Google has published a paper about Mesa, its new data warehousing system, used specifically to handle its online advertising business data. It’s a system used to create reports and analyzes for the company mangers. Due to the enormous amounts of data managed globally by Google, it’s a very complex system, requiring something more than other systems created by Google over the years.
IBM has revealed its new neurosynaptic chip, which reproduces at least partially the brain’s synapses. It’s the culmination of six years of development in collaboration with DARPA in the SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) project. The chip called TrueNorth was produced with the 28nm process, contains 5.4 billion transistors and the innovative element is that it contains 4096 neurosynaptic cores with one million neurons and 256 million synapses but at the same time consumes only 70 mW during its operations.
According to a study published in the journal “Science”, the quantum computer model D-Wave Two doesn’t seem to bring real benefits in terms of performance compared to classical computers. The article rekindled the controversy started since the introduction of this quantum computer by its manufacturer D-Wave Systems.
In Las Vegas, Hewlett-Packard’s CEO Meg Whitman, together with the company’s CTO Martin Fink, unveiled a new computer architecture that aims to revolutionize the sector. The Machine, as at the moment is called the new HP computer, uses hardware of type very different from the current such as photonics instead of copper and memristors instead of the current RAM and storage memories.
In recent years we’ve been seeing an extraordinary proliferation of very small computers that have low costs but really interesting potential. A project that is raising funds via the crowdfunding method on the IndieGoGo website is VoCore, which has the purpose of producing large quantities of a coin-sized computer, less than one square inch (25 mm x 25 mm).
