The Mugen 2 is a hefty hunk of a cooler, at 5.1 inches wide, 5 inches deep (with the included 12cm fan), and 6.2 inches high; it weighs nearly two pounds. It’s not the heaviest cooler we’ve ever tested, nor the most unwieldy, but its girth could certainly prevent you from installing it in all orientations on all motherboards. We had trouble fitting it in some orientations on our EVGA 680i SLI board—our usual preference being to install the cooler fan parallel with the rear exhaust fan. On our board, though, there wasn’t room; we resorted to attaching the cooler fan perpendicular to the rear exhaust fan. Thankfully, this didn’t seem to impact performance, as the Mugen 2 performed slightly better in our tests than the Thermalright U120-eXtreme—about 2.25 C cooler at both idle and full CPU burn.

AMD speak to Driver Heaven Media about HD5000 shortages For the last few weeks we have been fielding our readers concerns about a shortage of HD5000 series cards, particularly the 5850, 5870 and the new 5890 - all of which have won top awards at DriverHeaven. We managed to have a chat with one of the top men in AMD, John Byrne - Vice President of Worldwide GPU and CPU sales. We brought up the point that many enthusiasts can still not get a hold of one of their new mid to high end 5000 series cards. "In a span of two months we have launched 5 different products, an entirely new Graphics architecture (DX11), an innovative feature such as Eyefinity and on a new 40nm process. In summary, our 5XXX is the most powerful and exciting graphics family that we have ever produced where today we are seeing an unbelievably huge demand for the products. We launched both ASICs and unusually high volume of...

Well an interesting post from an OCZ rep seems to indicate that USB 3.0 accessories are coming sooner rather than later. In a post looking for help naming the product, OCZ appears to have developed a prototype USB 3.0 portable solid state drive.

Hoping to put your hands on a Nook this holiday season? Here's hoping you got in the door early, because bookseller Barnes & Noble claims that the Kindle-competitor has sold out for anyone hoping to gift the thing this year. According to the New York Times, B&N says pre-orders on the device have exceeded its expectations, and the well has now run dry on forthcoming stock. To make up for the loss, the seller is offering placeholder certificates for buyers, with a promise that the next round of devices will be shipping out around January 4th. Are suburban moms to blame? Only B&N knows for sure.

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silk and silicon implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning the wearer’s skin into a screen. The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolve away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about one millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick, and the sheet of silk will keep them in place, moulding to the shape of the skin when saline is added. These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chip to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example. Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t. The first displays are sure to be primitive but likely very useful for the patients that receive them — you won’t be getting the full-color, hi-res images that come with ink, but functional displays.

Toshiba says its second generation MLC SSDs have an advanced controller that achieves higher read/write speeds, faster parallel data transfers and better wear leveling than first generation SSDs to optimise performance, reliability and endurance. It claims its latest drives offer maximum sequential read speed of 240MBps and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps to enable faster system booting and application loading times. The drives also support AES data encryption to prevent unauthorised data access.

Called Colossus, it is designed to boost desktop and workstation performance for people who need really fast storage drives and shift a hell of a lot of data. It is supposed to be about twice as fast as the Intel SSD drives with a read rate of up to 260 MBps, write of up to 260MBps and sustained write of up to 230MBps. Eugene Chang, VP of product management at OCZ Technology Group, said the drive manages to go like a banshee because it has an internal RAID 0 architecture.

Hynix announces 2Gb DDR3 DRAM chips HYNIX SEMICONDUCTOR has managed to get validation from Intel for its 2Gb DDR3 DRAM that uses 40nm process technology. The outfit said it has begun mass production and expects the validation of RDIMMs to also be completed before year's end. There are 2Gb DDR3 SDRAM components, 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMMs and 2GB DDR3 unbuffered DIMMs. They ship with an operating speed of 1333MHz and run at 1.5V. The chips have a maximum data transfer speed of 1867MHz with 16-bit I/O and 3.7Gbps bandwidth...

Radeon HD 5970 extremely limited in the US It has been over forty-eight hours since AMD globally launched its flagship Evergreen card based on 40nm architecture. Taking the crown as the fastest GPU in the world to date, the Radeon HD 5970 has held an elevated position in the eyes of the enthusiast consumer due to its raw performance power in high-performance gaming and GPGPU applications. We have been scoping the internet continuously for any sight of retail and e-tail listings of the card in both EU and American markets respectively. While AMD’s launch partners did confirm that there would be limited availability of the card, we were surprised to see the actual availability rate in the US market close to almost nothing at all. On Wednesday, November 18th around 6:00am PST, Newegg began officially listing Radeon HD 5970 cards from PowerColor and HIS, both priced at $624.99 respectively. By noon, it had listed three more manufacturers including Diamond, Gigabyte and Sapphire. It was around this time that the Sapphire 102280OCSR Radeon HD 5970 was the first card to go on sale from the major US etailer, and...

