IBM and others have already boasted about their plans to develop sub-32nm processors, but it now looks like Big Blue is aiming to blow past its competitors in a pretty big way by taking things all the way down to the 22-nanometer level. That rather significant leap is apparently possible thanks to a new technique that IBM developed with Mentor Graphics and Toppan Printing dubbed Computational Scaling, which employs some new mathematical techniques and other head-scratching measures to overcome the current limitations associated with etching circuits onto processors of this scale. While it of course sees the 22nm processors being used in even smaller laptops and an array of other devices, IBM seems to be especially interested in using the chips in its cloud computing initiatives, where it seems to think the chips' greater efficiency could make a particularly big impact. As you might have guessed, however, it's not yet clear exactly when that might happen.

[Via DailyTech]

Japan's Nikkan is reporting that Sony and Toshiba will begin mass production of the 45nm Cell processor in 2009 -- not this autumn as previously rumored. The smaller chip which cost less than the current 65nm Cell to manufacture also require 40% less power to run. This opens the door to possible price drops on existing PS3 consoles in 2009 as well as slimmer, cooler running rigs should Sony decide to refresh the industrial design.

Well, that didn't take long. Atul Malhotra, the HP executive charged with stealing printer market data when he left IBM and sending it to his new colleagues at HP with the genius-level subject line "For Your Eyes Only," has pled guilty to one count of theft of trade secrets. Malhotra probably made the right choice -- he specifically requested the information just before he left IBM and HP itself investigated and turned him in when he was found sending it around, so the case against him was pretty airtight. It's not clear what his plea deal is, but sentencing is scheduled for October 29, and he can get up to 10 years in the clink with a fine of up to a quarter-million dollars. Crime don't pay, kids.

The printer market isn't exactly full of the most interesting news, but it's still big money, and big money tends to bring out the worst in people -- like former HP VP Atul Malhotra, who was just charged with stealing trade secrets from his former employer IBM and emailing them to other HP execs. Apparently Malhotra requested some confidential sales data two months before he went from the three-letter company to the two-letter one, and when he got there he hit up some other senior execs with the files -- marking the subject line "For Your Eyes Only." Yeah, that's an effective way to keep a lid on things. Malhotra was fired from HP in 2006, so all this went down some time ago, and HP says it actually conducted an internal investigation about the matter before firing Malhotra and reporting the theft to both IBM and the authorities. Sure, sure -- but we'll know what's up when the next HP AIO is running a Cell chip.

Stacking silicon into what are called 3D chips is something IBM does as good as, if not better than, any other screener. Problem is, all those stacked circuits create a an exponential amount of heat, and traditional cooling methods don't scale. So what does IBM do? It comes up with integrated water channels about the size of a human hair that it's calling "interlayer cooling." According to IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, this is the first tech of its kind. The 50 micron channels between individual chip layers are performing at 180 watt/cm² per layer for a stack with a typical footprint of 4 cm². In other words, it works.

[Via TG Daily]

It wasn't long ago that IBM promised to unleash its racetrack MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) on a power and speed-hungry computing public, but now Toshiba says its 1GB MRAM chips are "almost ready". The chips use Spin-RAM (STT-RAM) and Toshiba fully expects them to take over where DRAM left off by 2015. They say their new chips use about 10 percent the energy used by DRAM and, like MRAM is supposed to do, retain memory even after the power supply has been cut off. So what does this mean? Instant boot-up, fast access times, and super-low power consumption. While MRAM has been announced by others, capacities and speeds promised by this 1GB jobby from Toshiba will certainly make things worthwhile.

[Via MRAM-info]

So, how do you go about impressing the world after busting out a few systems based around the "fastest chip on Earth?" By getting us all worked up for a little thing called racetrack memory, that's how. Far from being the first memory technology that runs laps around the DIMMs we're relying on today, IBM researchers are suggesting that this iteration could enable users to store substantially more data at a lower cost and be available in around a decade. Put simply, the gurus working the project have discovered a way to overcome the prohibitively expensive process of manipulating domain walls in magnetic storage, essentially making a long-standing approach entirely more viable. If you're totally in nerd heaven right now, we assure you, checking out the explanatory video waiting after the jump is a must-do.

