibility that the kind of kibitzing now largely contained in a handful of mega-sites could be easily spread anywhere.
"We're in the middle of a huge change," said David Glazer, an engineering director working on Google's social initiative, in an interview. "Wherever people go on the Web, they want to have their friends with them, and this makes it possible."
Friend Connect is aimed at the millions of Web sites that could benefit from having members interact, but are unable to open their Web pages to such connections because of a lack of technical expertise or hardware.
With Friend Connect, the owner of a Web site would add a snippet of code to its page. Google's servers would handle the rest.
For example, one of the first Friend Connect customers will be independent musician Ingrid Michaelson, who like most entertainers has an official Web site ( http://www.ingridmichaelson.com). Now her fans can befriend one another if they visit her MySpace page.
But using the Friend Connect service, Michaelson will be able to allow fans who visit her site to connect with their friends, or make friends among fellow fans, without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see which of their friends are posting comments or attending concerts, all at her site.
Friend Connect is "about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," Glazer said. "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other."
Friend Connect for now will be available only to a limited set of Web sites. While Google will receive no immediate financial reward for Friend Connect, Glazer said the company benefits when "the Web is healthy." When more people use the Web, more people see the ads that Google runs on Web sites.
Many companies have come to believe that to survive the changing social evolution of the Web, their products must remain relatively open, allowing users to easily transport their list of contacts and other information from one Web site to another.
Last week, MySpace and Facebook announced plans in this regard, in a sense lowering the walls of their walled gardens.
At the same time, Web businesses have begun to create standards for social site interactions on the Web -- OpenId, OpenAuth, OpenSocial -- that has further enabled users to move easily, and socially, from one Web site to another.
Such changes seem likely to alter the nature of the big social sites, people in the industry said, as the social aspects they are known for become accessible across the Web.
"The real question for a Facebook or a MySpace is: Is it best to think of them as a place like Studio 54 -- a place where everyone wants to get in because all their friends are in -- or is it more like some kind of utility?" said John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo, a company that maintains relationship information for 20 million members. "This is the evolution of the walled garden to the social Web."
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 13 May 2008 8:18 AM
View the original article at SMH.com.au
Girl gamers are on the rise, so why isn't anything being made for them?
Wander into any videogame store and you could be forgiven for thinking that women do not play games at all but the statistics paint a different picture.
More than 40% of game players in Australia are female, yet most games on the store shelves are of little interest to them.
Despite this, the profile of the typical gamer has changed drastically over the past decade, with middle-aged housewives now as likely to play games as teenage boys.
The average gamer in Australia is now 28 years old, up from 24 just two years ago. And despite being largely ignored by the game industry, 41% are female.
Women and older Australians are the fastest-growing audience for computer and video games and if trends continue, by 2014 the average age of Australian gamers will be the same as non-players - 42 - with an equal number of male and female players.
Trends are similar in the US, where 38% of gamers are female, spending an average 7.4 hours a week playing, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
The popularity of video games has led to astonishing growth.
Australians spent a whopping $1.3 billion on video games and consoles last year - a rise of 43% from 2006.
Much of the recent growth in the Australian game market and the dramatic shift in gamer demographics is due to the success of a small number of non-traditional games such as the SingStar karaoke range (more than 520,000 sold), the Buzz trivia titles (more than 280,000 sold), Wii Sports (more than 350,000 sold) and the hugely popularly hand-held games such as Nintendogs and Brain Training.
The Sims, the world's most popular computer game, has also been hugely popular among women, as has the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft.
Both are largely about building relationships.
Even a cursory glance at some of the many internet forums and websites highlights the fact that many women enjoy games from all genres, some even forming female clans such as "Girlz", "Frag Dolls", "War Sisters" and "PMS" playing testosterone-fuelled shoot-'em-up titles such as Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament.
Women have no interest in the majority of commercial games that are released, particularly when they are being marketed almost exclusively to males. Instead, studies show most women gravitate to "casual" titles such as online puzzle and card games, trivia, word challenges and action arcade games.
The Casual Games Association reports that 74% of paying customers for these games are female.
And when it comes to mobile phones, women are just as likely to play games as men, with Forrester Research suggesting that 19% of Australian mobile phone users are playing games at least once a week on their phone, while another 24% play less regularly.
It's not surprising that women tend to shy away from most of the games on the store shelves when publishers routinely use semi-clad female characters to ply their wares, appealing squarely to adolescent male fantasies. And invariably the type of game that gets most media attention are violent and aimed at young men, such as Grand Theft Auto IV, which hit the streets last week amid the usual critical outcry.
