Monday, January 19, 2015

NASA’s New Horizons space probe: Powered by PlayStation

Today is a milestone for the New Horizons probe. The spacecraft, which launched nearly nine years ago, has just begun its official six-month countdown. From this point forward, NASA will guide the probe based on the position of Pluto, rather than using strict radio tracking. It’s the first Earth probe to visit the most distant planitesimal known in the solar system — the closest analog to its mission would be the Voyager missions in the late 1980s, which visited both Uranus and Neptune.

Part of what makes the New Horizon’s mission fascinating is that the entire project is being coordinated by a MIPS-based Mongoose-V CPU. The Mongoose-V is derived directly from the MIPS R3000, which powered the original Sony PlayStation.

The MIPS R3000 was a 32-bit workstation and console processor with a dedicated FPU unit and a very small set of instructions with minimal pipelining. The CPU lacks a conventional L1 cache design but does have instruction and data caches of 2KB and 4KB respectively. The space-hardened Mongoose-V does vary compared to the conventional terrestrial version in one respect — it’s actually significantly slower. Where the PS1 clocked in at 33MHz, the New Horizons probe runs at just 12MHz.

MIPS-based-Mongoose-V-processor-NASA-New-Horizons

The New Horizons probe actually carries more than one Mongoose-V CPU, but the second unit is kept as a backup control system and isn’t used simultaneously to provide additional compute power to the total probe. The reason for all this redundancy, and for the relatively anemic hardware in the first place, is power consumption and radiation hardening. At this distance from Earth, the New Horizons probe needs an efficient system to avoid taxing limited power reserves — but it also needs a CPU that can withstand substantial bombardment from cosmic rays and other stellar phenomena. Conventional high-end devices, like smartphones, wouldn’t last any length of time at all — so companies take considerable pains to radiation-harden their various designs.

By May, New Horizons will be close enough to Pluto to image the planet more clearly than the Hubble Space Telescope, meaning we should be able to resolve. Right now, the best image we have of Pluto that isn’t an artist’s rendition looks like this:

In four months, that will change. On 14 July, New Horizons will conduct a flyby of Pluto, Charon, Hydra, Nix, Kerberos, and Styx. Most of you have likely heard of Charon, the moon of Pluto discovered in 1978, but recent work has found three other natural satellites in orbit around the dwarf planet.

New Horizons will map the day and night terminators of the Pluto-Charon system, examine the surface of each planet for atmospheric conditions (if any), hydrocarbons and other nitriles, characterize the surface composition, and examine the area for moons, rings, and other features too small to be seen from Earth.

Following this mission, New Horizons will head into Kuiper Belt. NASA is currently searching for one or more targets that the probe might explore, shedding new light on some of the most distant objects in the solar system.

And no, Mass Effect fans, there’s no word on what NASA intends to do if the moon Charon turns out to be a large, ice-covered alien structure of unknown origin.

NASA and the ESA confirm that the lost Beagle-2 orbiter has been found on Mars

Back in 2003, a full month before NASA’s Opportunity landed on Mars, the British probe Beagle-2 entered orbit as part of the Mars Express exploratory mission. The Beagle-2 was the first British probe to travel to Mars, and it carried a full array of scientific gear — but after successfully detaching from the Mars Express, it was never heard from again. Now, NASA has identified the probe on the surface of Mars, proving that it did touch down and hopefully shedding light on what went wrong with the mission.

A shoe-string budget

One of the most striking things about the Beagle-2 is that Britain financed it with a mixture of public and private funds. Total cost for the probe was $120M (the joint Mars Express Orbiter and Beagle-2 put together were €150 million). The Beagle-2 carried a pair of stereo cameras, a microscope with 6 micrometer resolution, a spectrometer, an X-ray spectrometer, a drill for collecting and processing rock samples, equipment for measuring atmospheric carbon and methane, and a Planetary Undersurface Tool (dubbed PLUTO). This “mole” was capable of moving across the ground at 20mm per second and was going to be used to collect subsurface soil samples for analysis. The entire assembly was powered by an array of solar panels.

When the probe failed to respond, the ESA held an inquiry and attempted to use the Mars Express orbiter to image the Beagle-2’s landing place, but were unable to resolve the probe at its intended landing site, Isidis Planitia.

Today, NASA announced that painstaking observation with the later Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has successfully located the Beagle-2. The reason the Mars Express couldn’t find its own probe is straightforward — the camera onboard the Mars Express is only capable of resolving images at roughly 10 meters or smaller. The MRO, in contrast, can resolve an image as small as three feet in diameter — which means the Beagle-2 was just within the resolution distance of the MRO.

