Computer tech

Fujitsu has begun shipping the brains of a new Japanese supercomputer to be built at the government-funded RIKEN research institute and designed to perform 10 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.

The system, called K, is massive. It's planned to have 800 racks of computing gear housing 80,000 of Fujitsu's SPARC 64 VIIIfx processors running at 2.2GHz, Fujitsu said. The processors will be interconnected with a high-capacity direct-connection network that permits fast communications between neighbors.

Although the system is under construction now, it won't be ready for production use until 2012, Fujitsu said.

The system initially … Read more

The difficulties of adopting the next-generation Internet standard so far have outweighed its advantages, but one key part of the computing industry is showing signs of beginning the IPv6 transition in earnest: Internet service providers.

A total of 32 percent of ISPs offer IPv6 services to business customers today, according to a new European Commission-funded survey, said John Curran, chief executive of American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), one of the world's five nonprofit Internet registry organizations that collectively hand out Internet addresses and keep track of which numeric addresses are connected to which servers on the Internet.

That … Read more

Wireless networks and Bluetooth keyboards can free people from some cable clutter, but Fujitsu believes new research could help whisk away some power cords, too.

Fujitsu said Monday that it's overcome design hurdles for a mechanism for wireless charging of electronic devices and that it plans to use the technology in products to be sold in 2012.

The general idea, which Intel, MIT, and other organizations have been researching for years, offers the prospect of a laptop or phone that charges when you set it on a desk or table, potentially getting rid of some cables and making travel easier. Fujitsu has bigger ideas in mind, too: transmitting power within a computer chassis and charging electric cars, for example. … Read more

Editors' note: Sprint announced that it will offer the Samsung Galaxy Tab starting November 14. Pricing for the Android-based tablet is $399.99 with a two-year contract, and customers will be able to choose from two 3G Tablet Mobile Broadband plans: a 2GB data plan with unlimited messaging for $29.99 per month or a 5GB data plan with unlimited messaging for $59.99 per month.

BERLIN--After more than an hour putting the Samsung Galaxy Tab through its paces, I have to say I'm impressed.

It's no iPad-slayer, but it's an elegant tablet with conveniently compact dimensions, good performance, and a bright, responsive multitouch screen.

Samsung debuted the Galaxy Tab Thursday at the IFA electronics show here with strong words showing it plans to compete directly with Apple's iPad. Just how well it'll succeed depends in large measure on how well developers embrace large-screen Android devices: the Tab's most awkward moments came with applications designed for a smaller screen, and there will have to be a lot more games before Android tablets can take on the iPad.

First, some Samsung Galaxy Tab details. Front and center is its 7-inch, 1,024x600 touch screen. For a tablet to be competitive, it's got to respond quickly to touch, and the Galaxy Tab does--most of the time. The screen is bright and text is easy to read. It's not as spacious the iPad's, but it's a big step up from mobile phones.

The brains of the operation are a 1.0GHz Cortex A8 ARM-based processor paired with a PowerVR SGX540 graphics processor. Game developers take note: The two made the Tab the fastest and most responsive of Android devices I've used. Applications loaded fast and responded to input moderately fast. Internal memory of 16GB or 32GB is supplemented by a microSD port that can accommodate flash cards with up to 32GB more.

Speaking of mobile phones, note that the Tab is available only through carriers that provide mobile phone service. There's no Wi-Fi-only option, though the Tab does support 802.11 a, b, g, and n. For cell networks, it can use 2.5G (GSM/GPRS/EDGE) and 3G (HSUPA at 5.76Mbps, and HSDPA 7.2Mbps). I found Wi-Fi and 3G both worked well at Samsung's booth. … Read more

BERLIN--Samsung's Galaxy Tab got a lot of the attention Thursday, but Toshiba had an Android tablet of its own to debut here at the IFA electronics show: the Folio 100.

Unlike the smaller Tab, the Folio bears more of an outward resemblance to Apple's iPad, the dominant tablet device on the market today. And where Samsung will sell the Tab only through phone companies as a kind of smartphone on steroids, Toshiba's Folio will like the iPad come in 3G and non-3G models when it goes on sale in Europe in the fourth quarter.

