Lifeboat Foundation

Believe it or not, graphics card prices seem to be headed down. 3D Center has been tracking and reporting pricing trends for GPUs in Germany and Austria. There’s good news: prices are indeed on a downward slope. Even better; this is the third month in a row they have declined, so we can’t just write it off as a one one-time fluke. That said, here’s the bad news: even if this trend continues, which is a big if, prices are still so inflated that months of “progress” may only result in GPUs returning to MSRP, supply issues notwithstanding. At this point we’ll take what we can get.

The report by 3D Center for February mirrors the company’s report from last month, which we covered here. There’s a noticeable downward trend in pricing for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. It’s almost shocking to see after so many reports of price increases. The trend is undeniable. According to 3D Center, the February price of AMD’s Radeon RDNA2 cards has fallen 18 percent, to 145 percent over MSRP. For Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs, prices fell 20 percent, leaving them 157 percent over MSRP.

Instead of relying on a fixed catalogue of available materials or undergoing trial-and-error attempts to come up with new ones, engineers can turn to algorithms running in supercomputers to design unique materials, based on a “materials genome,” with properties tailored to specific needs. Among the new classes of emerging materials are “transient” electronics and bioelectronics that portend applications and industries comparable to the scale that followed the advent of silicon-based electronics.

In each of the three technological spheres, we find the Cloud increasingly woven into the fabric of innovation. The Cloud itself is, synergistically, evolving and expanding from the advances in new materials and machines, creating a virtuous circle of self-amplifying progress. It is a unique feature of our emerging century that constitutes a catalyst for innovation and productivity, the likes of which the world has never seen.

It’s all about perspective.

For the first time, artificial intelligence has been used to control the super-hot plasma inside a fusion reactor, offering a new way to increase stability and efficiency.

Unleashed cosmic ray bombardment may have eaten up ozone, driving short-term climate swings.

Lithium-sulfur batteries have three times the potential charge capacity of lithium-ion batteries, which are found in everything from smartphones to electric cars. Their inherent instability, however, have so far made them unsuitable for commercial applications, with lithium-sulfur batteries undergoing a 78 per cent change in size every charging cycle.

Overcoming this issue would not only radically improve the performance of battery-powered devices, it would also address some of the environment concerns that come with lithium-ion batteries, such as the sourcing and disposal of rare raw materials.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in developing a simple hydrocarbon molecule with a logic gate function, similar to that in transistors, in a single molecule. The discovery could make electric components on a molecular scale possible in the future. The results are published in Nature Communications.

Manufacturing very small components is an important challenge in both research and development. One example is transistors—the smaller they are, the faster and more energy efficient our computers become. But is there a limit to how small logic gates can become? And is it possible to create electric machines on a molecular scale? Yes, perhaps, is the answer from a chemistry research team at Lund University.

“We have developed a simple hydrocarbon molecule that changes its form, and at the same time goes from insulating to conductive, when exposed to electric potential. The successful formula was to design a so-called anti-aromatic ring in a molecule so that it becomes more robust and can both receive and relay electrons,” says Daniel Strand, chemistry researcher at Lund University.

A quasiparticle that forms in semiconductors can now be moved around at room temperature, a University of Michigan-led study has shown. The finding could cool down computers, enabling faster speeds and higher efficiencies, and potentially make LEDs and solar panels more efficient.

Today’s electronic devices rely on electrons to move both energy and information around, but about half of that energy is wasted as heat due to electrical resistance. Excitons, which escape traditional electrical losses, are one potential alternative.

“If you think of the past almost two decades, the computers have always been at two to three gigahertz—they never increase the speed. And that’s the reason. It just gets too hot,” said Parag Deotare, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and corresponding author of the study.

Perpetuum mobile of the past and the future seems to form the present in which the thought of thoughts is formed. Hidden meanings in the past that are often keys that unlooked the doors of the future. And a lot questions take us through worlds from which we want to imagine the probable and improbable answer like Dr. Robert Ford from Westworld…