The Beagle had landed

This new data shows that the Beagle-2 did land properly at Isidis Planitia, but that a secondary problem prevented the probe’s solar panels from opening properly. The MRO also captured what it believes to be the parachutes, deployed some distance from the spacecraft.

The best available images of the probe are below. Compared to the image at the top of the article, they appear to show that the probe properly deployed at least two solar panels, possibly more, but that something prevented it from completing the deployment process.

Unfortunately, the probe’s antenna could only deploy if all of the solar panels were properly deployed first, which means there’s no chance of recovering data from the Beagle-2, even if its electrical systems had survived more than a decade on the Martian surface. Still, it’s an important discovery and partial vindication for the British team, who now know that the lander landed in the proper area and with the appropriate orientation.

Mars, it should be noted, is a notoriously difficult planet to land on or survey. Of the 38 missions sent to Mars, 19 of them have failed to reach the planet at all, with a number of others failing before achieving mission objectives. All told, two-thirds of the missions to Mars launched from NASA, the ESA, Russia, and other nations have failed before completing their assigned tasks.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

CES 2015: WEARABLES EVERYWHERE

At the annual gadget show, wearable-device makers are moving beyond activity-tracking wristbands.

The International Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas this week, is a vast celebration of every imaginable gadget and gizmo, from self-cleaning smartphone screens to self-driving cars. And while the event is not always a reliable guide (think 3-D TVs), it does reveal the industry’s best guess of what consumers might want next.

This coming year, wearable technology is expected to be big: companies at CES displayed every imaginable wearable gadget, designed for everything from baby monitoring to calmer meditation.

And at the press preview on Sunday, where gadget makers show off their latest devices, there were plenty of niche wearables on display. The Ego LS wearable camera from Liquid Image, a company based in Santa Rosa, California, will be able to stream live video over Verizon’s 4G network (though, like a portable hotspot, it will require its own data plan). The camera, which will be released in March and cost $399 with an attachable 4G module, will also work with some as-yet-unnamed trackers to show your activity data live.

Wearable makers are also working on ways to take more accurate, intimate measurements than you can get with just an accelerometer. Singapore-based Zensorium, for instance, will soon start selling Being, a wearable device that can be worn as a smart watch or clipped to your clothing. When it’s on the wrist, an optical sensor on its back can continuously measure your heart rate and blood pressure, and it will use those readings to measure your stress. The watch, which is expected to ship in three months, will cost $199.

Among the odder-looking wearables on display was the head-worn Melomind from Paris-based myBrain Technologies, a digital meditation aid that shares EEG measurements with your smartphone.
Melomind looks like a cross between a headband and a bike helmet, with several metal electrodes touching different parts of the wearer’s head. Cofounder Thibaud Dumas, who wore a Melomind while speaking, explained that the device measures a user’s brain waves and sends them to a smartphone app via Bluetooth; the app also plays music that Dumas said will adjust with your changing brain waves in an effort to help you relax. The device will cost $299, and the company hopes to release it in late 2015.

Also on show at CES: Pacif-i, a pacifier made by U.K.-based Blue Maestro that measures a baby’s temperature and shares it via smartphone, and Tzoa, a wearable device made by Vancouver-based Clad Innovations that measures air pollution and UV exposure.

The many wearable devices and smart appliances on display at CES could also signal new opportunities for tech companies to target offerings to your behavior, said Shawn DuBravac, the chief economist and director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association, during a talk on Sunday. For instance, by monitoring your smart thermostat, in-home camera, and smart watch, he said, Netflix might eventually be able to determine that you’re alone, sad, and cold and offer a movie that might cheer you up.

NVIDIA DEMOS A CAR COMPUTER TRAINED WITH “DEEP LEARNING”

Many cars now include cameras or other sensors that record the passing world and trigger intelligent behavior, such as automatic braking or steering to avoid an obstacle. Today’s systems are usually unable to tell the difference between a trash can and traffic cop standing next to it, though.

This week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia, a leading marking of computer graphics chips, unveiled a vehicle computer called the Drive PX that could help cars interpret and react to the world around them.

Nvidia already supplies chips to many car makers, but engineers at those companies usually have to write software to collect and process data from various different sensor systems. Drive PX is more powerful than existing hardware, and it should also make it easier to integrate and process sensor data.

The computer uses Nvidia’s new graphics microprocessor, the Tegra X1. It is capable of processing information from up to 12 cameras simultaneously, and it comes with software designed to assist with safety or autonomous driving systems. Most impressive, it includes a system trained to recognize different objects using a powerful technique known as deep learning (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). The computer is also designed to generate realistic 3-D maps and other graphics for dashboard displays.

