WorldsFastest
Latest
Extra footage of record-setting Yates electric plane flight shows power loss, dramatic deadstick landing (video)
We've chronicled Flight of the Century founder and CEO Chip Yates' record-breaking 202.6MPH flight in his Long-ESA EV craft before. What we didn't quite touch on, however, is the power loss Yates' aircraft suffered after earning that electric plane speed record. Now Yates has released new video of the flight, which includes the moment his aircraft breaks the record, the ensuing power loss and his dramatic deadstick landing. That smile you see in the photo up there is the smile of a man who just made history and is also happy to be alive. Hey, we're glad he's safe, too. You can witness the close call yourself by checking out the video after the break. [Image credit: Flight of the Century]
Chip Yates breaks yet another record, notches 202MPH in world's fastest electric flight (video)
Chip Yates is a speed junkie in the truest sense. After nabbing the title for world's fastest EV motorcycle in April of 2011, the self-proclaimed "green technology innovator" is at it again. This time, Yates was able to conquer the sky above using the Long-ESA EV craft he and his Flight of the Century team engineered using a Burt Rutan Long-EZ and proprietary Infinite Range battery tech. The record-breaking flight in question took off from Inyokern Airport on July 19, achieving a top speed of 202.6MPH and solidifying Yates' place in the pantheon of electric enthusiasts. You can head past the break to check out a brief video snippet of the successful mission in action, but fair warning: it's not as exciting as you'd imagine. We're guessing it's one of those things you'd have to be there (in the cockpit) to appreciate.
German scientists shoot world's fastest movie: gone in 50 femtoseconds
No, it's not another Fast & Furious sequel, it's something much quicker -- 800 billion times quicker, to be precise. Scientists at DESY (Germany's largest particle physics center) are premiering the Guinness World Record-holding fastest "movie" to a select audience at its light sources users' meeting. The film was shot using an X-ray Laser, and splitting the light in two. By firing one beam off on a minuscule detour (0.015 millimeters) and delaying its arrival by 50 femtoseconds, two separate images are captured. Okay, so two frames isn't exactly Lord of the Rings, but it's still the smallest interval ever recorded. This technique won't be popping up in Hollywood any time soon -- instead, it's actually used for snapping subatomic glimpses of ultra-fast molecular processes and chemical reactions. Despite the brevity of this record-breaking flick, the plot is apparently still more complex than Tokyo Drift.
Mitsubishi Electric to build world's fastest elevator, usher in the death of small talk
Cheer up, ladies, because Mitsubishi Electric is about to make your elevator ride substantially less awkward. Yesterday, the company unveiled plans to construct what it hopes will become the world's fastest lifts, as part of a new project in China. The forthcoming set of elevators will be housed within the still-incomplete Shanghai Tower, where they'll travel between the basement and 119th floor at a speed of 59 feet per second -- a rate that would narrowly eclipse the current Guinness world record, which sits at about 55 feet per second. These elevators, of course, would be significantly slower if they were filled with vomit, which is why Mitsubishi will add active roller guides, vibration-dampening roof covers and pneumatic controls to make the ride a bit easier on the human body. Unfortunately, it'll be a while before these flesh wagons enter the record books, as the Shanghai Tower likely won't be completed until 2014. Willy Wonka, however, has already begun the appeals process. Elevate past the break for more information in the full press release. [Image courtesy of AMC]
ASUS' 12x BW-12D1S-U external Blu-ray writer: world's fastest, until the next one
Fed up with the simply unacceptable performance of your external Blu-ray writer? Of course you are. ASUS feels your pain, and it's looking to ease it with the soothing balm of the BW-12D1S-U, a new 12X, USB 3.0 burner. The highly capable (and highly complex, we're surmising) BW-12D1S-U offers realtime 2D to 3D conversion, 1080p video output and support for the usual complement of HD audio formats. But does it have a jewel-like, almost ominous translucent blue power button, you ask? Indeed it does, not to mention a sleek black finish and the ability to operate horizontally or vertically. The outfit has yet to put a price on having the fastest writer on the block, but don't even pretend that you wouldn't pay it. Whatever "it" ends up being.