The Folio will cost 399 euros (about $511) for the version with just Wi-Fi networking; the 3G version price jumps to 499 euros (about $639). It's got a 10.1-inch multitouch screen with 1024x600-pixel resolution, an Nvidia Tegra processor, stereo speakers, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, two USB ports, an SD card slot, an HDMI connector for sending video to other screens, Bluetooth communications, and 16GB of memory.

It weighs 760 grams--about the same as an iPad with 3G abilities. The Folio's battery lasts seven hours when being used 65 percent for Web browsing, watching video for 10 percent, and idling for 25 percent, Toshiba said.

Besides the array of Android applications available, the Folio 100 also comes with the Opera Mobile Web browser, the FBReader e-book reader software, Documents To Go for productivity suite, Evernote for taking notes, Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 for running Flash apps, and Fring for video chat. Most of these are useful, so let's hope this doesn't portend the migration to Android of the crapware that bogs down (and subsidizes) many Windows PCs.

I found the Folio 100 to be comfortable to hold and easy enough to use for basic tasks. Its performance didn't jump out at me, and pushing buttons seemed to come with a lag I'm used to on phones, but applications loaded reasonably fast. I found the interface easy to dive into--but then, I'm already familiar with Android quirks, such as how to make the virtual keyboard pop up when you need it and go away when you're done. … Read more

BERLIN--Gadgets such as cameras, portable game consoles, and mobile phones that have tiny digital projectors are still a relative rarity, but Texas Instruments hopes a new chip will help change that.

The company unveiled a new DLP Pico chip for such devices here at the IFA electronics show, a model called the nHD that's about the size of a raisin. It can be used to project images with a resolution of 640x360 pixels, TI said.

The new model features a better contrast ratio of 1000:1 for darker blacks, a richer color gamut, and lower power consumption, according to … Read more

BERLIN--The SD Card Association is working on a revision to its widely used flash memory card technology that should nearly triple the data-transfer speeds of mainstream SDHC and larger-capacity SDXC cards.

The specification should be complete in the first quarter of 2011, with products coming about a year afterward, said Akihiro Kasahara, a member of the association's marketing committee, in an interview at the IFA electronics show here.

Today's SD cards have data-transfer buses with a maximum speed of 104MB per second, though actual read and write speeds are somewhat slower. The new specification, just called SD 4.0 for now, will increase that to 300MB/sec, said Kevin Schader, the association's director of communications.

Faster data-transfer speeds aren't necessary for everyone, but newer uses make them important. Flash cards are functioning more like solid-state drives in modern gadgets such as Android smartphones and now tablets, too. High-definition videocameras or video SLRs have a tremendous appetite for data. Writing to a card faster frees cameras up for the next shot or take sooner, and of course means it can be faster for people to transfer files to their computers once those support the higher speeds as well. … Read more

BERLIN--In 2011, Sony plans to join the small set of companies that offers laptops that can display 3D video and games at 1080p resolution.

The company showed off prototypes of a forthcoming Vaio laptop at the IFA electronics show here Wednesday, models that come with a "3D" button and active-shutter glasses to separate what the right and left eyes see.

"3D Vaios will debut next spring," Howard Stringer, Sony's chief executive, said in a press conference touting 3D technology and Sony's commitment to it. Sony also touted other 3D products and content at the show.

The protoypes shown at IFA use "frame-sequential" technology that rapidly cycles the full screen between left-eye and right-eye views, with blank screens in between each to reduce the "crosstalk" that can reduce 3D image quality.

That means the laptop must be able to display video at 240 frames per second to keep up with a 3D rate of 60 frames per second. Sony wouldn't reveal whose graphics chip is used in the system. Sony's also cautioned that the ultimate products may be different from the prototypes it showed. … Read more

For all those who believe the computing industry is populated by people who are out of touch with the world of emotion, it's time to think again.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which standardizes many Web technologies, is working on formalizing emotional states in a way that computers can handle. The name of the specification, which in July reached second-draft status, is Emotion Markup Language.

That might sound alien to the cold calculating ways of a computer. Let's face it, compared with most computer interaction, HAL 9000 sounded positively genial in "2001: A Space Odyssey" … Read more