Supercomputers that consist of thousands of individual processor "brains" connected by miles of copper wires could one day fit into a laptop PC, thanks in part to a breakthrough by IBM scientists announced today.

And while today's supercomputers can use the equivalent energy required to power hundreds of homes, these future tiny supercomputers-on-a-chip would expend the energy of a light bulb.

While companies probably get plenty of advertising revenue from putting previews in behind DVD movies, IBM seeks to go above and beyond the call of duty. IBM recently applied for a patent. If granted, IBM would own the means to essentially place commercials in the middle of a DVD movie. You can read the exact workings of this new system by reading the patent. IBM argues that such invasive and interruptive methods of advertising "may be a great source of advertising revenues that are not being tapped...revenues from DVD advertising may contribute to the reduction in cost of the DVDs." Of course, if IBM does start flooding DVDs with unwanted advertisements, chances are users will make their DVDs extremely cheap...by pirating them, thus avoiding the advertisements in the first place.

The world's most powerful line of supercomputers - IBM's Blue Gene family - is by far the most energy-efficient, according to a new ranking of the TOP500 computers. The inaugural Green500 list ranks by energy efficiency the machines that make the overall TOP500 list of the world's fastest computers. The new Green500 list shows IBM Blue Gene supercomputers capturing 26 of the top 27 spots.

IBM and Cognos today announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Cognos, a publicly-held company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in an all-cash transaction at a price of approximately $5 billion USD or $58 USD per share, with a net transaction value of $4.9 billion USD. The acquisition is subject to Cognos shareholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.

After purchasing IBM's PC division three years ago Lenovo has continued to use the IBM brand until now. Although the agreement gave Lenovo rights to the IBM name until 2010 the company has now announced that, starting from next year it would drop the brand.

By making substantial progress on all of our critical priorities over the past few quarters, we're now a stronger, healthier company,

One important sign of this progress is our decision to completely transition our Think products from the IBM brand to the Lenovo brand two years earlier than planned.

said William Amelio, chief executive of Lenovo, in a press announcement relating to its quarterly results.

IBM today announced an innovative new semiconductor wafer reclamation process pioneered at its Burlington, Vermont manufacturing facility. The new process uses a specialized pattern removal technique to repurpose scrap semiconductor wafers -- thin discs of silicon material used to imprint patterns that make finished semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones, video games, and other consumer electronics -- to a form used to manufacture silicon-based solar panels. The new process was recently awarded the "2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award" from The National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR).

IBM today announced a definitive agreement to acquire NovusCG, a privately held storage solutions company based in Manassas, Virginia. Financial terms were not disclosed. Novus will become part of the Storage and Data Services business unit in IBM Global Technology Services.

I.B.M. plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft's dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

The company announced the desktop software, called I.B.M. Lotus Symphony, at an event yesterday in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the I.B.M. Web site.

I.B.M.'s Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsoft's mainstay Office programs - Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker.

The ability to cram more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

Now, if an idea that Stuart S. P. Parkin is kicking around in an I.B.M. lab here is on the money, electronic devices could hold 10 to 100 times the data in the same amount of space. That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV program broadcast during a week on 120 channels.

Yet another crazy American lawsuit seems to be on the cards as federal contractor T.R. Systems Inc. attempts to sue IBM after a $1.4 million IBM server fell from a forklift truck during transit. According to T.R. Systems, the rear wheels of the forklift being used to move the server hit a raised surface, causing the server to rock slightly and break the pallet holding it, resulting in the server falling onto the curb and being damaged. In the court documents, T.R Systems said "The damages sustained by T.R. Systems were due to the poor workmanship and/or defective packaging design and methods used by IBM to pack the servers prior to shipping." However, IBM has already filed a motion with the court asking for the case to be dismissed claiming that the accident was down to the forklift truck's driver, stating "No evidence exists that anything but [T.R. Systems'] negligence caused this accident." Now T.R Systems is now trying to claim more than $1.4 million in damages as it was forced to buy a new server after IBM refused to take the server back to its facility for testing.

AIX is an open, UNIX operating system that allows you to run the applications you want, on the hardware you want-IBM UNIX servers. AIX in combination with IBM's Virtualization offerings, provides you with new levels of flexibility and performance. AIX delivers high levels of security, integration, flexibility and reliability-essential for meeting the demands of today's information technology environments. AIX operates on the IBM System p , BladeCenter , IntelliStation POWER , and System i5 platforms, as well as predecessor IBM UNIX products including the IBM RS/6000 server and workstation product lines.

A new state of the art SRAM chipset is responsible for this achievement. The 6 GHz speed is almost twice the speed of today's SRAMs. SRAM's usage is to hold frequently accessed data used by the processor. The faster the access, the faster the data transfer from SRAM to CPU.

IBM today simultaneously launched what it claims is the fastest processor in the world and an ultra-powerful new computer server that leverages the chip's many breakthroughs in energy conservation and virtualization technology. IBM's new POWER6 chip is a 64 bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7GHz and 8MB of on chip L2 cache. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it. This means customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half. Also announced today is the IBM's new 2- to 16-core server which offers three times the performance per core of the HP Superdome machine. The new server is also the first ever to hold all four major benchmark speed records for business and technical performance.

Apple recently announced that it has officially received FCC approval to sell the iPhone, its much anticipated entry into the mobile phone market. Along with getting FCC approval, the iPhone is ready to ship next month, Apple spokespeople said.

All mobile phones offered in the United States must receive a "grant of equipment authorization," which means it has received the green light from the FCC.

"We're on track to release it in late June," Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel said. "Nothing has changed."