Designed from the ground-up for parallel computing, the NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs slash the cost of computing by delivering the same performance of a traditional CPU-based cluster at one-tenth the cost and one-twentieth the power.

The family of Tesla 20-series GPUs includes: Tesla C2050 & C2070 GPU Computing Processors Single GPU PCI-Express Gen-2 cards for workstation configurations Up to 3GB and 6GB (respectively) on-board GDDR5 memory Double precision performance in the range of 520GFlops - 630 GFlops Tesla S2050 & S2070 GPU Computing Systems Four Tesla GPUs in a 1U system product for cluster and datacenter deployments Up to 12 GB and 24 GB (respectively) total system memory on board GDDR5 memory Double precision performance in the range of 2.1 TFlops - 2.5 TFlops

MSI is working on a H57-based mATX motherboard, according to the fellow site Techsweden, which is expected to fight against the Asus P7H57D-V EVO.

Gaming remains our bread and butter focus area. However, there are other opportunities for us to explore as the company grows, such as the HPC sector," explained Del Rizzo.

"Look, I understand that some people might be feeling anxious because we haven't published detailed information about Fermi-based Geforce cards," said Del Rizzo. "But, I can assure you that data is forthcoming. The wait will be well worth it, especially when people understand what products based on Fermi are capable of."

Constructed of all black steel, the EVO edition expandson the original Tempest's design with better cooling potential and more attention to cable management schemes. Cooling duties are provided by four 120mm fans (dual intake, one side, and one rear). NZXT said it even redesigned the fan blades to push more air at lower noise levels. The mid tower Tempest EVO targets enthusiasts looking for server-level performance. The E-ATX form factor is now supported, and there are slots for up to 8 hard drives.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been updated for the 21st century with seven small robots playing fairies alongside carbon-based co-stars.

“It’s now possible for these unmanned aerial vehicles to be used for evacuation or crowd control,” said Robin Murphy, a computer science and engineering professor at Texas A&M University, which staged the production. “But what’s missing is an understanding of what makes a person trust or fear the robot.” Murphy can change that. She leads the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, and her bots have combed the rubble of the World Trade Center, crawled into caved-in mines and searched collapsed buildings around the world. But this is the first time they’ve taken to the stage, and it provided some interesting insights.

The biggest of the mechanical stars was an AirRobot with four rotors. It’s about the size of a large pizza. Cops and soldiers use them for surveillance, and they’ve been deployed in Iraq. It was joined by a squadron of E-Flight micro helicopters about the size of your fist. Casting them in a play was a great chance to see how man and machine interact and what can be done to make robots more like humans.

The rough handling softened, however, when the actors were told to think of the bots as baby fairies. After that, the actors began showing concern if the bots crashed. In other words, they bonded with the machines. That could have big implications for the design of search and rescue robots, which might be the first thing to reach, for instance, someone trapped in a collapsed mineshaft and their only contact with the outside world for hours. If it were you in that hole, would you want to be stuck with a cold machine like T-1000 or a friendly one like WALL-E?

ATI Radeon HD 5950 will launch in Q1/2010 We got informations that AMD will launch another Dual-GPU, called HD 5950, in Q1/2010. This card will feature 2x 1440 SPs, 2x 72 TMUs, 2x 32 ROPs and 2x 256 Bit GDDR5. The clock frequencies are not final, yet, but you can expect 650-675 MHz for the core and 1800-2000 MHz for the memory.

