Fusion power at home, or, how small science will defeat big science

Fusion research is known for its huge projects — and its huge lack of tangible success. Big machines like the Princeton tokamak and theLivermore laser have indeed managed to fuse a few nuclei, but have required too much energy to get too little in return. A Brooklyn web developer named Mark Suppes recently created fusion in in his own home, using a much simpler device called a Farnsworth fusor. Accessing declassified experiments, and using open-source software, open-source hardware and crowdsourced funding, he has turned the traditional approach to scientific research on its head — and he makes it look easy.

In his early teenage years, Philo Farnsworth presented a concept for the all-electronic “image dissector,” and soon developed it into the first functioning television set. He successfully defended his rights to the design against larger corporations like RCA, which tried to claim it in a patent, and in the process became a legend and inspiration for private inventors and DIYers everywhere. Farnsworth’s skill at controlling electrons with electric fields later led him to develop a small nuclear fusion device. The device used inertial electrostatic confinement, as opposed to magnetic confinement which is used to fuse charged particles in the larger and more complex machines.

Suppes first heard about the Farnesworth fusor from Robert Brussard’s Google Tech Talk.With DARPA’s permission, Brussard described his work on Polywell reactors. The Polywell is a refinement of the Farnesworth fusor, but has the potential for significant net energy production. Suppes knew little of physics, but decided that with a little help from the open source community, he could make a fusor for himself. His blog
and Github repository show step-by-step exactly how he did it. In the video below, you can see a talk that Suppes gave at Wired 2012.

Can you really create fusion at home?

The biggest challenge to homebrew fusion is creating a spot where the conditions are just right. Typically a vacuum chamber that can tolerate some heat is needed. In university and industrial research labs a vacuum system is built using standard erector set pieces called“conflat flange” mounts. Prior to Ebay, the best way to get value out of an old vacuum system was to recycle it for the nickel and chrome in the steel. Today however, passing these systems on to someone who can use them is just a matter of a few clicks.

Another thing Suppes had going for him was the capability to design and 3D print heat resistant parts in the complex geometry needed for the Polywell device. The Polywell is basically a set of electromagnetic coils positioned in a precise geometry that enables charged particles to be confined. Ceramic is needed because other heat resistant materials, like metals, would perturb the field and let particles escape.

The most important a tool for Suppes was the willingness of skilled individuals to help him at every turn. As the 38th person to build a working fusor, there was a lot of technical know-how floating around. Suppes was able to collect that information into one place and package it in a way anyone can understand. His approach of publish first, then review, has been catching on as the new way to do science. Not every person cares about the research that their tax dollars fund, but those who do care have demanded access to it — and are getting it.

A cautionary note is perhaps in order. David Hahn, also known as the radioactive boy scout, was a child prodigy who built a subcritical fission reactor in his backyard using tiny amounts of radioactive material from many smoke detectors. He eventually became obsessed with his hobby and landed himself in the hospital for treatment of radiation injuries, and then in jail for larceny. The risks from radiation are not the same with fission as with fusion. High energy X-rays and neutrons are created in a fusor and need need to be respected accordingly.

The fire that Farnsworth lit years ago continues to burn bright. The untimely death of Brussard, just a year after his Google Talk and initial results with the Polywell device offered the torch, and Suppes and others have run with it. Big science concentrates all the money and knowledge on large projects that can’t fail, but it is slowly yielding to small science, where nimble, crowd-funded and -sourced projects can gracefully die if they don’t yield productive results. Not every scientist is compelled to fuse atoms, nor every layperson, but with enough people working on the problem and communicating their results and techniques openly, humankind will one day harness the power of the Sun (perhaps through a Sun-encompassing Dyson sphere, hm?)