FCC documents confirmed the iPhone will have WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities. Apple requested the FCC keep several details secret from the public, including the official launch date of the device. Apple also requested the FCC not release external or internal photographs and user manual of the iPhone for 45 days -- which means the material will likely not be made available until the iPhone is on the market.

IBM's supercomputer Blue Gene/L has been used to run a 'cortical simulator' as complex as half of a mouse brain. The researchers say that their work has shown characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains, and are now working on improving the simulation to allow it to run faster in order to make it more neurobiologically faithful. Blue Gene/L is one of four Blue Gene projects in development and is the fastest computer in the world with a theoretical peak of 360 TFLOPS. Using 4,096 processors, each with 256MB of memory, the team managed to create a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons with up to 6,300 synapses each. Real mouse brains will have about 16,000 neurons which can have up to 8,000 synapses (connections with other nerve fibres) each.

IBM Moves Moore's Law into the Third-Dimension

Armonk, NY - 12 Apr 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips that will extend Moore's Law beyond its expected limits. The technology - called "through-silicon vias" -- allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.

The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The result is a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.

New research by Big Blue could see CPUs running up to 40% cooler in the near future, without needing prices to rocket. In a paper released at the IEEE Semi-Therm conference, IBM published ideas designed to make thermal paste more efficient, therefore allowing for an improved cooling capacity leading to cooler processors. According to IBM, current thermal paste techniques can lead to 40% of heat given off by the CPU being absorbed by the particles in the paste, largely caused by the fact that the particles don't spread evenly, leading to the "Magic Cross" shown in the image below and to the left. IBM's new technology involves integrating micro-meter length trenches into the copper cap that sits above the CPU core (below on the right), which will allow thermal paste to be more evenly distributed and will lead to a third less thermal paste being required, as well as halving the pressure required to fit a CPU cooler. IBM still needs to finalise the research, but this relatively in-expensive method could be integrated into new CPUs and coolers before too long. For more detailed information you can read IBM's press release.

At the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, IBM scientists will reveal a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today. The breakthrough could transform how data is accessed, shared and used across the Web for corporate and consumer networks. The transceiver is fast enough to reduce the download time for a typical high definition feature-length film to a single second compared to 30 minutes or more.

IBM Previews New Accessibility Tool for People With Low or No Vision to Access Multimedia Web Content

TOKYO & ARMONK, NY - 13 Mar 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new emerging technology that helps blind and visually impaired people experience streaming video and animation on the Internet. Designed at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory, the new multimedia browsing accessibility tool potentially opens a world of rich content to visually impaired people around the world, who number more than 161 million.

Computing giant IBM is planning yet another supercomputer, with this one set to take the performance crown away from its very own BlueGene. The computer is being built for the Department of Energy and will be housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, costing $110 million to construct. Named Roadrunner, this new hybrid will use a unique design combining 16,000 conventional AMD Opteron Cores alongside 16,000 Cell processors (yes, the ones in the PS3), with calculations being shared between the two. According to IBM, the Cell processors will act as the workhorse, completing the major floating point calculations, whilst the Opterons will act as the system interface processors and the transactional backbones between the nodes. Once the machine is finished it ought to run at one petaflop - that's one trillion calculations each second, more than capable of belittling BlueGene, which is capable of a mere 280 teraflops.

Harnessing the power of the Cell processor, developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, is no easy task - IBM has therefore decided to get together with Vivendi and offer hands on programming sessions on the processor to game developers.

"The Cell Broadband Engine is complex high-performance architecture that processes millions of pieces of information per second to deliver highly detailed graphics," said Hal Lasky, vice president of consumer, media and entertainment for IBM Global Engineering Solutions in a statement. "Our focus is also on enabling the broader eco-system of game developers to fully utilize the power of the Cell Broadband Engine. We hope this takes us to a plateau that has never been approached before."

Clinton Keith, chief technology officer for High Moon, admitted it "would have been great to get it before launch," but the information wasn't available at the time, so they are seeking it out now.

The performance of the Cell is such that IBM has discussed using it in supercomputers and has already released one blade server based on the Cell, the QS20, which provided 205 GFLOPS of floating point performance. With a rackmount chassis, performance could reach 2.8TFLOPs, which would easily put such a system in the Top 500 supercomputer list.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.

International Business Machines Corp. said Wednesday that its new memory technology will help unclog crippling bottlenecks that build up as increasingly powerful microprocessors attempt to retrieve data from a separate memory chip faster than it can be delivered.

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said its solution entails swapping out most of the static random access memory, or SRAM, used to store information directly on computer chips and integrating onto the chip another kind of memory, known as dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.

IBM said it has been able to speed up the DRAM to the point where it's nearly as fast as SRAM, and that the result is a type of memory known as embedded DRAM, or eDRAM, that helps boost the performance of chips with multiple core calculating engines and is particularly suited for enabling the movement of graphics in gaming and other multimedia applications.FoxNews

The Inquirer reports that IBM has sold off more than a quarter of its shares in the Chinese computer maker Lenovo.

Lenovo gave IBM the shares as part payment when it bought IBM's PC outfit last year.

IBM sold 300 million shares at a fairly low price, triggering a seven per cent share slide before there was a suspension in sales.

IBM made $123 million by selling the shares which made up about 3.5 percent of Lenovo's holdings.

Lenovo had seen its stock increase in value this week, unfortunately, IBM's sale has wiped out most those gains.

At the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) today, IBM and AMD presented papers describing the use of immersion lithography, ultra-low-K interconnect dielectrics, and multiple enhanced transistor strain techniques for application to the 45nm microprocessor process generation. AMD and IBM expect the first 45nm products using immersion lithography and ultra-low-K interconnect dielectrics to be available in mid-2008.