The industry's response to luring women gamers has often been cynical and heavy-handed. Many of the games aimed at females are unimaginative, such as Ubisoft's new (paradoxically titled) Imagine range of hand-held games that feature stereotypical "pink" subjects such as dressing up, cooking and nurturing babies and pets.
Many industry insiders believe the key to creating more games that appeal to women is to get more women into the industry. By diversifying the workforce, developers hope to create products that appeal to a wider audience.
In Australia, female game developers make up only 5% of the industry while the International Game Developers Association puts the worldwide figure at about 12%.
To fix the imbalance in Australia, a "Women in Games" group was established to promote development as an exciting career choice.
Eve Penford-Dennis, an art tutor at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment, has worked in game development for 15 years. She says that although most people in the industry assumed that gender inequity would eventually balance itself, "it never did".
"It became obvious that we needed to do something," she says.
Moran Paldi, a designer at local game studio Tantalus, says women tend to be better at communication and conflict management - crucial in the studio environment. Most games are built by teams of 30 to 100 people, including programmers, artists and designers.
One of the big problems with games often cited by women is the lack of characters with which they can identify.
While action heroines such as Lara Croft may inspire debate among girl gamers for having a bit each way - showing some hick-kicking girl power while at the same time displaying plenty of cheesecake sex appeal - many female game characters are merely ornamental and inevitably scantily clad.
Ms Paldi argues that "until we (women) start making games ourselves there is no way we will be able to see representations on screen that we can recognise and identify with. We need to start making a generation of games that women want to play and get them excited about creating their own content," she says.
But there is hope that change will come. More than 100 million games in the enormously successful Sims franchise have sold since its launch in 2000. Its astonishing success is due in no small part to the fact that it appeals strongly to both sexes.
Publisher Electronic Arts says more than 60% of Sims players are female.
Sims designer Will Wright says his team deliberately tried to make the game appeal to women. "I think the main reason we were able to do that successfully was that about 40% of our development team, and my two other designers, were women," he says.
One of the members of EA's Sims division, passionate game designer Robin Hunicke, recently completed work on MySims and is working on a game with Steven Spielberg for EA. She believes there are many ways the industry can attract more women into development.
"You can market more games to women," Ms Hunicke says. "You can have more women being shown in game commercials. You can have articles in women's magazines that talk about women who are successful in the field. You can showcase women in the advisory boards for conferences.
"You can feature recent work of prominent women developers, even when they're not in lead roles on projects, so that up-and-coming young women can be shown a little bit of attention and have a chance to (have a) dialogue with people about the process of evolving as developers themselves."
Although game development has never managed to shake its geeky boys-coding-in-the-garage image, many behind the scenes roles are highly creative - something the industry is keen to emphasise in its attempt to lure more young women.
Game developer Ms Paldi agrees: "It's not just jobs for code geeks any more. There are all sorts of jobs available, from production and design, to art and animation."
She says another major hurdle is stereotypes: "There is an awful lot of negative press surrounding the type of games being made. But not all games are about shooting people in the head."
Like many of her female colleagues, Ms Paldi believes the stereotypes are damaging because they affect the number of female game players, what publishers invest in and female interest in game development.
"Many women react to this tired old stereotype by thinking 'this game doesn't interest me' and so never explore the exciting opportunities the industry offers," she says.
"At Tantalus we make positive, kid-friendly games. I am excited by the work I do as a designer and feel I am making a positive impact on people's lives by encouraging them to engage in thought-provoking game play."
One strategy the game industry could learn from is a free book being distributed to high schools around the country by the IT industry called Tech Girls are Chic, not Just Geek. It features 16 of the IT industry's hottest young female professionals who are on a mission to change their industry's image in the minds of teenage girls.
The book follows an even more controversial approach in 2006 - the racy Screen Goddess IT Calendar - that featured young women from the IT industry in sexy poses based on popular Hollywood films. The calendar sold well but hit criticism for objectifying women.
The woman behind both projects, Sonja Bernhardt, says the technology industry's "nerd image" is a problem that must be tackled.
While the academy's Ms Penford-Dennis acknowledges that gender imbalance is not unique to the game industry, she's not sure her IT colleagues have the solution.
"This is a huge problem across IT in general - and IT has a way bigger budget to look at this problem - and still there isn't a magic answer that we've found," she says.
"It's also difficult for individual developers to put forward initiatives to solve the problem themselves. There needs to be that push from the industry as a whole to encourage more women into development."
Ms Paldi says awareness about the roles in the game industry should start in schools. "We need to let young girls know that they are not strange or alone, and that they don't have to emulate men to succeed," she says. "It is an awesome industry to work in and it's still small enough for people to be able to make global impacts with the work they do."
