AMD today announced that it has joined the Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA) and forged partnerships with leading technology providers to help promote the development and proliferation of new blockchain-powered gaming platforms.

The Blockchain Game Alliance is committed to driving awareness and adoption of blockchain technologies within the game industry, providing an open forum for individuals and companies to share knowledge and collaborate, create common standards, establish best practices, and network. As the first major hardware manufacturer to join the BGA, AMD plans to enable alliance members with efficient and high-performance computing technologies for next-generation blockchain-based gaming platforms that could potentially transform the way games are created, published, purchased and played.

Micron Technology, Inc., today announced a breakthrough in nonvolatile memory technology with the introduction of the world's fastest SSD, the Micron X100 SSD. The Micron X100 SSD is the first solution in a family of products from Micron targeting storage- and memory-intensive applications for the data center. These solutions will leverage the strengths of 3D XPoint technology and usher in a new tier in the memory-to-storage hierarchy with higher capacity and persistence than DRAM, along with higher endurance and performance than NAND.

"Micron's innovative X100 product brings the disruptive potential of 3D XPoint technology to the data center, driving breakthrough performance improvements for applications and enabling entirely new use cases," said Micron Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana. "Micron is the only vertically-integrated provider of DRAM, NAND and 3D XPoint solutions in the world, and this product continues the evolution of our portfolio towards higher value solutions that accelerate artificial intelligence capabilities, drive faster data analytics and create new insights for our customers."

Scientists with the University of Leeds have managed to deploy gold in an ultra-efficient layer that's just two atoms thick, paving the way for much improved efficiency in the usage of the precious metal. The development, which university representatives claim marks a "landmark achievement", will open doors for the medical device and electronics industries-and also as a catalyst to speed up chemical reactions in a range of industrial processes. Because this 2D gold technology is up to 10x more efficient than current gold nanoparticle deployment (since all the gold particles are part of the surface, with no gold being left unused due to it being below the surface, in a bulk dispersion that's unavoidable with current coating technologies).

This means that materials savings can be achieved - which will likely be a magnet to the electronics industry, which will be able to not only increase efficiency of deployed gold, but also reduce waste of the precious material. Scientists behind the breakthrough claim this could also serve as a gateway for the development of other 2D materials, since lessons learned here may be applicable to other materials. All that remains (and that's putting it nicely) is being able to develop ways to scale-up the process, which deploys gold in a flake-like manner (scientists call it nanoseaweed of gold) that is flexible enough to be built into bendable devices.