IBM

Casting one’s eye into a crystal ball is a risky undertaking that can leave the forecaster as visionary or fool – particularly if they are short term predictions that can easily be checked. But that hasn’t deterred the soothsayers at IBM coming up with their fourth annual “Next 5 in 5” list of innovations that will impact our lives in the next five years. Based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies, the latest list focuses on innovations that have the potential to change how people live, work and play in our burgeoning cities.  Read More

We've seen vertically oriented transistors, now it's time for entire chips to explore the z-axis. Collaborating with Swiss research institutes EPFL and ETH Zurich, IBM has made another important step toward creating faster, higher-efficiency "3D" processors stacking their cores vertically to increase the number of interconnections and sensibly reduce heat.  Read More

There have been a few breakthroughs in recent years that hold the promise of sustaining Moore’s Law for some time to come. These include attaching molecules to silicon and replacing copper interconnects with graphene. Now IBM are proposing a new way to pack more power and speed into computer chips by using DNA molecules as scaffolding for transistors fabricated with carbon nanotubes and silicon wires.  Read More

An international team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots. It is hoped the use of the supercomputer modeling - the supercomputers undertake 76 trillion calculations per second - will help scientists unlock mysteries of the sun and its impacts on Earth.  Read More

Pilots, the military and emergency services have been using simulations for years to teach skills in a risk-free environment where otherwise lives might be lost. Video gaming isn’t new either - the CEOs of many of today’s big names such as Yahoo and Google grew up on a diet of avatars and role-playing. But it’s only recently that business simulators and advanced video gaming have merged to form ‘serious games’ like IBM's Innov8. IBM has announced v.2, a new version that helps students and professionals hone their business and technology skills in a compelling, familiar video game format.  Read More

IBM has retained the Number One Plate Holder's title at the US Patent Office for 16 years straight, with 2008 issuances greater than Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google combined. On February 3 it astounded even seasoned patent watchers when it filed a patent for bionic body armor which not only recognizes a bullet has been fired, but delivers a shock to the target's appropriate muscles so they step out of the bullet's trajectory.  Read More

When Sony entered into a partnership with Toshiba and IBM to design the Cell processor for their PlayStation 3, they agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other companies. What they didn't know was that parts of the Cell would be sold to their major competitor Microsoft for use in the Xbox 360 processor - before the Cell was completed.  Read More

While Linux erosion of Microsoft’s desktop dominance hasn’t really reached the mainstream yet, the popularity of the open source operating system has seen a steady increase as variations become more user friendly. Recognizing that rise in popularity IBM, along with its business partners, Virtual Bridges and Canonical has released a Linux-desktop solution that is designed to drive significant savings compared with Microsoft-desktop software by amplifying Lotus collaboration software and Ubuntu to a larger user base through virtualization.  Read More

June 17, 2008 A collaboration between IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory has resulted in the world's fastest supercomputer. Roadrunner can run at speeds above the "petaflop barrier" of 1,000 trillion operations per second, making it twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene/L™ and opening up an era of science at a previously unseen scale.  Read More