Now read: Inside California’s star power fusion facility

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NASA combats the conspiracy theorists: How Curiosity took a self-portrait on Mars

Back when NASA released Curiosity’s first self-portrait from the surface of Mars, there was asurprisingly large number of people who doubted the veracity of the image. Most of these doubts revolved around the 7-foot robotic arm that captured the photo, but which isn’t actually visible. As with the Moon landing photos, there were conspiracy theorists who claimed that the self-portrait was actually shot here on Earth. “It’s impossible to shoot a photo and not have your arm visible,” the tinfoil-hat-wearing fruitcakes decried. “A third party must’ve taken the photo… or it’s CGI!”

NASA, which is rightfully rather proud of its ability to land a one-ton rover on another planetafter a 352-million-mile journey, seemingly took these attacks to heart and has nowpublished information about how the self-portrait was taken.

As we originally reported, the self-portrait is a mosaic of 55 images captured by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), which sits on the end of Curiosity’s 7-foot robotic arm. These 55 images were taken in such a way that the arm was mostly out of shot — and where that wasn’t possible, data from other images (other angles) was used to fill in the gaps.

As you can see in the animation above, the moves that MAHLI makes as it traverses Curiosity are very exact. According to National Geographic, these movements were planned out last year by none other than James Cameron, and Michael Malin and Michael Ravine of MSSS, the company that manufactured Curiosity’s cameras. “Actually, there weren’t that many images with the arm in them because of how we positioned the arm,” Ravine explains. “It’s like if you hold a camera out in front of you with your elbow crooked and shoot—what you’ll probably get is your face and top of your body including your shoulder, but most of your arm is out of the frame.”

The exact movements to shoot all 55 images were then programmed into NASA’s Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP), and then tested on the Curiosity’s stunt double — the Vehicle System Test Bed at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena (pictured above). Before trying out new maneuvers, just as an extra precaution, NASA generally tests them on the VSTB first. Finally, to take the actual self-portrait on Mars, NASA simply presses “play” in RSVP, transmitting the commands to NASA’s Deep Space Network antennae, which squirts them across 200 million miles of deep space to the rover.

In other news, Curiosity has now reached the region of Glenelg, and is powering along to Yellowknife Bay, where the rover will hopefully try out its percussive hammer for the first time (by drilling into an interesting rock). The photo below was taken at Shaler, where Curiosity briefly stopped to take some photos and other scientific measurements. Curiosity will likely spend a few weeks/months in the Glenelg region before turning south to Mount Sharp — the final destination of the rover’s primary mission.

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Father-daughter duo have the world’s first brain-to-brain ‘telepathic’ conversation

It should be fairly obvious why, all technological considerations aside, there has been much more research into letting machines extract our thoughts, rather than insert them. Mind reading is a scary-enough concept all on its own — but mindwriting? It calls to mind the hacker deities of cyber punk novels; skinny, trench-swathed Neos projecting e-thoughts into the skulls of passing civilians. With such basic issues of privacy on the line, it took the trusting relationship between UK scientist Christopher James and his adventurous young daughter to give us our first stab at developing real telepathic, brain-to-brain communication technology.

James’ process of telepathic communication is rough, its results shaky, but the principle of brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is unquestionably met. It begins with the by-now standard collection of mental information, achieved in this case with electrodes placed against the skull. “I only used scalp electrodes on my daughter, since my wife wouldn’t let me drill holes in my daughter’s head,” James told the Times of India.

In the experiment, the sender imagined a series of binary digits, broadcasting their choices by imagining movement in their right arm or their left. The resulting patterns of brain activity were recorded and expressed by an LED — one frequency to represent a one, another to represent a zero. The patterns are simply too arcane to be useful to the conscious mind, too quick and complex, but they’re not meant to be read like Morse code, in any case.

Dr. James conducting a preceding experiment in 2009.

When the LED signal travels to the recipient, it flashes into a very specific part of the eye (which part doesn’t matter much) and so the resulting optical signal is sent to a predictable section of the visual cortex. Surface electrodes just like those that originally recorded the signal are much better than people at making sense of the quick-flash LED language, seeing in the recipient’s brain more data than does the recipient themselves.

