Kang Gosol

SSDs can survive drops and other kinds of hostile treatment much better than hard drives, but they can still be broken if their PCB or one of the chips gets damaged. For those who want to reduce their risk of losing their data, Buffalo has introduced its new family of SSDs — the SSD-PSMU3 — that is specifically designed to withstand drops. Unlike typical rugged devices, the new drives are rather miniature and more resemble flash drives. Buffalo’s SSD-PSMU3 series SSDs are designed to endure MIL-STD 810G 516.6 Procedure IV drop test, known as the ‘transit drop’. This means that the device was tested to survived six face drop tests, eight corner drop tests, and 12 edge drop tests from a height of around 1.2 meters, remained in working condition and suffered no physical of internal damage. The drives measure 33×9.5×59.5 mm and weigh 15 grams (dimensions and weight akin to those of a box of PEZ mints), so it should not be particularly hard...

With transistor shrinks slowing and demand for HPC gear growing, as of late there has been an increased interest in chip solutions larger than the reticle size of a lithography machine – that is, chips bigger than the maximum size that a single chip can be produced. We've already seen efforts such as Cerebras' truly massive 1.2 trillion transistor wafer scale engine , and they aren't alone. As it turns out, TSMC and Broadcom have also been playing with the idea of oversized chips, and this week they've announced their plans to develop a supersized interposer to be used in Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging. Overall, the proposed 1,700 mm² interposer is twice the size of TSMC's  858 mm² reticle limit . Of course, TSMC can't actually produce a single interposer this large all in one shot – that's what the reticle limit is all about – so instead the company is essentially stitching together multiple interposers, bu...

Back in August, the United States Department of Energy and Cray announced plans for a third United States exascale supercomputer, El Capitan . Scheduled to be installed in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in early 2023, the system is intended primarily (but not exclusively) for use by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), who uses supercomputers in their ongoing nuclear weapons modeling. At the time the system was announced, The DOE and LLNL confirmed that they would be buying a Shasta system from Cray (now part of HPE), however the announcement at the time didn’t go into any detail about what hardware would actually be filling one of Cray’s very flexible supercomputers. But as of today, the wait is over. This afternoon the DOE and HPE are announcing the architectural details of the supercomputer, revealing that AMD will be providing both the CPUs and accelerators (GPUs), as well as revising the performance estimate for the supercomputer. Alread...