She says some benefits are high wages and work in cities such as Tokyo, London and San Francisco (instead of just the main Australian game development hubs of Melbourne and Brisbane).
One local developer having success in creating games just exclusively for females is the new Adelaide studio Champagne for the Ladies.
Its new mobile-phone game, Coolest Girl in School, was nominated for four awards in the recent Game Developers Association of Australia awards.
"Coolest Girl in School is the world's first mobile role-playing game made specifically for girls and the potential audience is huge," says Holly Owen, who co-produced, wrote and directed the game.
"Well over half (60%) of casual mobile gamers are women but very few games are made specifically for female audiences. Giving girls a different gaming option made specifically for them is what Coolest Girl in School is all about."
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Thursday, 8 May 2008 8:24 AM
Original article taken from smh.com.au
An Australian company is gearing up to release a computer headset that allows people to control video games using only the power of their minds.
Emotiv Systems, founded by four Australian scientists in 2003, will release the $US299 ($315) EPOC headset on the US market this year. Australians will be able to order it online.
Featuring 14 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC's USB port - will enable games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by visualising them.
The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it must first be calibrated using Emotiv's software to recognise patterns in the user's electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30 preset actions.
When the player performs those same thoughts in the game the software knows to associate them with the correct action, such as rotate object or push object.
"If you look at the way we communicate with machines up to this day, it's always in a conscious form, so whether you turn on and off the light or you program software you always consciously tell a machine to perform a task for you," Emotiv CEO and co-founder Nam Do said in an interview from the company's Pyrmont offices.
"But the communication among ourselves is much more interesting because we have non-conscious communications, so we read body language, we read facial expressions and we also have feelings and emotions which differentiate us from machines.
"Our vision for the next generation of man-machine interface is it's not going to be limited to just conscious [interaction]."
While the headset will work in a very limited sense with existing titles, Do said the major game developers and publishers were designing a number of their upcoming titles to take full advantage of the technology.
For instance, an in-game avatar would be able to mimic the human player's facial expressions - smiles, winks, grimaces, and so on - in real time, and other non-human characters in the game could respond to these.
"If you shoot somebody and you're smiling, the non-player character can turn around and say to you, 'What are you laughing at? You just killed that dude,' " Do said.
The headset could also detect the players' emotions - whether they're bored, angry, engaged, happy, stressed, etc - and adjust difficulty levels, in-game music and the game environment accordingly.
Characters could also react to a player's emotional cues.
In horror-themed games, enemies could intelligently select the perfect time to startle a player based on how they feel, rather than having opponents in the same positions every time a mission is reloaded.
But the most powerful aspect of the EPOC is its ability to detect thoughts. Players can just think about performing actions, such as lifting or pushing objects or making them disappear, and have the game act accordingly without the need to push any keys or buttons.
All of these features have been publicly demonstrated to thousands at gaming conferences using a role playing game developed by Emotiv. It will be included for free with the headset and was trialled in Sydney by smh.com.au.
Do, who came to Australia from Vietnam in 1995 on a university scholarship, said his intention was not to replace the keyboard or traditional game controller; he simple wanted to add another layer to the experience.
"You can still move around using your joystick, using your keypad, using your mouse and keyboard, just like a normal game, but there is a lot of activity that we take to another level by adding a headset - such as being able to levitate an object by thinking about it," he said.
Do said the company was first concentrating on the larger US market - which has about 9 million hardcore gamers - but was working with Australian resellers and distributors to launch the product here.
Regardless, Australians would be able to order the headset online from US retailers or from Emotiv itself.
"We're working very hard to get the headset to other markets at least by online ordering," Do said.
He said that, while the company was initially focused on gaming, the technology had applications in any situations where humans interacted with machines, such as in medicine and robotics. Further, market research companies and even Hollywood studios were tapping Emotiv's technology to measure reactions from focus groups.
Emotiv spent two years developing its technology in Sydney before moving its headquarters to San Francisco, the home of Silicon Valley, in 2005. It employs about 50 staff - neurologists, biomedical scientists, mathematicians, engineers - but its entire research team is still based in Sydney.
Moving to the US, Do said, meant Emotiv was "closer to all the action, all the [big gaming] companies, all the clients and also access to money, because, as a start-up company, money is always one of the key considerations".
He said Emotiv had been approached by numerous suitors keen to acquire the company, but wanted to first see how far the technology could grow. Emotiv has also had meetings with the major game console makers about licensing the technology to them for future products.
