Pretty soon, Toyota’s in-car entertainment and communication systems might use the same base operating system kernel as your Android smart phone or the operating system of the server that runs this website.
Toyota Motor Corp has joined the Linux Foundation as a gold member – the first automaker to formally participate in the non-profit organization. A gold member is required to pay an annual fee of US$100,000. This announcement comes soon after a consumer electronics manufacturer joined the foundation as a gold member for the first time – Panasonic Corp.
“Linux gives us the flexibility and technology maturity we require to evolve our In-Vehicle-Infotainment and communications systems to address the expectations of our customers. The Linux Foundation provides us with a neutral forum in which we can collaborate with the world’s leading technology companies on open innovation that accelerates that evolution,” said Kenichi Murata, Project General Manager, Electronics Development Div. 1, Toyota Motor Corp.
Other than Linux being used in Toyota’s in-car computers soon, such is the flexibility of the operating system that Linux can even be used in Toyota’s diagnostic tools at the service centre.
AMD has been giving its fans lots of hope about the Bulldozer that will apparently bulldoze over Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, or so AMD claims. But the thing is they kept on delaying it for reasons unknown. Maybe Intel’s processor is too superior? Well that may not be the case anymore, if these benchmarks are any clue.
Donanim Haber recently obtained an 8-core (that’s four Bulldozer cores) engineering sample and put it through its paces alongside an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 GPU, and from the looks of things it fared pretty well, pulling in a 3DMark 11 score of 6265, with a physics (CPU-centric) score of 7487.
As Ars Technica points out, that puts it solidly in the centre of Tom’s Hardware’s physics scores for the Sandy Bridge Core i5-2500K, scoring 6667, and Core i7-2600K, pulling in 8152. When it came to PCMark 7 scores, however, Bulldozer fell far behind the competition.
Of course, these are just numbers — for an engineering sample, no less — which means they should be taken with a fistful of salt left over from the Bersih rally, but it’s nice to finally see Bulldozer getting down and dirty.
Klipsch has quietly introduced the Mode noise-canceling headphones, and boy they look good. These headphones have earcups made from “high-grade” leather and provide noise cancellation for up to 45-hour on a single battery charge. Each earcup contains a 40mm woofer with Klipsch’s signature focuses on bass and mid-range as well as a separate 15mm tweeter to catch higher frequencies. The Klipsch Mode noise-canceling headphones feature a 20Hz – 20kHz frequency response, a 32-Ohm of impedance and a 97.5dB signal-to-noise ratio. The headset will arrive in fall 2011 with a very whopping price of $350.
Looks like Adobe has lost yet another ally to the silky smooth allure of HTML5. Internet radio service Pandora has traded in the once ubiquitous Flash for the increasingly adopted web standard, citing, among other things, the ability to lop precious seconds off the site’s load time.
The upgrade is part of a major redesign for the service, said to have been inspired by the company’s own iPad app. Hey hey, did I just see Steve Jobs smiling? Anyway, the old features are largely intact, but many, like Twitter and Facebook integration, have been revamped. The update will be rolled out to Pandora One subscribers soon, in something of a limited testing mode, with other users following later.
Those with browsers that aren’t fully HTML5-friendly will still be able to access Flash features as backup, though last I heard the race over at the browser war was very pinched, so you should be covered nicely.
People of this generation really love touchscreens, and their tastes aren’t going to change anytime soon. That’s the takeaway from a new report from market research firm DisplaySearch, which predicts that revenue from touch panel sales will hit the $13.4 billion mark by the end of this year, before soaring to nearly $24 billion by 2017. Shipments of capacitive touch displays, in particular, are expected to increase by 100-percent over last year, accounting for a full 70-percent of all tactile revenues. The mobile market still accounts for most of this industry-wide growth, but demand for touch-based tablets is accelerating considerably, with more than 72 million panels expected to ship this year, and 100 million projected in 2012.
It’s common to see companies holding contests to promote their new products and to expand their brand. But what we have here is a rather unique contest. It’s held by Sony and Adobe, called the Air App Challenge, and it’s all about Adobe’s latest product Air and Sony’s latest product, the S2.
For one, Air hasn’t exactly taken off quite like the Flash makers had hoped — especially in the mobile space. And two, that new S2 tablet is going to need some apps that are designed to take advantage of its dual screens. The $200,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to developers who whip up the best creations specifically for the forthcoming Sony Honeycomb devices, using Adobe’s Flash-plus-browser environment.
Challenges have proven successful in the past to spur interest in platforms from Android to New York City’s vast databases of information. If the contest is successful it could turn that little folding Sony from a novel design into a unique and compelling product.
We all have trouble getting out of bed in the morning once in a while, some more often than others. But when you’ve got a lot full of Mercedes-Benz AMG muscle sedans to play with, you jump up with a little more spring in your step.
That is, assuming you actually need sleep at all, because some say these drivers from Mercedes-Benz World at Brooklands in Surrey, England aren’t quite human. At least, not if they are who they look like. Mercedes calls them their Silver Arrows, and if you thought one Stig was good, just follow the jump to check out what kind of antics a whole team can get themselves into. Let’s just say it involves plenty of tire spinning and opposite lock.
Typically most references relating to ARM’s architecture centers around the mobile sector including smartphones and tablets. But the UK’s Manchester University is doing something entirely different with ARM-based cores: it’s simulating the brain.
In conjunction with Southampton, Cambridge and Sheffield Universities, the Manchester University has created a massively parallel computer called SpiNNaker, short for Spiking Neural Network architecture, using up to one million cores based on an old ARM instruction set architecture. The project has been backed by a £5 million (about $8 million) grant from the British government.
Naturally the project isn’t replicating the human brain at a 1:1 scale – there are around 100 billion neurons with 1,000 trillion connections taking place within our skulls. That said, the 1 million ARM cores will represent only 1-percent of the human equivalent. Instead of neurons transmitting information along analog electrical spikes, cores will use packets of descriptive data. To process the information, SpiNNaker will use virtual neurons. In the end, it can transmit and process data just as fast as the brain but with fewer physical components. Read more…
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