IBM shows off 155GHz graphene transistor in the name of DARPA research
IBM might be cautious about touting graphene as a a silicon killer, but that hasn't stopped it from pushing the production of ever faster graphene transistors. With the recent demonstration of a 155GHz graphene transistor, the firm successfully outdid its previous record-setting efforts, which produced a cut-off frequency of 100GHz. What's more, the thing is also IBM's smallest to date, with a gate length of 40 nanometers; that's 200 nanometers less than the 100GHz iteration. This smaller, faster transistor was produced as part of a DARPA research project that aims to develop high-performance RF (radio frequency) transistors. So, no, we probably won't be seeing the things in our PCs anytime soon, but it looks like they could be right at home in war machines of the future.
AMD launches Radeon HD 6990 powerhouse for $699, maintains 'world's fastest' title
If you're scoring at home, NVIDIA currently holds the lead in single-GPU graphics cards with its GeForce GTX 580, but ATI's dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 has been holding down the absolute speed crown for a good long while. Now, bearing the name of AMD Radeon HD 6990, its successor sidles up to the throne and demands attention as the fastest single expansion board you can plug into your shiny new motherboard. The 6990 boasts a massive 4GB of GDDR5, 3,072 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs, and an 830MHz core clock speed. A dual-BIOS switch will let you crank that clock up to 880MHz with a corresponding increase in voltage, but don't expect to see much overclocking headroom above that. Reviewers note, alongside their fawning assessment of the world's best performance, that the HD 6990 is a massively power-hungry card (375W TDP) and one that makes quite a bit of noise while going through its herculean tasks. That's in spite of a new vapor chamber cooling system that allegedly supports up to 450W of thermal output. If all this strikes you as a somewhat flawed execution, maybe you'll join us in hoping NVIDIA's imminently upcoming response, dubbed the GTX 590, will be able to offer a neater, more efficient assault on the extreme peaks of graphical performance. Read - HardOCP Read - AnandTech Read - Tech Report Read - PC Perspective Read - techPowerUp! Read - Hot Hardware Read - Hexus
Chinese passenger train reaches 302mph, claims speed record for unmodified trains
Did you find the 262mph record that China scooped up only two months ago impressive? Well, add another 40mph to that number as today Xinhua News has revealed China's claim to the new speed record for unmodified commercial trains. The new line presently being tested between Beijing and Shanghai has delivered a mind-warping 302mph (486kph) top speed, which is projected to help cut down travel times between the two cities in half, down to a mere five hours. As with the Shanghai-Hangzhou connection that held the record previously, speeds with actual passengers on board will probably be limited to more moderate levels when this connections opens up in 2012, but the Chinese government's goal is still that magical 312mph (500kph) mark -- at this pace, they should be there by Tuesday.
NVIDIA promises 'fastest DX11 GPU on the planet' very, very soon (video)
Nobody will be too shocked to hear NVIDIA expects its next flagship GPU to be the fastest that's ever been, but few will have guessed it'd also be one of the company's coolest and quietest. In the first public teasing of its next-gen graphics card (which is almost certain to bear the GeForce GTX 580 name tag), NVIDIA has revealed a new vapor chamber cooling system, which reminds us of Shuttle's ICE CPU cooler -- basically, water sealed within the chamber gets boiled by the hot elements (a copper plate in NVIDIA's case), which forces it to transfer heat away to the bits that are being cooled by the fan, where it chills out and recycles itself back to the boiling plate. The end result, according to NVIDIA, is about seven decibels less vroom relative to the GTX 480, along with lower operational temperatures. Besides that, the company's Tom Petersen also showed off an impressive tessellation demo and the first public display of Call of Duty: Black Ops gameplay, which was powered by this as yet unannounced GPU. Skip past the break to see it all on video. [Thanks, Vygantas]
China's Tianhe-1A is world's fastest supercomputer, plans to usurp the West now complete
It happened. China just passed the US and the world with the reveal of the world's fastest supercomputer. The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray's 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts. Knowing that 10 petaflops is within reach by 2012, we'll see if Tianhe-1A can maintain its title when the new Top500 supercomputers list is released next week.