Once the pattern has been reverse-engineered from LED back to arm-waving, the telepathic process is said to have concluded. “The key idea to grasp,” said Dr. James, “is that a person’s eyes cannot distinguish between the different frequencies of flashing lights but a part of his brain, [the] visual cortex, can.” For more serious results, the electrodes would have to be implanted on the surface of the brain, a procedure for which he had neither governmental nor spousal approval.

All in all, this advance will take some time to spawn any dystopian mind flayers or Inception-style dreamscapes. This advance has to do with the translation of thought to binary data, and the ability to technically induce that data in the brain of another person. The glaringly absent piece of the puzzle is any ability to induce much more sophisticated visual images; multi-pixel messages that appear in the mind’s eye, as opposed to the physical one.

That sort of sophistication could come through a better understanding of just how stimulation of the visual cortex influences images in the mind, or in teaching brains the language of light bulbs. With LED technology now finding its way into contact lenses, this technology seems well-suited to the (possibly) upcoming brain-machine revolution. It’s unclear was uses this tech might find in such a future, especially when it steps beyond the constraints of fatherly affection.

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Is it worth investing in a high-efficiency power supply?

If you’ve gone shopping for a power supply any time over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed the explosive proliferation of various 80 Plus ratings. As initially conceived, an 80 Plus certification was a way for PSU manufacturers to validate that their power supply units were at least 80% efficient at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of full load.

The 80 Plus program has expanded significantly since the first specification was adopted. Valid levels now include Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and a currently unused Titanium specification level. The chart below lists the requirements a PSU must meet to be certified.

In the pre-80 Plus days, PSU prices normally clustered around a given wattage output. The advent of the various 80 Plus levels has created a second variable that can have a significant impact on unit price. This leads us to three important questions: How much power can you save by moving to a higher-efficiency supply, what’s the premium of doing so, and how long does it take to make back your initial investment?

Power supply pricing and premiums

First, here’s an overview of 80 Plus PSU pricing at various wattages. We created this data from NewEgg results, but only picked units from well-known vendors. Generic products from companies like CoolMax aren’t a part of these results. When we priced units, we opted for the lowest-cost unit from the same manufacturer.

Basic 400W-600W units are quite cheap these days, even from top vendors like Antec, Corsair, OCZ, and Silverstone. Prices start to climb by the 700W range; 1200W units are several hundred dollars.

The price premium for greater-than-80 Plus certification can be substantial. Below 800W, Bronze certification adds 4-20% to the list price of an 80 Plus unit. 80 Plus Gold PSUs are 35-61% more expensive within the same wattage category. Platinum-level power supplies are 90-100% more expensive; twice the price of a standard 80 Plus unit.

By way of example: Antec and Rosewill have $50-$60 80 Plus PSUs in the 501-600W category, while the 80 Plus Platinum products are $139 and $110 respectively. In the 701-800W division, Corsair has 80 Plus Bronze units for $84.95, and 80 Plus Platinum priced at $179.

At the highest end of the market, this changes slightly. Power supplies in the 1kW and greater category don’t put much of a premium on high-efficiency units. An 80 Plus 1200W PSU is $229; 80 Plus Gold is ~$258. 80 Plus Platinum is still significantly more expensive at ~$332.

You can’t save power that you aren’t using

Power supply efficiency is defined as the amount of power actually provided to the internal components, divided by the amount of power drawn at the wall. A 50% efficient PSU that’s tasked with providing 50W of power to a system will draw 100W from the grid. The extra 50W is lost as heat. A 90% efficient PSU would draw 56W in the same circumstances.

Even generic PSUs are far more than 50% efficient; in fact, 75-77% is fairly common. This means the amount of money you save from upgrading to a high-efficiency PSU is minimal if you don’t actually draw much power to start with. Electricity rates are charged by the kWh — if your system only uses 80W at idle, and idles 20 hours a day, you won’t see much benefit from an 80 Plus Platinum PSU as opposed to a regular 80 Plus.