[Via BBC]

Pretty much anything that's predictably repetitive can be automated. As such, we expect corporate lawyers to be replaced by shiny dull robots just as soon as AI advances sufficiently beyond Japanese pet translators. Robots... lawyers... oh wait. Anyway, ASUS has mechanically responded to IBM's patent lawsuit with a scripted suit all its own. ASUS claims that IBM is violating two of its patents related to server technology and storage on the Internet. That's two claimed violations against IBM vs. three against ASUS -- if this were a playground, IBM would win and ASUS would have to hand over its lunch money. Instead, this is big time patent law so it'll cost somebody millions and create months of distraction.

Merely months after IBM first inserted silicon nanophotonics into our memory bank, and just weeks after we drooled all over ourselves reading about its green optical link, the mega-corp has chosen St. Patrick's Day to trumpet the development of the "world's tiniest nanophotonic switch." The device, which boasts a footprint "about 100 times smaller than the cross section of a human hair," is said to be a vital part of creating an on-chip optical network. More specifically, it's bringing the gurus behind it one step closer to conjuring up multi-core CPUs that transmit data with light pulses rather than relying on electrical signals on copper wires. This particular switch would essentially divert traffic within the network, ensuring that "optical messages from one processor core could efficiently get to any of the other cores on the chip." Keep on livin' the dream IBM -- just ping us when this stuff is anywhere near ready for the commercial market.

As of this morning you can add Hitachi to the list of cohorts IBM has gathered in its quest for sub-32nm circuitry. Hitachi's 2-year semiconductor research agreement -- a first between IBM and Hitachi -- puts them under a loose-knit alliance with AMD, Chartered, Freescale, Infineon, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and STMicroelectronics. The notable, non-member here is of course, Intel; that little company making "45-nm processes" and "Hi-K metal gate" house-hold terms amongst geeky, type-A adopters of consumer electronics. Yes, we're looking at you.

So IBM is apparently working like crazy on some next-gen communications technology that -- ready to have your mind blown? -- "uses light instead of wires to send information." We know, this is some crazy future crap up in here, but check it out. Apparently this so-called light-based communications system is supposed to be ten times more power efficient than others in its class, and can transfer data at speeds far greater than our current 4Mbps token-ring networks and even the next-gen 10BASE2 Ethernet (as if!); if optical data communications are actually real, well, it's just in time because we've been seriously maxing out our Tandy 1000 playing MUDs. Touting such other gibberish as "high definition content," and "ex-aflop supercomputing," IBM's Optocards (which feature integrated "Optochips") can apparently move data at up to 8Tbps / 1TBps, which isn't quite up to snuff to compete with Alcatel-Lucent's latest, but is still, like, way more than necessary for accessing the Engadget BBS.

Shocking as it may seem, mainframe computing has never really gone away -- even in this age of modular PS3-based supercomputers, financial institutions, retailers, and other large corporations still buy the big iron, which means IBM still makes it. The company's latest, the fridge-sized System z10, follows up on the million-dollar System z9 released three years ago with faster, cooler processors, more energy efficient designs, 70 percent more computing capacity -- and a smaller price tag, starting at just south of a million dollars this time. Hilariously, the z10 caused a bit of a mainframe Osbourne effect: eager customers holding off on z9 purchases in anticipation of the z10 caused a 15 percent drop in IBM's mainframe revenue last quarter. Mainframe fanboys? Nothing surprises us anymore.

Well, it sure looks like IBM is keeping all its supercomputing bases covered these days, with it not only working on a chip-sized supercomputer, but a global-scale shared computer that'd be capable of "hosting the entire internet as an application." That latter word comes in the form of a white paper ambitiously dubbed "Project Kittyhawk" (we're guessing they found "Project Mulitvac" a little too obvious), which aims to explore the construction and implications of such a massive scale computer. That apparently wouldn't be a SETI or Folding@home-style shared computer consisting of everyday PCs, however, with it instead relying on IBM's petaflopping Blue Gene/P as a common platform, which would effectively be able to run any web-scale application you could throw at it. Of course, none of that has moved very far beyond the page just yet, so you can rest easy that there's still no supercomputer out there that's capable of bringing the entire internet to the halt on a whim, at least that we know of.

[Via Slashdot]