Karthi Nigam

Friday, September 4, 2020

Time Flies..... Years Difference

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Intel Announces New 11th-gen Tiger Lake Processors and New Iris Xe Graphics

Intel Announces New 11th-gen Tiger Lake Processors, New Iris Xe Graphics

Intel has finally taken the wraps off its latest generation of processors. The new Tiger Lake chips from Intel is its 11th-generation of processors, and offers features such as Thunderbolt 4 support, WiFi 6, and a lot more. Intel’s announcement today focused on processors for laptops, with the company unveiling U-series processors aimed at thin and light laptops.

Intel’s announcement has a total of 9 new processors, with the Core i7-1185G7 at the top of the stack. This particular processor features 4 cores/ 8 threads and operates at a base frequency of 3.0GHz. It also comes with Intel’s new Iris Xe graphics, which go up to 1.35GHz on the i7-1185G7.

Tiger Lake is built on a 10nm process similar to Intel’s current Ice Lake chips. However, the company says that it has upgraded the new processors to the Willow Core architecture with a new ’10nm SuperFIN’ design. Intel claims this offers better speeds at lower power consumption, something that’s a must, especially for laptop processors.

Here are all the processors announced today:

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Processor Cores/ Threads Base Clock Boost Clock Boost Clock (Single Core) Graphics TDP

Core i7-1185G7 4/8 3.0GHz 4.3GHz 4.8GHz Iris Xe 12-28W

Core i7-1165G7 4/8 2.8GHz 4.1GHz 4.7GHz Iris Xe 12-28W

Core i5-1135G7 4/8 2.4GHz 3.8GHz 4.2GHz Iris Xe 12-28W

Core i3-1125G4 4/8 2.0GHz 3.3GHz 3.7GHz Intel UHD 12-28W

Core i3-1115G4 2/4 3.0GHz 4.1GHz 4.1GHz Intel UHD 12-28W

Core i7-1160G7 4/8 1.2GHz 3.6GHz 4.4GHz Iris Xe 7-15W

Core i5-1130G7 4/8 1.1GHz 3.4GHz 4.0GHz Iris Xe 7-15W

Core i3-1120G4 4/8 1.1GHz 3.0GHz 3.5GHz Intel UHD 7-15W

Core i3-1110G4 2/4 1.8GHz 3.9GHz

New Intel Iris Xe Graphics

Intel also announced new Iris Xe graphics alongside the new Tiger Lake processors. These graphics can be found in the new Core i5 and i7 processors announced today while the i3 processors keep Intel UHD graphics.

According to the company, the new graphics offer up to twice the performance of the last generation. The company even showed off a demo where the Iris Xe graphics performed better than a 10th-gen processor paired with an MX350 GPU.

Intel EVO Platform

Intel also announced a new platform of PCs. Building on the premise offered by Project Athena, Intel’s new Evo platform is aimed at helping PC buyers know that the device they’re purchasing will meet high quality standards. For a laptop to get the Evo branding, it has to satisfy requirements including WiFi 6 support, Thunderbolt 4, 9 hour battery life on a charge, and fast system wakes in less than a second.

Intel says that over 20 Evo verified designs will be available by the end of the year.

Sunday, August 23, 2020

UCL engineers set new world record internet speed

UCL engineers set new world record internet speed

19 August 2020

The world’s fastest data transmission rate has been achieved by a team of UCL engineers who reached an internet speed a fifth faster than the previous record.

Working with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research, the research team led by Dr Lidia Galdino (UCL Electronic & Electrical Engineering), achieved a data transmission rate of 178 terabits a second (178,000,000 megabits a second) – a speed at which it would be possible to download the entire Netflix library in less than a second.

The record, which is double the capacity of any system currently deployed in the world, was achieved by transmitting data through a much wider range of colours of light, or wavelengths, than is typically used in optical fibre. (Current infrastructure uses a limited spectrum bandwidth of 4.5THz, with 9THz commercial bandwidth systems entering the market, whereas the researchers used a bandwidth of 16.8THz.)

To do this, researchers combined different amplifier technologies needed to boost the signal power over this wider bandwidth and maximised speed by developing new Geometric Shaping (GS) constellations (patterns of signal combinations that make best use of the phase, brightness and polarisation properties of the light), manipulating the properties of each individual wavelength. The achievement is described in a new paper in IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

The benefit of the technique is that it can be deployed on already existing infrastructure cost-effectively, by upgrading the amplifiers that are located on optical fibre routes at 40-100km intervals. (Upgrading an amplifier would cost £16,000, while installing new optical fibres can, in urban areas, cost up to £450,000 a kilometre.)