How we tested

We’ve tested two pairs of PSUs from the same manufacturer and with the same rated power output (or close as we could get). Our first testbed was outfitted with two 750W power supplies from PC Power & Cooling. The first is a red Silencer with an 80 Plus certification. Overall listed efficiency for the unit is 83%. The manual breaks this down further, specifying that efficiency ranges from 82-85% depending on exact load.

The other 750W is a Silencer Mark II. It’s certified as 80 Plus Silver with an average efficiency of 85%. Efficiency isn’t broken down by overall load for this model.

The second testbed was configured with a brace of Thermaltake Toughpowers. The first is a 1200W Toughpower 1200A, the second is a 1275W Toughpower XT Platinum. The first unit is certified as 80 Plus, with a listed efficiency of up to 87%; the second’s efficiency is listed as up to 94%. Thermaltake doesn’t provide any additional clarity for either unit, so it’s not initially clear if those figures are for 115V or 220V operation.

Note: The 750W and 1200W figures cannot be cross-compared. We built two entirely different testbeds for this project. Putting a moderate load on a 750W PSU isn’t particularly difficult, while stretching the legs of a 1200W PSU took a bit more work.

Our test methodology was simple: We plugged in a Kill-A-Watt wall meter and measured the power consumption of each unit over 2.5 hours at both load and idle. The meter was reset in between each test for each PSU. Our wattage figures are the average load while the system was in each state, not spot checks on the meter. It’s true that this is a relatively simple, broad-spectrum test, but our goal is to compare simple, real-world savings; not metrics you can’t measure without expensive equipment.

Results

First, here are the idle figures for the four solutions:

The idle figures illustrate what we said earlier regarding the limited impact of increased idle efficiency as far as total power costs are concerned. Gains here are in line with claimed figures. Moving to the 80 Plus Silver 750W cuts idle consumption by roughly 3.6%; the 80 Plus Platinum reduces power consumption by 9.2%.

Load tests show the same gaps at higher power consumption. The 80 Plus Silver 750W Silencer Mark II is 4.5% more efficient than the original Silencer; the 1200W Toughpower XT Platinum is 8.8% more efficient than the 1200A power supply. Again, it matters where you start from. Saving 25W between the 80 Plus and 80 Plus Silver isn’t bad, but the XT Platinum knocks almost three times as much wattage off the 1200A’s main draw.

Clearly the efficiency of a top-end PSU can save you some scratch over the long term. Exactly how much depends on what you’re doing.

How much can you save?

Here, we’ve taken our data from all four power supplies and plugged it into various use equations over an entire year. Our first two graphs assume that the system is either in idle or under full load 24/7/365. Two different costs per kilowatt-hour are included: The US average, at 12.5 cents per kWh, and the current New York State average of 18.7 cents. These are simplistic assumptions, but they ballpark the maximum and minimum savings you’ll see if you never turn the system off.

At constant idle, the 750W 80 Plus Silver saves $4.38 to $6.56 over the course of a year. Upgrading to the 80 Plus Platinum drops between $18.63 and $27.87 back in your pocket.

At constant load, even the modest upgrade offered by the 750W 80 Plus Silver is worth $27-$40. The Toughpower XT 1275W saves you $80-$120 in power costs per year.

Granted, very few people are going to need a power supply under this type of continuous load, but there is a financial benefit to upgrading if you use this much power. At some point, however, we need to address the fact that the best way to save power is to turn the machine off or put it into hibernation.

Here are power usage figures and costs if we assume that the system is idle eight hours a day, under load for four hours, and off/hibernating for the remaining 12.

Heavy workers may still see an advantage from an upgrade; the Thermaltake 1275 XT Platinum will save from $19.57 to $29.38 a year. The smaller 750W upgrade is worth $6 to $9.

A dubious investment

The good news is that power supplies with better 80 Plus ratings really do deliver what they claim — there is a net reduction in total power consumption. If you burn a lot of power, Platinum units could be good investments and pay back their premiums in a year or two. Similarly, if you’re trying to minimize every last watt of consumption, this is one way to do it. The cost premiums, however, don’t add up anywhere but at the highest end. If you’re buying a 1200W unit, Gold is scarcely more expensive and Platinum will still pay back its initial up-front cost in a year or two.

