Light Start – Supercomputers, big sound, Steam’s Summer Sale, and Huawei has an OS
Brett Venter
The world’s fastest computer is a 10-million core monster created by China
China has held the title of world’s fastest computer for some time now so that country holding the title shouldn’t be news. Except when it is. The previous record-holder was a Chinese computer named Tianhe-2, which has a speed of 33.9 petaflop/s. A new computer, also made in China, called Sunway TaihuLight has shattered that record (and most others) by clocking in at a speed of 93 petaflops per second. You’re never going to play Crysis on this monster but that’s because it’d be a waste of most of the 10 million processor cores that go into making up Sunway. 10,649,600 cores, to be exact, spread over 40,960 nodes. Perhaps the most exciting part of the new record? The supercomputer has been wholly made up of components designed and made in China, notably ShenWei processors instead of Intel Xeon Phi silicon.
If you’re driving a van like this, you’re a rolling noise complaint
We all have (or had) that friend who feels that car sound is more important than a vehicle whose bodywork keeps shaking loose because the bass keeps dropping. That friend (and if you don’t have that one, you might BE that one) would probably lose it over this van encountered in New York. Or perhaps not. One Nelson Hidalgo spent over $20,000 to fit over 80 speakers and a whole lot of amplifiers into his van. He was also picked up by the police soon afterwards, for a noise complaint, as he was sitting alone listening to his massive speaker system. By most accounts, the people who reported his sound-powered van were a considerable distance away at the time. Now… watch someone build a local version of this monster.
Gird your wallet, for the Steam Summer Sale has started
Hide! Hide your wallet, get rid of the credit card, perhaps avoid the internet altogether for a while. Steam’s Summer Sale has started. Even though we’re in the wrong hemisphere for summer, the Sale doesn’t care. It’s going to be cheap, no matter how cold it is outside. And you’re going to be buying games, games that you won’t ever play, because of how cheap they are. We know, we’ve done this before. We’ve promised ourselves that this sale would be different, that we would play the games we purchased and yet… we’re going to do it again this time, aren’t we? And so are you. Look how cheap everything is…
Huawei has been making strides in the world smartphone market and they’re now the third-largest company offering pocket computers (that happen to make phone calls) to a hungry market. But their reputed next step might seem… a little silly to some. Huawei is said to be working on their own mobile OS, which is “…meant as a contingency measure in case Google further tightens its grip on Android or stops offering it to smartphone makers”, according to The Information. Whether or not Huawei is actually following through on this report, we’d question whether it’s needed. BlackBerry and Windows Phone are both in the toilet, more or less, and the market is dominated by Android and iOS. It’s kind of a mirror of the desktop market, where Windows and OS X (macOS now) are the leaders and everything else comprises a fraction of the marketplace. Huawei should first ask itself how many people are clamouring for Samsung’s Tizen operating system before spending too much money on development. Still, perhaps they come up with something fantastic. Or Firefox OS. We’ll test it, either way.