The new record, demonstrated in a UCL lab, is a fifth faster than the previous world record held by a team in Japan.

At this speed, it would take less than an hour to download the data that made up the world’s first image of a black hole (which, because of its size, had to be stored on half a ton of hard drives and transported by plane). The speed is close to the theoretical limit of data transmission set out by American mathematician Claude Shannon in 1949.

Lead author Dr Galdino, a Lecturer at UCL and a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, said: “While current state-of-the-art cloud data-centre interconnections are capable of transporting up to 35 terabits a second, we are working with new technologies that utilise more efficiently the existing infrastructure, making better use of optical fibre bandwidth and enabling a world record transmission rate of 178 terabits a second.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, demand for broadband communication services has soared, with some operators experiencing as much as a 60% increase in internet traffic compared to before the crisis. In this unprecedented situation, the resilience and capability of broadband networks has become even more critical.

Dr Galdino added: “But, independent of the Covid-19 crisis, internet traffic has increased exponentially over the last 10 years and this whole growth in data demand is related to the cost per bit going down. The development of new technologies is crucial to maintaining this trend towards lower costs while meeting future data rate demands that will continue to increase, with as yet unthought-of applications that will transform people’s lives.”

This work is funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering, The Royal Society Research grant, and the EPSRC programme grant TRANSNET (EP/R035342/1).

Monday, July 20, 2020

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Saturday, April 25, 2020

Forget 5nm, TSMC already has its eyes on 2nm chips

The size reduction of computer transistors has been going on since the day they were invented. Thanks to the amazing engineering and theoretical work of thousands of people, we’re all holding in our hands devices that would seem like science fiction just a few decades ago.

But semiconductor manufacturers are never satisfied and keep breaking down barriers to bring us even smaller and more powerful chips. At the nanometer scale we’re at now, things are getting very complicated. Production methods that worked before can be used no longer and new ones have to be developed.

That’s exactly what TSMC is doing right now, as reported by DigiTimes. According to TSMC's latest annual report, the company has begun its research and development efforts towards the 2nm process in 2019, and preliminary studies regarding nodes even smaller than that are underway as well.

If you haven’t been following the developments on the nanometer front, currently, the best smartphone chips are built using the 7nm process. The first ones using the 5nm process are expected later this year (likely Apple’s A14 chip for the new iPhones). After that will come the 3nm one, targeted for 2022-2023, and hopefully, around 2025, we’ll see the first 2nm chips on the market.

In nanometers, the difference is small, but we should look at what it means for transistor density. A 7nm chip can fit 2 times more transistors on the same die as a 14nm one, but a 2nm one will be able to fit 3.5 times more than a 7nm one!

Chips that powerful and that energy-efficient will open up a whole new set of functions our phones will be able to perform. And while that future is still a few years away, it’s steadily coming and it’s exciting!

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Scientists develop photon-based silicon circuitry that could make Moore's Law obsolete

Scientist managed to change the cubic silicon structure into a hexagonal nanowire structure. (Image Source: Wired)

By changing the cubic silicon structure to a hexagonal nanowire structure, scientists managed to develop photon-based silicon alloy circuitry that may replace electron-based transistors. The photon-based material prevents electron traffic jams, overheating and transmission slowdowns caused by cramming too many transistors.

by Bogdan Solca, 2020/04/15

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore was estimating that CPU transistor counts could double every two years, and so far this proved to be more or less accurate. The problem now is that we are approaching the physical limits of silicon transistors, which cannot really be shrunk down to less than 1 nanometer, so scientists are looking into new materials that can help overcome such restrictions. One of the latest inventions in this field comes from the Netherlands in the form of light-emitting silicon circuitry that could help reduce the number of needed transistors while still improving the performance.

A group of Eindhoven University of Technology scientists led by Erik Bakkers managed to develop silicon alloy nanowires that can emit light. These new materials can potentially be used to build photon-based circuits that, in turn, may replace the electron-based cubic transistor models used in commercial chips nowadays.

The photon-based hexagonal nanowires should greatly improve the computational performance as data transmitted through photons instead of electrons can prevent electron traffic jams, overheating and transmission slowdowns caused by cramming too many transistors in a determined area. Photons move considerably faster than electrons, so they can transmit data more efficiently over multiple channels. With the introduction of photonic circuits, data-intensive applications like machine learning and big data crunching could see tremendous boosts.

Researchers are currently trying to figure out a way to implement a tiny laser to act as the light source within the new materials. It is yet unclear how long it will take for this technology to become a reality. Intel is planning to reach the 1 nm transistor size limit by the end of this decade and TSMC may do it even faster, so scientists ought to come with a decent solution by 2025.