Most of us, however, would be best served by turning the machine off or dropping into hibernation. The best way to save power is simply not to use it, and manufacturers currently charge huge premiums for marginal performance gains. If you’re upgrading from a cheap piece of junk (anything with words like Sparkle, Max, Tech, Sun, Bright, or Beam in the name is virtually guaranteed to be garbage), the premium is easier to justify. If you’ve already got an 80 Plus PSU, it’s a much harder sell.

The flip side is that PSU units go on sale fairly frequently, and a gold or silver unit can be trusted to provide an upgrade. It may not make much sense to buy a unit at a significant premium, but if you get a good deal, we recommend taking it.

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GE develops ultra-thin, almost-silent cooler for next-gen laptops and tablets

General Electric has unveiled what seems to be the thinnest, high-performance cooler for the next-generation of ultra-thin tablets and laptops (pictured above). While this cooler obviously allows for slimmer designs (or more space for other components), it also uses just half the power of a comparable fan, granting a significant boost to battery life. Oh, it’s almost silent, too.

The technology behind GE’s cooler is called DCJ — Dual Piezoelectric Cooling Jets. DCJ basically acts as a miniature pair of bellows: Expanding to suck in cool air, and then contracting to expel hot air. GE originally invented DCJ to help cool commercial jet engines, but two years ago it seems someone had the clever idea of miniaturizing the tech for use in computers — and so here we are.

At 2:15 in the video below you can see the DCJ in action, inside a modern ultrabook laptop. The rest of the video is a bit fluffy, featuring lots of dramatic lighting and excessive use of protective goggles.

As you can see above, GE’s cooler is roughly the size and thickness of a credit card, but the press release states that the complete cooling solution (presumably including a heatsink/pipe) is 4mm. This is apparently 50% thinner than existing fan-based solutions, and obviously rather significant as we move towards tablets and laptops that are sub-8mm.

Perhaps most importantly, though, according to GE VP Chris Giovanniello, “DCJ can be made so quiet that users won’t even know it’s running.” This is partly because the tech is fundamentally different from a fan — there’s no blade whizzing through the air at thousands of RPM, and thus no buzzing or vibrations — but it’s also because DCJ supports verylocalized cooling. Instead of a complex heat pipe and fan assembly, GE suggests that you might instead have a bunch of smaller, more efficient DCJs directly attached to components that need cooling.

Moving forward, GE has already licensed DCJ tech to Fujikura, a Japanese thermal management company. GE is also providing OEMs with DCJ kits, so that they can test the technology out in next-generation tablets and laptops. Realistically, we should see DCJ cooling solutions sometime in the next couple of years.

How to bring back the Start menu and button to Windows 8

In our continuing quest to fix and finesse some of Windows 8′s frolicsome foibles, we turn at last to the Start menu — that beloved button that has staked out the bottom left corner of your desktop for almost 20 years, only to be ignominiously removed from Windows 8 and replaced by the desktop-hating Metro Start screen.

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to ensure that the Start button and menu remain dead, a bunch of third-party replacements have emerged. Really, it just goes to show how devoted the Desktop Windows userbase is: Microsoft completely stripped out the underlying Start menu code to quash potential Luddite revolutionaries, and yet just weeks after the release of Windows 8 there are dozens of Start menu and Start button replacements.

Let’s take a look at the best, cheapest, and most authentic apps for bringing back the Windows Start menu and button.

Classic Shell

Classic Shell is free, open-source donationware that gives you the option of a classic (Windows 98ish), Windows XP, or Vista/7 Start menu. At its most basic, it puts a Start button back on your taskbar — but as always with third-party utilities, it has a ton of other features and settings that you can tweak to your heart’s content (in Classic Shell’s case, there’s probably too many tweakable settings). There is apparently an option for Classic Shell to boot straight to Desktop, but I couldn’t find it.