“It’s pretty cool to bring this level of powerful computation into cars,” said John Leonard, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who works on autonomous-car technology. “It’s the first such computer that seems really designed for a car—an autopilot computer.”

The new Nvidia hardware can also be updated remotely, so that car manufacturers can fix bugs or add new functionality. This is something few car companies, aside from Tesla, do currently.

So far Audi has emerged as an early buyer; at CES, the company showed off a luxury concept car called the Audi Prologue that includes the Drive PX. A year ago, the company announced at CES that it had developed a compact computer for processing sensor information (see “Audi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-Driving Cars”). That, too, included Nvidia chips.

The introduction of Nvidia’s product is a landmark moment for deep learning, a technology that processes sensory information efficiently by loosely mimicking the way the brain works. At CES, Nvidia showed that its software can detect objects such as cars, people, bicycles, and signs, even when they are partly hidden.

Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, says the Nvidia chipset is an important commercial milestone. “I would not call it a breakthrough, but more a continuous advance in a direction that has been going for a number of years now,” he said.

Yann LeCun, a data scientist at New York University who leads deep-learning efforts at Facebook (see “Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts”), also sees the announcement as an important step: “It is significant because current solutions tend to be closed and proprietary, use custom and inflexible hardware, and tend to be ‘black boxes’ that equipment manufacturers cannot really customize.”

At a press event Sunday, Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, said the devices will provide “more computing horsepower inside a car than anything you have today.”

INTEL’S BROADWELL IS COMING TO MAINSTREAM LAPTOPS

Intel’s Broadwell is coming to mainstream laptops — here’s what you need to know

CES has always been a major launch window for Intel and 2015 was no exception. The company announced multiple new Broadwell chips today, as it’s been promising to do for the past few years — but exactly which cores are these, and how much should you care about them compared to the Haswell chips currently on the market?

First, let’s back up to how Broadwell’sinitial delays impacted the long-term product rollout. When Intel decided to stagger Broadwell’s launch dates, it opted to introduce the most power-efficient cores first, followed by mobile parts in the 5-28W TDP range. The new chips are known as Broadwell-U, to distinguish them from the Core M family (Broadwell-Y).
These new core are going to replace the current crop of Haswell low voltage and mainstream dual-core processors, and primarily drop into ultrabooks and non-enthusiast laptops. The advance are driven by two different cores — an uprated 1.3B Core M chip with higher TDPs and correspondingly more powerful clocks.

The other Broadwell variant, shown above, bumps up the transistor count and die size considerably, mostly on the GPU side of the equation. Broadwell-U’s 1.9B transistors are spent pushing out the GPU to 48 executable units, up from the 24 EUs in Broadwell-Y/Core M. In Intel’s parlance, an “EU” or execution unit, is the fundamental unit of the graphics engine — 48 EUs is equivalent to the CUDA core count or streaming processor count from an Nvidia or AMD chip (note: GPU core counts cannot be compared directly due to drastic differences in how much work each “core” can perform per cycle).

Broadwell’s GPU is available in two basic configurations — GT3 (48 EUs) and GT2 (24 EUs). GPU horsepower is the major factor in determining Intel’s hardware stack and processor pricing. The company is releasing the same basic dual-core + Hyper-Threading CPU in multiple GPU configurations and TDPs, including:

Intel Iris Graphics 6100 (GT3 graphics, 28W TDP)
Intel HD Graphics 6000 (GT3 graphics, 15W TDP)
Intel HD Graphics 5500 (GT2 graphics, 15W TDP)
Intel HD Graphics (Pentium and Celeron, 15W TDP)

The “HD Graphics” denotes a cut-down subsystem with minimal performance attached to a low-cost processor. Graphics capability plays an important role in both chip TDP and Intel’s pricing — the cheapest HD 6000 parts start at $315 for 15W parts, while the slightly higher-clocked Iris 6100 chips at 28W TDPs are the same price.

Will Broadwell boost battery life?

The big question for mobile users is going to be whether Broadwell will improve battery life. The picture there is complicated — it very much depends on where you look and what you’re looking for. On the positive side, Broadwell incorporates multiple improvements to the underlying SoC, over and above the improved 14nm process. Intel can now turn the GPU off for much of the time (while continuing to refresh the display controller). In addition, Broadwell sports a new, low-power audio DSP that improves power consumption while watching movies or playing back certain types of content.