In addition to Do, Emotiv was founded by 1998 Young Australian of the Year Tan Le; Neil Weste, a neuroscientist who sold his chip manufacturing company Radiata Communications to Cisco in 2000 for $US295 million; and Allan Snyder, the director of the University of Sydney's Centre for the Mind and winner of the 2001 Marconi Prize.
The four founders self-funded the initial $1 million needed to start the company but have since raised $US14.5 million in series A funding. It is now in the process of raising series B funding.
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 6 May 2008 3:47 PM
Take from the
Toshiba Website
TOKYO--Toshiba Corporation today announced the start of sample shipping
of the SpursEngine™ SE1000 (SpursEngine), a high-performance stream
processor integrating four Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores
derived from the "Cell Broadband Engine™" (Cell/B.E.™). Sample shipping
started from today, and Toshiba expects sales of 6 million units within
the first three years of the SpursEngine's release.
SpursEngine is a co-processor that integrates a hardware codec for Full
HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams with four SPEs
derived from Cell/B.E. These advanced processing elements offer high
performance media streaming capabilities, with a clock frequency of
1.5GHz, while achieving low power consumption range of 10W to 20W.
"We are very pleased to have started sample shipping of SpursEngine"
said Yoshio Masubuchi, Director of Toshiba's System LSI Division,
Advanced SoC Development Center. "The design of this powerful
co-processor is dedicated to bringing the advanced capabilities of the
Cell/B.E.™ to consumer electronics, particularly video processing in
digital consumer products. We are sure that SpursEngine will accelerate
the market for full-HD applications."
Toshiba will support developers working on SpursEngine applications
with a comprehensive reference kit that includes a reference board and
essential middleware APIs. The reference board has a PCI-Express edge
connector that can connect to an x1 layer slot in a PC. Toshiba will
also provide an integrated development environment (SPE compiler, SPE
debugger, and performance monitor) and sample applications that
demonstrate how to use the provided middleware. With the reference kit,
customers can quickly and easily construct an evaluation and
development environment and accelerate product development.
Read the full article...
Toshiba
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 6 May 2008 3:34 PM
Taken from the Intel Website
May 5, 2008 - Intel Corporation,
Samsung Electronics and TSMC today announced they have reached
agreement on the need for industry-wide collaboration to target a
transition to larger, 450mm-sized wafers starting in 2012. The
transition to larger wafers will enable continued growth of the
semiconductor industry and helps maintain a reasonable cost structure
for future integrated circuit manufacturing and applications.
The companies will cooperate with the semiconductor industry to help
ensure that all of the required components, infrastructure and
capability are developed and tested for a pilot line by this target
date.
Historically, manufacturing with larger wafers helps increase the
ability to produce semiconductors at a lower cost. The total silicon
surface area of a 450mm wafer and the number of printed die (individual
computer chips, for example) is more than twice that of a 300mm wafer.
The bigger wafers help lower the production cost per chip.
Additionally, through more efficient use of energy, water and other
resources, bigger wafers can help diminish overall use of resources per
chip. For example, the conversion from 200mm wafers to 300mm wafers
helped reduce aggregate emissions per chip of air pollution, global
warming gasses and water, and further reduction is expected with a
transition to 450mm wafers.
Intel, Samsung and TSMC indicate that the semiconductor industry can
improve its return on investment and substantially reduce 450mm
research and development costs by applying aligned standards,
rationalizing changes from 300mm infrastructure and automation, and
working toward a common timeline. The companies also agree that a
cooperative approach will help minimize risk and transition costs.
Read the full article..
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Tuesday, 6 May 2008 8:45 AM
Original article taken from PCMAG.com
The ProCurve family has been
around for a long time, so it's both robust and mature. The new 1700
class of switches adds a new attribute: low cost (as little as $200).
That's what you pay for the HP ProCurve 1700-24, a decent starter switch for a small business looking
to expand its network port count. A managed 24-port switch for that
little cheddar won't have the bells and whistles of, say, a D-Link xStack DGS-3627, of course. You'll immediately notice that only two ports support Gigabit Ethernet, and there's no support for Power over Ethernet
(PoE). With a rapidly increasing number of networking products,
especially wireless APs and VoIP hardware, that make use of PoE, its
absence limits this ProCurve's ability to act as the center of an SMB
network. The rest of the switch, however, competes well enough with
other 24-port switches I've tested.
Click here to view the original article from PCMAG.com.
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Thursday, 1 May 2008 10:19 AM
Taken from the Samsung Website.
Samsung Digital Camera (CEO Lee Joong-Goo, www.samsungcamera.com) has announced the launch of a new DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera, the 'GX-20' with upgraded functions and capabilities.
