Author: elegant

The world’s largest jet engine maker Rock Hill, South Carolina based General Electric (GE) is turning to 3D printing to make airplane parts. More specifically it is trying to build more than 85,000 fuel nozzles for its Leap engines using 3D printers. It bought 3D printing company Morris Technologies last year and spent millions of other dollars on other acquisitions and hardware. GE is not alone in this field and Boeing, Nike, Siemens, and Rolls-Royce are also using the technology and making substantial investments to improve it. They all expect to get required parts faster, at a higher quality and lower cost.

3D printing is a process of making three-dimensional solid objects using an additive process where layers of material are laid to make the final product. Some compare it to an industrial robot. The technology has been around since the 1980s but commercial availability of printers became widely used in 2010s. Some estimates the 3D printer market equal to about $2.2 billion a year industry. GE’s biggest problem at the moment is finding industrial grade systems capable of producing metal parts. 3D Systems is the largest maker of 3d printers in the United States.

Article submitted by My Systems Journal.

The world’s computing hardware industry is estimated at more than $100 billion a year. Major manufacturers of servers, networking gear and storage equipment includes Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. More and more Asian manufacturers are entering the market place and new free technologies introduced by Facebook are threatening the existence of major industry players.

In April 2011, Facebook started a new blueprint for its hardware known as the Open Compute Project. It allowed outsiders to join its engineers to build a new data center of tomorrow. An experimental data center is located just outside the Arctic Circle in Luléa, Sweden. Facebook claim the building is most energy efficient mega data center ever built in the world. It uses two-thirds less energy than a typical data center to process data and to cool the entire facility including servers. It takes frigid air from outside to cool servers and vents out hot air. Additionally, it slimmed down most of the servers getting rid of outer covers exposing motherboards to arctic air for efficient cooling. The center can handle 350 million photographs, 10 billion massages and another 4.5 billion similar things a day. The project has gotten the attention of computing behemoths.

The Cupertino, California based Apple introduced two new smartphones on September 10, 2013. A high-end smartphone with a finger print scanner, iPhone 5S that begins at $199 with a contract that comes in three colors and a $99 with a contract, iPhone 5C, a colorful with plastic cover that comes in five colors. Actual prices in emerging markets or the release date and availability of these smartphones in China have not been disclosed at the time of the unveiling of the new products.

The iPhone 5C colors include blue, green, pink, yellow and white. It is available in the U.S. for $549 without a contract. 5C also has a “M7 Motion co-processor” chip that can track motion data continuously with less impact on the battery. Because of this it is a dream gadget for sports fans and fitness enthusiasts. 5C will be available sooner than the 5S.

The higher end iPhone 5S comes in gray, silver and gold. It is expected to carry higher processing speed, finger print scanner and an improved camera. The iPhone 5S is expected to go on sale in the U.S. and in China on September 20, 2013. Many expect these new products will stop market share losses for Apple in rapidly developing markets in China and India.

Intel is well known for its more powerful yet cooler running 22 nanometers “Core” processor chips that run PCs and servers. Intel dominates the PC and server chips market. However, PC sales are declining in the face of rapidly growing smartphones and tablets. Until the recent past, Intel did not attempted to enter into the rapidly growing mobile segment of the market and allowed its partnering ARM licensees to deal with it. Faced with dwindling PC sales Intel is now forced to compete in the mobile market segment in order to survive.

Now Intel is gearing up its “Atom” chips technology. Atom chips were first introduced in 2008 during the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, China. The 22 nanometer Atom chips (code named Silvermont) are in production and getting ready to be shipped before the holidays. Known as Bay Trail these chips will be available in early September 2013. But Intel is putting more attention to a much faster, ultra-low-voltage 14 nanometer Atom chip (code named Airmont) that can revolutionize the mobile chip market. The 14 nanometer Atom chips carry a power advantage over other similar chips using only 15 watts or less of electricity.