Previous research, however, has shown that these kinds of gains are very much conditional. When Haswell shipped, DigitalTrends did a comparison study on how an identical laptop with Haswell performed in various battery life scenarios compared to Ivy Bridge. In near-idle tests, Haswell indeed delivered a nearly 50% increase in battery life.

In other scenarios, however, the gains were much more modest, and at full power load, battery life actually went backwards. This reflects underlying physics rather than skullduggery on Intel’s part, but it’s important to keep in mind that the improvements you see are going to be workload dependent.

The second complicating factor is laptop manufacturer’s tendency to suck up efficiency improvements through the use of higher-end hardware and the relentless pursuit of thinner form factors and lighter systems. Again, there’s nothing objectively wrong with that, but higher resolution displays consume more power than lower ones, assuming equal technology. Smaller, lighter laptops tends to mean smaller, thinner batteries. In some cases, this also means a reliance on USB charging, which can exacerbate the battery issue by taking longer to recharge the system.

Put together, we’d suggest that end users expect to evaluate Broadwell system-by-system and in specific use cases. There will undoubtedly be scenarios where it substantially improves on Haswell — and there are going to be laptops that don’t show much gain at all, for a variety of reasons.

Overall, Broadwell is going to be a positive step forward for the mobile PC industry and if you’re upgrading from a laptop from the 2010-2011 era, I’d jump on it, no question. If you’re already using Ivy Bridge or Haswell, however, I’d wait to see what specific systems offer and evaluate the various pros and cons of hardware configurations. Lower resolution displays and heavier batteries may not be as sexy as Retina-class hardware and featherweight products, but for some people, the battery life improvements outweigh the other issues.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

ET deals: Lenovo K450e Core i7 desktop with 16GB RAM, 2TB HHD for $700

One of the pros of owning a large form factor desktop is how easy it is to upgrade components at will. Start off with a great set of base specs and enjoy ample room to grow with Lenovo’s performance focused K450e desktop, on sale now for just $699.99 after a helpful $300 in savings.

Lenovo has equipped their K450e desktop with a strong set of specs to get you started, headlined by a 4th-gen Core i7-4790 quad-core processor. Also included off the bat is a sizable quantity of memory, including 16GB of RAM and a 2TB hybrid hard drive with an 8GB SSD cache. Together these specs give you everything you need to fly through both everyday and complex office and multimedia tasks, all while multitasking freely and enjoying snappy performance and quick boot times.

As mentioned above, the K450e is designed to be highly upgradeable, and features tool-less entry, easy pull trays, clear access to drive bays and more. This means it’ll be easy to upgrade your memory even further if you want to, as well as to do things like add a dedicated graphics card or even a new PSU and turn this into much more of a serious gaming rig. Aiding that cause, the case is conveniently built with side-vents for more efficient cooling.

Even without a GPU, the K450e offers a large quantity of ports, including HDMI, DVI, VGA, and six USB ports (four USB 3.0, and two of which are conveniently front-facing). There’s also 7.1-channel surround sound support and a DVDRW, as well as built-in 802.11n WiFi. A keyboard and mouse are also included with purchase. Snag this desktop up and expand it to your needs – or not – from a great starting price after our coupon savings.

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Viber launches games platform

After voice and video calling, the social messaging app is now adding social gaming to its platform.

As the popularity of social messaging apps grows, so does the need for the different companies behind the apps to offer new and exciting features in order to keep up with the competition and to keep people on their platforms.

Gaming is quickly becoming part and parcel of messaging apps that are big in Japan, Korea and China -- such as Line and WeChat. So, while Viber is by no means in uncharted territory, it is the first app with a large Western world user base to plug into the trend for smartphone gaming.

"We have been focusing on broadening the functionality of Viber and are really excited to unveil Viber Games," said Talmon Marco, Viber CEO. "This major expansion of our platform gives people another completely new way to connect with Viber. It's an important step for us and we are looking forward to the response from our users."

By hosting games within the app, Viber can bring a host of social, interactive, connected elements that are missing from standalone titles. Users can compete with their contacts and gift each other in-game purchases for example.

But perhaps the smartest feature is to put quality above all else. When the feature goes live on Monday in five initial test regions -- Belarus, Malaysia, Israel, Singapore and the Ukraine -- players will only have a choice of three games. All of the titles has been developed specifically for Viber and even feature characters that are based on the app's growing choice of customizable stickers.

The three games are Viber Candy Mania -- a platform/puzzle game featuring Violet and Legat (two popular Viber sticker characters); Viber Pop -- a bubble puzzle game; and Wild Luck Casino, which features virtual slot machines.

After a test run, Viber plans to roll the games out globally some time in 2015.