Using a naming convention that will keep fans swapping "GTX" side to side, NVIDIA's newest generation of video cards has just been announced over press waves. The GeForce GTX 280 and the GTX 260 are the initial models pushed out by the graphics manufacturing company for the new line known officially as the GTX 200 (note how the GTX prefixes the model numbers). This new family is an old idea improved - it's based on similar G80 architecture, but significantly improved in computing power. More details can be had at the full story.

A team of Scottish, German, and Italian researchers have collaborated to subvert the limits of the silicon chip and have come up with a way to create nano-sized wires and intricate nano-chips that can turn handheld phones into an equal of high-end computer laptops. This new discovery will be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and the University of Rome (Italy) have speculated that their new findings will pave the way to more powerful computers just about the size of your palm. "This will help to make small devices much more powerful in the future," said Dr. Michael Zaiser of the University of Edinburgh.

While many an enthusiast rambles on how great AMD processors are better than Intel or vice versa, soon there would be little to fuel the bickering when handheld supercomputers have come to be realized. "Holding a supercomputer in the palm of your hand will one day be possible - and we are going to make sure all the wires are in the right place," Zaiser said. That is, of course, once engineers and scientists have overcome the issues that come hand in hand with nano-miniaturization.

"What we found is when we made these wires smaller and smaller they started to behave in a very funny way," said Zaiser. The different behavior cued the researchers to use computers to predict these unconventional behaviors, which could help engineers understand the new phenomena and how to work around them.

In the experimental front, STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) have previously voiced out plans for a 45-nm iteration of the 1x8 core CELL Broadband Engine, while Intel is still secretive about developments on its 80-core prototype (codenamed POLARIS) which still has a couple of years before entering commercial production. AMD in the meantime has previously released news of its new Phenom processor, a multi-core on single-die architectural marvel.

Imperial College London currently has the most powerful microscope commercially available today. Known as TITAN, the transmission electron microscope was created by FEI Company and costs around GBP 2.4 million or roughly US$ 4.8 million.

It is capable of imaging objects just 0.14 nanometers in diameter (one nanometer is one-billionth of one meter). The machine works by firing electrons through "a sample, just microns (one millionth of a metre) thick, and observing the changes to the particles as they pass through and out the other side".

Once TITAN is in use, everyone has to stay quiet as this is one of the operational requirements of the machine. You see, the vibrations caused by talking too loudly are enough to spoil a sample being viewed by TITAN.

According to Imperial College London's Dr. David McComb, TITAN will be used to probe everything from new materials for supercomputers as well as tissue samples that will help the medical community understand certain diseases. McComb explained,

Clearly, if we want to tackle diseases like osteoporosis, we need new drugs and clinical trials. But in order to develop those we also need to understand the process of osteoporosis. We need to understand how bone and tissue interact and why that process changes as we get older.

Aside from this, the doctor also shared that other teams are working to understand the processes behind the dreaded Alzheimer's disease, specifically the role of iron metabolism in its development. McComb added,

We are not quite sure what the state of the iron is or how it interacts with the tissues in the brain. But if we can understand that then potentially we can feed that into research into something that can disrupt or modify that process. We're ramping up, we're starting to get results. I expect over the summer we'll really start rocketing.

IBM wins the bid to build "Roadrunner", a supercomputer system that will compete (and hopes to outdo) Japan's "Protein Explorer" and its own Blue Gene/L. IBM-Los Alamos will announce the plans as to when the project will officially start, but it's going to be a phase by phase process that begins this September and ends in 2007.

It seems a little off-topic, PS3 fans should start rejoicing. The Roadrunner kicks off a new trend in supercomputing, which relies on "hybrids" to sustain the performance level of a "petaflop," or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. These hybrids are a combination of general-purpose processors and special-purpose accelerator chips. In this case, it's going to be not just Opteron chips, but the Cell processor from Sony's PS3 as well. The Cell processor as we know it was originally designed to improve video game performance in the PlayStation 3 console.

Obviously, this is going to lead us to a futuristic conclusion: With more powerful petaflop-churning supercomputers, there will be greater possibility for more high-speed gaming systems and machines to come out in the future. Also, because the U.S. government has become an avid supercomputer customer, the nuclear simulations will be continuously fueled.

Gaming, as we know it, will never be the same again.