One strong point of Classic Shell is that it successfully rebinds your Start key, so that the Start menu pops up instead of the new Metro Start screen. Hitting the Start key from Metro pops up Classic Shell, too. Other Start menu replacements don’t usually cope quite so well.

Take care while installing Classic Shell, though: It’s not just a Start menu replacement, and if you’re not careful you will end up installing Classic IE and Classic Explorer, too.

Download Classic Shell (free)

Pokki

Where Classic Shell tries to replicate the Windows of yesteryear, Pokki (free) is very much its own beast — and as much as I love the Windows 7 Start menu, I have to admit that Pokki is probably even better. It utilizes a neat “pinning” system that isn’t unlike the home screen of your smartphone or tablet (though I would argue that the Windows taskbar/superbar still does a better job). You can also add widgets to Pokki, such as Gmail or Facebook, which display your latest email or status updates.

By default, Pokki will configure your Windows 8 system to boot straight to the Desktop — and there is an option that will just completely disable the hot corners, if you so desire. (Remember, Win+C pops open the Charms menu, if you need.)

Download Pokki (free)

Start8

Finally, a commercial offering that will set you back $5: Start8. Start8 is very similar to Classic Shell, but it’s just a little bit smoother. Start8′s configuration interface is much easier to use (and easier on the eyes), and the actual Start menu feels much more like a contiguous part of Windows.

Start8 has a curious option where you can actually have the Metro Start screen pop up as a menu, rather than full-screen (pictured at the top of the story). This is kinda neat, though you’re probably better off sticking to the normal Windows 7-style Start menu replacement.

Like Pokki, Start8 can disable your hot corners and boot directly to Desktop. Start8 also has a bunch of configuration options for how the Start key interacts with Desktop and Metro, which can be useful if you’re looking for a very specific functionality.

Download Start8 ($5, free 30-day trial)

For more Windows 8 tips, such as shutting down a Windows 8 PC easily, or booting to the Desktop without the aid of a third-party app, check out ExtremeTech’s extensive Windows 8 tips.

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Customizable gamepad makes for the perfect introduction to Arduino

PC gamers love their mice and keyboards, but some titles just work better with a controller. Anyone who has ever used an emulator to play games designed for consoles can attest to that. Many different USB gamepads are available, but a new Arduino-based gamepad might just persuade you to build your own, at least if you’re electronically inclined. The Arduino Esplora is a brand new do-it-yourself gamepad, and it’s a perfect my-first-Arduino project because it doesn’t require manipulating a breadboard or soldering.

The Esplora includes an analog joystick and four face buttons for traditional input, but also sports a handful of sensors: a linear potentiometer, microphone, light sensor, temperature sensor, and accelerometer. It also features a square-wave buzzer, an RGB LED, twoTinkerKit inputs/outputs, and a TFT display connector.

The Esplora circuit board is 6.5-inches by 2.4-inches, and has four screw holes so you can build a case for your controller or even mount it to a surface like an arcade cabinet. It connects to your computer through USB 2.0, and can be completely custom-programmed by using the Arduino software. It even has libraries available to take advantage of the sensors without having to write everything from scratch.

This gamepad will eventually be available for purchase through the Arduino store, but Radioshack should have it as well. It’s not online quite yet, but the Arduino blog promises it will be out soon. The official price isn’t posted on its site, but it is available through press releases. It will apparently be available online for 41.90 euros, but the retail version will cost 44.90 euros. Currency conversion varies, but we’re looking at less than $60. Until it’s online, your best bet is to visit your local Radioshack in hopes of finding one right now. Obviously, other gamepads are available in a finished state for less money, but there’s not much entertainment or educational value in that, right?

Arduino-based kits and devices continue to impress. From aiding hotel thieves to computing in space, this tiny and inexpensive platform has made electrical tinkering exciting again. It’s not only novices that are taking advantage of it to learn the ropes, but some of the brightest electrical engineers are exploiting the capabilities of the Arduino platform to make working solutions quickly and cheaply. If you’ve been eying Arduino for a while, but you’ve been too worried about the difficulty, this is the project for you.

