Compute

IBM’s Power Roadmap Extended By Chip Breakthrough

Hot on the heels of the closing of the deal that divests its semiconductor business and places it in the hands of Globalfoundries, the former chip making business of AMD that is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, IBM and its academic and chip industry partners have announced that they have successfully etched chips with transistors that are 7 nanometers in size – significantly smaller than current processes and extending the Moore’s Law curve one more step.

Compute

IBM Scales Up Power8 Iron, Targets In-Memory

The rollout of Power8 systems that IBM started last year is nearly completed as the company has put its largest Power E880 configurations into the field, giving an upgrade path to customers who had been using Power7 and Power7+ systems to run large databases and online transaction processing workloads and to others who are looking for more scalable machines to run in-memory databases and their applications like SAP’s HANA stack.

Code

Rockets Shake And Rattle, So SpaceX Rolls Homegrown CFD

Elon Musk is shaking up both the car and space industries with his respective Tesla and SpaceX companies, and the irony is that while the former is totally upending the combustion engine for land transportation with zippy and stylish electric cars, the latter company has to not only embrace but to create new combustion technologies to get a manned mission to Mars as Musk not only dreams of doing, but is making happen.