More on "Algo/Igor/Robo" trading and how it works. Rasputin - Wed, Nov 18, 2009 - 08:49 AM Since "High Frequency Trading" is all the rage these days, I have been skulking around the Internet, digging up little tidbits on the enabling technologies that allow this most-interesting activity to take place. Well, the latest puzzle piece I uncovered comes from the recent nVidia Technology Conference, held back in early October. One of the presenters was Gerald Hanweck, of Hanweck Associates. Hanweck is former JPM Chief Equity Derivatives Strategist (from 2003-2003) who Left to start his own technology company that provides GPU-based ("GPU" being a Graphics Processing System board) systems to assist in High Frequency Trading. Here is a link to his thirty-minute presentation: http://nvidia.fullviewmedia.com/GPU2...o-hanweck.html Frankly, Mr. Hanweck isn't the most dynamic speaker. However, he did reveal a number of interesting factoids, even if they were presented in a coma-inducing monotone. Overcoming my urge to nod off during his diatribe, I managed to copy down the following salient points: -There are currently 350,000 options (puts/calls) listed on 3500 stocks/indices/ETFs -Over one million messages PER SECOND are being generated on these options (over FOUR BILLION per hour!) -His system supposedly computes all "Greeks" on all options, in real time, using these 1 million messages per second. -His system then feeds into "ALGO/IGOR/ROBO" real-time trading systems so that the "black boxes" can all race to be the first to execute the option trade -There is a 10 millisecond latency for the feed into the above black box -Hanweck quote: "Traders watch systems so they don't run amok" (Ras: LOL. Yeah, right!) -Hanweck sold one of these systems to Lehman, who later went belly-up (Ras: I hope Hanweck got the payment up front from Lehman!) -"OPRA" is now the only option market online? -Two more exchanges coming online in 2010. (Ras Conclusion): SEC investigations notwithstanding, this Hanweck guy seems to believe that HFT is going to be around for a while and in fact will grow along with the addition of new options exchanges. The bottom line: The "Animal Spirit" schemes not only continue unabated, but will be running at ever-increasing speeds. Pretty soon even the fastest F12-punching trader is going to be left behind if he or she doesn't have one of these super-duper GPU-based platforms.

Radeon HD 5970 sold out in a day ATI partners have told Fudzilla that they received decent quantities of dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 cards, but due to heavy pre-orders and huge interest, they sold out all they had in matter of hours. Some additional cards might show up tomorrow or Monday, but it looks like partners can't provide enough cards to meet demand. Once they become available, they sell in matter of hours. Etailers are having the ride of their lives and they are making some additional money as suggested etail price in the US should sit at $599 level and most of the cards that showed up and were and sold yesterday were priced at $629. Europe is not an exception as most of the cards were selling for above €600, and we've seen some selling for €619 including tax or more.

The demonstration is a N-body simulation running on CUDA with 20,480 body interactions in double precision. This demonstration was designed to show off Fermi's massive DP performance increase over GT200. Of course, being a supercomputing conference, these results are hardly relevent for gaming. The GT200 GPU was a Tesla C1060 and the Fermi was an Tesla 20 sample. The results? 3.5 fps for the C1060, 21.72 fps for Fermi.

YouTube- Demonstration of NVidia Fermi

YouTube- NVIDIA @ SC09

Sacha35 takes a look at Asus’ first “The Ultimate Force” or “TUF” motherboard, tested against rigid reliability standards. Full credit to Paul for yet another quality review of an Asus product. This one certainly stands out from the rest. http://www.benchtec.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=5381

Jabski gives us the low-down on Gigabyte’s P55-UD5 motherboard on air, cascade and LN2! James runs the board through a number of tests on air, cascade and even LN2. All your favourite benchmarks inside. http://www.benchtec.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=5397

ZXT has been enjoying a good reputation with high-quality chassis products at a very affordable price, and the company has just unveiled its latest offering - Tempest EVO, as an upgrade version of the previous Tempest.

We’ve recently come across something interesting at Galaxy’s official webiste which we’d love to discuss with you. As you can see above, the design looks quite refreshing.

Club 3D Introduces its Radeon HD 5970 Accelerator Club 3D, European market leader for graphics cards, today announced the release of its new 40nm process technology based HD5970 graphics card. Equipped with two ATI Hemlock graphics processing units. The fastest graphics card on the planet has been developed.

DFI has recently announced its latest creation - the Hybrid P45-ION-T2A2 motherboard which combines the P45 and ION chipset.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) plans to build a supercomputer that uses massive amounts of flash based memory to help improve processing speeds. Using a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the SDSC is building Gordon, a supercomputer designed to tackle 'critical science and societal problems now overwhelmed by the avalanche of data generated by the digital devices of our era', which is expected to be operational in mid-2011. Once up and running, Gordon will feature 245 teraFLOPS (TF) of total compute power, 64TB of DRAM, 256TB of flash memory and four petabytes of disk storage, placing it pretty high in the Top 500 supercomputers list.