Read up about the platform, grab the Esplora, and start hacking away.

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Samsung’s Ativ 500T: Not the Windows 8 tablet you’ve been waiting for

Samsung’s Ativ Smart PC 500T is a $749 tablet meant to bridge the gap between the notebook industry and the Apple-dominated tablet space. The manufacturer describes the 500T as “a fully functioning PC. The Samsung Ativ Smart PC 500T runs the programs you need on a Windows 8 operating system in a sleek, lightweight form.”

Samsung has built an enormous smartphone business around delivering high-quality products at attractive price points; the Galaxy series is the beautiful result of close collaboration between engineers, designers, and the Holy Beancounters. The Smart PC 500T, in contrast, feels more like the product of a three-way turf war — and the accountants won.

The 500T’s base specs look great. It’s built on Intel’s Clover Trail platform and features a pair of 1.8GHz Atom cores with Hyper-Threading enabled. The tablet includes 2GB of RAM, lists 64GB of storage, and an 11.6-inch display at 1366×768. There’s no 3G or LTE support, but WiFi and BlueTooth 4.0 are both included.

External hardware

Note: The Samsung Ativ 500T we were sent for review lacked the keyboard that normally ships with the device. When we compare against Surface, we’re omitting comparisons to the Touch Cover. The Ativ 500T’s weak points are unrelated to its dock.

The plastic shell Samsung uses for the 500T feels sturdy, with just the right touch of flexibility. This may or may not be an accurate impression; grip the 500T too hard at the back, and the front LCD will distort in the same places. The Samsung logo at front and back is glued on and there’s a pair of thankfully unobtrusive stickers on the back. The system feels a little too cheap. The stickers aren’t visible in the stock image below, but you can see the included stylus in its slot. This is a welcome addition for navigating in Desktop mode, and Samsung gets kudos for including it.

The bottom of the tablet has the attach points for the dock as well as a magnetic connector reminiscent of those Microsoft uses for the Surface.

Port access and button placement is very hit-and-miss. Here’s the left-hand side of the 500T:

The left-hand side of the device is clean; the volume controls and mini-HDMI output are easily accessible. Mini-HDMI is esoteric enough that we wish the company had included a full-size HDMI to mini-HDMI adapter, but that’s a fairly minor point.

The top of the device is very busy. From the left, there’s the SD card slots, the USB 2 port, the physical auto-rotate on/off button, and the power switch. We’re thrilled to see a physical option for auto-rotate, but the device’s button placement makes it impossible to hold it in portrait mode from the left-hand side. The power button is easy to hit by mistake, a fact that’s particularly annoying given the network problems we experienced. The fold-away tabs make the device look cheap, especially if you’ve got multiple peripherals hooked up at the same time. There’s no way to detach them without breaking them off.

Weight and size

The 11.6-inch screen is clear and bright, but 11.6 inches is, in my opinion, the tipping point for 16:9 tablets. Even before I had the opportunity to test Microsoft’s Surface, I thought the Samsung 500T was too large and clumsy for a handheld device. Windows 8′s split keyboard helps, but doesn’t completely solve the problem.

I compared notes with Sebastian, who has an 11.6-inch Series 7 (Core i5) tablet from Samsung and substantially larger hands than me. He agreed; 11.6-inch tablets aren’t that great for on-screen keyboard work. At 1.65lbs (0.75kg) sans dock, the 500T isn’t heavy, but the 16:9 form factor make it difficult to hold in just one hand in either portrait or landscape mode. Holding the 500T up at an angle while reading/watching content in bed also aggravated the tendinitis in my right arm. That’t not Samsung’s fault, but if you have carpal tunnel, tendinitis, or a similar problem, you may want to look elsewhere.