Huawei breaks DSL speed barrier with 700Mbps prototype
DSL cables might not really be the sexiest thing in networking anymore, but what they are is ubiquitous, so let's not begrudge Huawei its feat here. The Chinese telecoms facilitator has shown off a new prototype that can pump 700Mbps of data across a 400-meter expanse. This is done by bundling four twisted pairs of copper wire together and sprinkling in some fairy dust to make them communicate at 175Mbps each. The clever bit here is in how crosstalk and interference are minimized, and Huawei claims a 75 percent improvement in bandwidth as a result. An immediate opportunity for these new cables will be, ironically, with fiber rollouts, as they could serve as the last connection between fiber hubs and your home. Then again, with Google and Chattanooga already looking at 1Gbps lanes, maybe the day of the copper wire has already passed?
IBM claims world's fastest processor with 5.2GHz z196
Remember when a 1.4GHz processor was deemed the world's fastest? Man, that was ages ago. Recently, IBM has laid claim to that very record, with its 5.2GHz z196 processor being the focal point. Of course, we've seen a number of consumer chips hum along at speeds well beyond that (thanks to sophisticated cooling systems, of course), but this here enterprise chip does it without any liquid nitrogen-based assistance. It's a four-core slab that was manufactured using the outfit's 45 nanometer technology, boasting 1.4 billion transistors and the ability to handle more than 50 billion instructions per second. Interestingly, Fujitsu's Venus CPU is said to handle a staggering 128 billion calculations per second, so we're guessing that IBM won't be snagging this crown without any debate from the competition. At any rate, there's a very convincing video waiting for you after the break, and no, you won't find this thing in your next Alienware anytime soon.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M reviewed: fastest mobile GPU to date
It's one thing to have a product called the world's fastest on paper, but it's another thing entirely to have the benchmarks confirm it. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480M has been swooned over for months now, but it just recently hit the hardcore review sites in a big way. Frankly, there's not a whole lot to say about the thing at this point: it's simply the fastest mobile GPU to date, with Hot Hardware finding it to be "significantly faster in nearly all gaming benchmarks," with just one title showing the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 as the champ by only a few frames. If you've been searching for the fastest mobile GPU in town, you're wasting your time looking any harder; 'course, all of that power consumes an insane level of energy, so true road warriors will certainly want to look elsewhere. Critics pointed out that energy consumption and excess heat were real issues, though both of those are easily overlooked when you're able to take a beastly laptop to a LAN party rather than your desktop. Give those links below a visit if you still need proof.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: 'world's fastest' mobile GPU now official, landing in June
NVIDIA has just announced that the GTX 480M, the mobile re-spin of its extravagantly overpowered Fermi desktop parts, will be arriving in the middle of next month. Touted as the world's fastest mobile graphics processor, this chip will bring 352 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface to up to 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. These are clear and convincing advances over the incumbent Green Team leader, the 360M, but things start to look a little worrying when we check the 480M's clock speeds. The processor speed is nearly halved from the desktop GTX 480, at 850MHz, the memory does only 1,200MHz, and the graphics run at 425MHz -- we didn't know anything worthwhile even operated below 500MHz these days. Either way, you're getting a computing powerhouse, with the 480M's 897 gigaflops comfortably dwarfing its predecessor's 413 and promising almighty tessellation performance. What it all means with regard to keeping your frame rates up while traversing the Terminus Systems, we can't yet say. We'll let the benchmarking gurus figure it out -- go past the break for the full press release and spec sheet.
Fujitsu's supercomputer-ready Venus CPU said to be "world's fastest"
Due to the intrinsic limitations of machine translation, it's hard to say exactly what makes Fujitsu's latest supercomputer the "world's fastest," but we'll hesitantly believe for the time being. We're told that the SPARC64 VIIIfx (codename Venus) can churn through 128 billion calculations per second, which supposedly bests the current champ -- a chip from Intel -- by 2.5 times. An AP report on the matter states that Fujitsu shrunk the size of each central circuit, which in turn doubled the number of circuits per chip. 'Course, this beast won't be ready for supercomputer work for several years yet, giving the chip maker's biggest rivals plenty of time to sabotage its moment in the limelight.[Via Physorg]
