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Scientists Discover Nearby ‘Diamond Planet’

Scientists at Yale University have discovered a nearby super-Earth that is a “diamond planet” — a planet that has a mantle made of graphite and diamond.

The planet, called 55 Cancri e, is just 40 light years from Earth and orbits the binary star 55 Cancri, which is located in the constellation of Cancer. When the planet was first observed last year, it was originally thought to be a water planet, similar to Earth, but new information has allowed the scientists to infer that the planet is much more likely to be a diamond planet.

55 Cancri e (which desperately needs a nickname) is referred to as a super-Earth because it is larger than Earth, but not as large as the Solar System’s gas giants. That’s where 55 Cancri e’s similarities to Earth end, though. 55 Cancri e has twice the radius of Earth, eight times the mass — and because it’s the innermost planet in the 55 Cancri system, the planet has a surface temperature of 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,150 Celsius), and its year lasts just 18 hours (as opposed to Earth’s 365 days). 



But why is 55 Cancri e made out of diamonds? Because the star system itself is primarily made up of carbon, iron, and silicon — and over millions of years of pressure and heat, the planet’s carbon mantle has slowly turned into diamond. The Yale scientists estimate that as much as one third of 55 Cancri e’s mass is made up of diamond — the same as three Earth masses, or roughly 18×10²⁴kg. This is a few trillion times more diamond than has ever been mined on Earth.

Suffice it to say, the identification of just a single diamond-rich planet is massive news. In recent years we have identified hundreds of rocky, Earth-like planets — and until now, we had assumed they had similar make-ups. It is now fairly safe to assume that there are millions of diamond planets in the universe. There could be other planets out there with different chemistries, too — water planets, gold planets, uranium planets — and each are likely to have very different atmospheres, biologies, and geological/tectonic characteristics.

The idea of mining other planets and asteroids for valuable resources doesn’t seem quite so crazy now, eh?

Nintendo tears down Wii U to show off single-chip IBM/AMD CPU + GPU

One of the most interesting aspects to new console design is only indirectly related to the device’s game performance. Internal design — how components are laid out, integrated, and cooled — is vital to building a reliable machine. Until quite recently, this aspect of design only attracted consumer interest if something went wrong. Each generation of consoles has had issues, but the Xbox 360′s famous Red Ring of Death catapulted design problems into mainstream discussion. The surging popularity of websites like iFixit, meanwhile, has shone a spotlight on design decisions that were previously hidden under plastic shells. 

Nintendo has chosen to one-up such popular sites by releasing its own data on how the Wii U’s components were designed. The new information, released through an “Iwata Asks” explainer, sheds light on the difficulties of designing a system as compact as the Wii U, which isn’t much larger than the Wii, while substantially increasing its overall performance. Nintendo remains tight-lipped on many details, but we know that the CPU inside the system is a multi-core, POWER-based IBM design. Nintendo went with IBM for the combined module, as shown below:  

Without any sort of scale, the only thing we can conclude from the image is that the second on-die package is much smaller than the first. Nintendo offers a few additional hints with the following: 

This is rather odd. Rumors around the Wii U’s GPU initially pointed to an RV770-derived (HD 4000-series) chip with DX10.1 support, while later statements claimed the AMD component as actually a Radeon 6770. The Radeon 6770 was itself a re-badged Radeon 5770, and at 170mm² on TSMC’s 40nm process, it wasn’t all that small. Toss in the 32MB of eDRAM we know the Wii U has on-package, and that’d be an awfully large piece of silicon. If the smaller die is actually the CPU, it means that Nintendo, for all its praise of AMD and IBM’s knowledge of CPU+GPU integration, chose to keep the two packages separate. There’s no APU to be seen here, alas.

It also implies that the Wii U is a fundamentally a GPU with a CPU hanging off the side.

Here’s the Wii’s heatsink in comparison to the Wii U’s. Iwata says the new console generates 3x more heat than the old one did, which necessitated a larger fan and more fins. The heatsink design is still technically passive; the system uses a single fan to intake and exhaust air over the heatsink. Again, while we don’t have absolute scales, Iwata’s demonstrations put some hard thermal limits on what sort of GPU could be inside the system. Under load, the Wii drew ~16W as measured at the wall; Iwata’s comments imply that the Wii U will draw between 40-60W.

A 5770 dissipated 108W and measured 63.5mm tall, 165mm wide, and 267mm long. It’s true that this referred to total board power and that AMD doubtlessly refined its base GPU to Nintendo’s specifications, but a 50% reduction in active power seems unlikely.

Nintendo offers a few additional hints when it writes that “An MCM [multi-chip module] is where the aforementioned Multi-core CPU chip and the GPU chip are built into a single component. The GPU itself also contains quite a large on-chip memory.” There are, in short, plenty of reasons to think that an integrated CPU+GPU with on-package cache would serve Nintendo better than a GPU with on-die eDRAM + on-package CPU. The company’s phrasing points towards the former, but image labeling states the latter.
What can we tell from this new data? The “Juniper” GPU at the heart of the 5770 was almost certainly too large and too hot for Nintendo’s targets. Redwood, the GPU inside the Radeon 5670, is a much better bet. Not only is it smaller, at 104mm² on 40nm, it also shipped in a 39W flavor. Additional optimizations and tweaks could easily squeeze a GPU of that caliber into the 40W-60W dissipation window we previously mentioned.

Nintendo’s reveal also supports developer statements that while the Wii U’s GPU is significantly more advanced than anything the Xbox 360 or PS3 can offer, the CPU is on-par or slightly less powerful than the Xbox 360 or PS3′s. Nintendo may have gone for a POWER-derived architecture this time around, but the smaller package in the image above implies three lean cores without much muscle.

The Wii U’s unusual controller and secondary screen means that a great deal may be riding on how many CPU cycles are dedicated to controller synchronization and processing. In theory, it might be possible to offload certain tasks to the system’s GPU, but that depends on which core Nintendo used. Both the RV770 and the Evergreen (HD 5000) GPUs supported OpenCL, but RV770 was limited to OpenCL 1.0, whereas the HD 5000 family supported OpenCL 1.1.

It goes without saying that Nintendo has dedicated a great deal of effort to building a small system that would retain the quiet operation and comparatively low power draw that made the Wii stand out in the 2005-2006 product cycle. Will lightning strike twice? That’s a good deal murkier. Nintendo is moving first this time around, but Sony and Microsoft are both planning their own next-gen consoles at much lower price points than the Xbox 360 and PS3 debuted at.

HTC DLX incoming to challenge Samsung Galaxy Note 2

HTC is readying a phablet for release, as the phone-maker bets on a half-tablet, half-smartphone hybrid to help turn around its freefalling profits.

According to HTC modding maven Football, the device will be dubbed the HTC DLX and will pack a five-inch screen and an impressive sounding 12 megapixel camera.

And adding to what’s shaping up to be one of HTC’s most lavishly specc’d devices ever is a 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 16GB of internal storage and a 2,500mAH battery, claims the mono-monikered source.

Perhaps surprisingly, the handset purportedly won’t run the latest 4.2 version of Android out of the box, but will instead pack the still-pretty-up-to-the-minute Jelly Bean iteration, AKA Android 4.1.

News of HTC’s product pipeline comes as it recently announced a 79 per cent slide in third-quarter profits, amid slow sales for its One range of phones and an increasingly strong showing from its Android rival Samsung.