The Samsung GX-20 is equipped with the best 14.6 Mega pixel CMOS of its kind, an Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) with shaking image sensor method, a de-dusting function, and various image correction functions which enable emotive images to be captured and saved. The GX-20 is an intermediate level of DSLR camera, and may satisfy families, amateur photographers, and even professionals.
A 14.6 Mega pixel CMOS image sensor, which is developed by Samsung and Pentax together and manufactured by Samsung, is used for the first time in the GX-20. The effective pixels of the 14.6 Mega pixel CMOS image sensor in the APS-C size (23.4mm×15.5mm) produces excellent images with better clarity, and greater enjoyment when shooting.
This CMOS image sensor has finally been developed after two years of effort, from 2006. It has the advantages of using a battery for extended time of use, with low power consumption and noise reduction at high sensitivity. Moreover, the CMOS image sensor can express clear images with high definition and excellent reliability in color by improving the amount of light received per unit area through the refinement of the circuit process. Even though Samsung encountered many obstacles when designing the CMOS, we overcame those and improved its efficiency. Samsung will show the world its technologies once again by having technologies and equipment that enable the production of the CMOS with the highest number of pixels in any camera of its kind.
For customers who want clearer pictures, the GX-20 utilizes the OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) with shaking image sensor method. The OIS quickly detects minor vibrations in the hands, and minimizes camera shake by moving the image sensor in the opposite direction of the shakes.
As the use of DSLR cameras has lately increased rapidly, shooting locations have become diversified to include mountains and seas, and so on. Customers' requests for the prevention of dust and moisture have therefore increased. The GX-20 cameras have a specific dust- and waterproof design, on the luxury model DSLR body. 72 areas on the inside of the camera's body, such as the shutter button, the operational button and the dial, are sealed to minimize any internal damage to the camera from hazards such as water, sand and dust.
The GX-20 can support a high sensitivity ISO 3200 and produce optimal image quality under any circumstances through the equipped upgraded image correction technologies, such as the HDR (High Dynamic Range) function for broader expressions, by expanding the expression range of bright and dark areas. This product also provides professionals with an X sync for connection with an external flash, a one-touch RAW & JPEG conversion button and high class RAW format conversion software. Moreover, as per the customers' requests for a large LCD, the GX-20 is equipped with a high quality, 6.86cm (2.7 inch) LCD, and shot images can be checked with more clarity and brightness. A live-view function also provides the convenience of being able to shoot subjects by directly looking at the LCD screen rather than through the viewfinder.
A Samsung employee said, "This product will satisfy everyone from professional photographers to amateur photographers with its powerful functions and high performance, and will make a breakthrough in the DSLR camera industry. Through the release of this product in early March of this year, Samsung Techwin said "we will reshuffle the worldwide DSLR camera industry to a 3-strong structure of competitors."
Read the Full Article...
Filed Under: | 0 Comments
Thursday, 1 May 2008 9:57 AM
From The Intel Website
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SEATTLE, April 28, 2008 - Cray Inc. (Nasdaq GM: CRAY) and Intel Corporation announced today they signed a multi-year agreement to advance high-performance computing (HPC) on Intel microprocessors while delivering broad new Intel and Cray technologies in future Cray server systems. The collaboration of these two industry leaders will result in HPC systems that will help solve some of the world's most complex scientific, engineering and humanitarian challenges.
"We're excited at the potential of bringing together Intel's powerful silicon expertise and Cray's industry leadership in scalable HPC systems," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "We pride ourselves in offering the most innovative supercomputing systems and our customers will now enjoy greater choice in processor technologies.
"This collaboration provides the HPC market segment with access to the best microprocessors the industry has to offer at any point in time, in the most advanced supercomputers in the world," Ungaro added. "This further strengthens Cray's industry-leading adaptive supercomputing vision as we move into the Cascade timeframe and beyond."
The two companies plan to explore future supercomputer component designs such as multi-core processing and advanced interconnects. As a result of this collaboration, Cray and Intel plan to develop a range of HPC systems and technologies over the next several years.
"Cray's commitment to Intel is a testament of our commitment to HPC and the strength of our hardware and software roadmap and many-core research," said Patrick Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "Throughout Cray's history, it has been an innovator in high-end HPC while Intel has pushed the boundaries of processor technology.
"The combination of this industry leadership and technical strength will allow HPC users to take advantage of future Xeon and other Intel processor technologies," Gelsinger said. "Together we will enable fundamental and historical problems of science and industry to be solved."
Read the Full Article....
Filed Under: | 0 Comments