World's first 7nm GPUs

                 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has made its 7nm Radeon VII graphics card available in India, as it aims to bolster the demand for high-end GPUs among computer gamers and content creators. The Radeon VII will start shipping from February 7.  Radeon VII was launched earlier this month at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

          The Radeon VII graphics card is based on the second-generation of Vega architecture optimised for TSMC’s 7nm architecture. The company claims the Radeon VII graphics card will provide twice the memory, 2.1 times memory bandwidth, and up to 29 per cent better gaming performance compared to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card, the company’s top-end graphics card.

            The Santa Clara, California-based company has been optimistic about the future of PC gaming in India. “With faster internet speeds, cheaper broadband tariffs and affordable gaming machines, the Indian PC gaming industry is growing rapidly and has evolved from being a fun to a serious business landscape”.  Sasa is of an opinion that PC gaming will always have an edge over smartphones and dedicated consoles due to the superior performance of machines and the ability to display better graphics.

World's fastest camera: 10 trillion frames per second

           Researchers have created a new world’s fastest camera. Called T-CUP, the camera can capture a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second.The camera was developed by scientists at the INRS branch of the Université du Québec in Canada, and it doubles the previous record speed. Lund University’s FRAME camera boasted 5 trillion frames per second in 2017, beating out MIT’s one-trillion-frame-per-second camera of 2011.

             At 10 trillion frames per second, T-CUP is able to freeze time in order to see and study things that are traditionally too fast to visualize — things like laser pulses can be seen in slow motion.T-CUP broke new ground in its first shoot by capturing “the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time,” INRS says.

       The camera captured 25 frames at an interval of 400 femtoseconds (one femtosecond is 1/1,000,000,000,000,000, or one quadrillionth, of a second), revealing the light pulse’s shape, intensity, and angle of inclination. As the camera is used for more applications at even faster frame rates, it will help reveal more previously-unknowable secrets involving how light and matter interact.

Graphene enables clock rates in the terahertz range

                  Graphene is considered a promising candidate for the nanoelectronics of the future. In theory, it should allow clock rates up to a thousand times faster than today's silicon-based electronics. Scientists have now shown that graphene can actually convert electronic signals with frequencies in the gigahertz range extremely efficiently into signals with several times higher frequency.Today's silicon-based electronic components operate at clock rates of several hundred gigahertz (GHz), that is, they are switching several billion times per second. The electronics industry is currently trying to access the terahertz (THz) range, i.e., up to thousand times faster clock rates.

                A promising material and potential successor to silicon could be graphene, which has a high electrical conductivity and is compatible with all existing electronic technologies. In particular, theory has long predicted that graphene could be a very efficient "nonlinear" electronic material, i.e., a material that can very efficiently convert an applied oscillating electromagnetic field into fields with a much higher frequency. However, all experimental efforts to prove this effect in graphene over the past ten years have not been successful.

          The long-awaited experimental proof of extremely efficient terahertz high harmonics generation in graphene has succeeded with the help of a trick: The researchers used graphene that contains many free electrons, which come from the interaction of graphene with the substrate onto which it is deposited, as well as with the ambient air.

Automation Machines

           Automation Machines are the use of electronics and computer-controlled devices to assume control of processes. The aim of automation is to boost efficiency and reliability. In most cases, however, automation replaces labor. In fact, economists today fear that new technology will eventually push up unemployment rates significantly.

            In many manufacturing plants today, robotic assembly lines are progressively carrying out functions that humans used to do. The term ‘manufacturing’ refers to convertingu raw materials and components into finished goods, usually on a large scale in a factory.

               The automation encompasses many key elements, systems, and job functions in virtually all industries. It is especially prevalent in manufacturing, transportation, facility operations, and utilities. Additionally, national defence systems are becoming increasingly automated. The automation today exists in all functions within industry including integration, installation, procurement, maintenance, and even marketing and sales.

Facial Recognition

           Facial recognition is a category of biometric software that maps an individual's facial features mathematically and stores the data as a face print. The software uses deep learning algorithms to compare a live capture or digital image to the stored face print in order to verify an individual's identity. 

        High-quality cameras in mobile devices have made facial recognition a viable option for authentication as well as identification. Apple’s iPhone X, for example, includes Face ID technology that lets users unlock their phones with a face print mapped by the phone's camera. The phone's software, which is designed with 3-D modeling to resist being spoofed by photos or masks, captures and compares over 30,000 variables.

             The technology, which uses machine learning to detect, match and identify faces, is being used in a wide variety of ways, including entertainment and marketing. Smart advertisements in airports are now able to identify the gender, ethnicity and approximate age of a passers by and target the advertisement to the person's demographic.

1000-fold increase in computer storage capacity

The densest solid-state memory ever created could soon exceed the capabilities of current computer storage devices by 1,000 times, thanks to a new technique scientists at the University of Alberta have perfected."Essentially, you can take all 45 million songs on iTunes and store them on the surface of one quarter," said Roshan Achal, PhD student in Department of Physics and lead author on the new research. "Five years ago, this wasn't even something we thought possible."

His team used the same technology they developed in previous research to build atomic-scale circuits – which allows the quick removal or replacement of single hydrogen atoms. This enables the memory to be rewritable, offering tremendous potential for more efficient solid-state drives. Previous discoveries of atomic-scale computer storage were stable only at extremely low temperatures. 

But the new memory developed by Achal's team works at real-world temperatures and can withstand normal use. The technology has immediate applications for archiving data, according to Achal. Next steps will include boosting the read and write speeds, for even more flexible applications.

Intel reveals 9th generation CPUs

              Intel is yet has to announce its 9^th Gen Core processors for laptops officially, but because the company needs to sort out all the things with authorities and regulators well in advance of actual product launches, CPU model numbers and general specifications have been published well ahead of the formal release. As it turns out, recently the company disclosed the first details about its 9^th Gen mobile Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5 H-series processors for higher-end laptops.

           Before proceeding to the actual products, let us make it clear what Intel actually revealed. Among other things, Intel (and other companies) has a number of export compliance metrics for its CPUs, including GFLOPS, Adjusted Peak Performance (APP), and Composite Theoretical Performance (CTP). These metrics are used by various governments to determine capabilities of CPUs and other processors. The APP and GFLOPS metrics are used by the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). Meanwhile, other authorities and regulators use CTP calculations, which are stated in Millions of Theoretical Operations Per Second (MTOPS), to assess what companies import to their countries. The CTP numbers are the ones that Intel published for its yet-to-be released CPUs.

           Since the new processors belong to Intel’s 9^th Gen Core family are designed to feature hardware mitigations against specific Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, a quick look at the basic specs that Intel published as well as their CTP numbers can shed some light on general specifications of the upcoming 9^th Gen Core H-series mobile processors.