Finally, there’s Surface. On a purely aesthetic level, Surface makes Samsung’s 500T look like a cheap knockoff from mainland China. In this case, looks are deceiving — the 500T is faster than its rival — but you’d never think so to look at them. The small difference in screen size (10.6 inches instead of 11.6) and weight (1.5 pounds vs. 1.65) matters far more than you’d think; Surface feels solid and comfortable when held in a single hand. The 500T never does.

Display

The Ativ’s display is one of the device’s strong points. 11.6 inches and 1366×768 is a good fit for basic desktop work as well as browsing in Metro applications. It’s bright and clear, with good color saturation and uniformity.

Each bar should be a individual, easily distinguished color. Good TN panels will only blur a bit at the 30-32 marker. Surface is a bit better than the 500T, but the Samsung panel is quite good. Both tablets performed well in single-color viewing angle tests as well.

We compared it against the Surface’s 10.6-inch screen for general video playback and used Lagom’s LCD tests for specific data points. Surface’s display has a slightly higher PPI (147 vs. 135), and slightly more accurate color reproduction. Both displays were adjusted to the third “Brightness” notch. That’s one of the only changes you can make to either tablet; the driver interfaces are bare-bones by even Intel’s standards. Nvidia’s comprehensive control panel, with its 2D and video playback controls, is completely DOA.

White and black saturation are slightly better on Surface; the 500T’s display is marginally easier to use outdoors. Surface is a bit slower in lag tests; viewing angles for both are excellent. Both panels are glossy. Boo.

Video playback: Pick your problems

File compatibility and format support are a big potential reason to go with an x86 tablet instead of something Windows RT-based. Microsoft’s decision not to support MKV playback natively is still a problem; there’s currently no sure-fire solution available in the Windows Store. The 500T, in contrast, has access to tools like VLC and MPC. Samsung’s decision to include PowerDVD doesmake some sense here, even if we prefer open-source solutions.

Unfortunately, other problems keep the Ativ from snagging what ought to be an easy win.

We measured CPU utilization on Surface and the Samsung 500T with multiple test files. These included:

An Xvid encode of a Walking Dead episode (343MB, 640×360, 1.1Mbps)
An Xvid encode of The Incredibles (2.05GB, 720×304, 2.5Mbps)
An Xvid encode of Shutter Island (1.7GB, 1280×544, 1.73Mbps)

We also tested one movie (Star Trek) at multiple quality settings to measure what the two platforms could and couldn’t handle. We encoded Star Trek at three different quality levels and profiles using Handbrake. These were:

1x H.264 (High@L3.0) (811MB, 720×304, 761 Kbps)
1x H.264 (High@L4.0) (6.77GB, 1920×800, 7.6Mbps)
1x H.264 (High@L4.1) (8.75GB, 1920×800, 9.8MBps)

Here’s how performance broke down in our first three videos:

Overall CPU usage is lower for Tegra, which isn’t too surprising — Hyper-Threaded cores are treated like full cores when Windows tracks CPU usage, but they don’t have a full core’s worth of resources. The Incredibles and The Walking Dead episodes played beautifully across both tablets. Shutter Island, on Surface, was something more akin to Stutter Island, for no reason we could see. Its encoding parameters and bit stream size are well within the range of the other two files, but playback was a mess.

The x86 Smart PC had no such problems. Point to Samsung. Watch what happens, though, when we fire up Star Trek.

Atom can play all three versions of our Star Trek encode, but the last two, only just barely. We had to shut down the Task Manager (keeping it open consumes 4-6% of the CPU’s processing power) and close every other open program. Unfortunately, none of our go-to applications fully support Clover Trail’s SoC; we couldn’t get a reliable read on whether or not the video stream was being properly offloaded to the GPU. Based on these figures, we don’t think it is.

GPU offload problems would also explain the lag in Desktop mode. A number of other reviewers have commented that while Metro is smooth and capable on the Ativ, attempting virtually anything in Desktop turns the system into a lagfest. We ran into the same problem; as soon as the tablet tries to juggle even basic tasks, it starts to skip. We suspect the problem here has more to do with video drivers than Atom’s CPU performance. What we’re seeing in Windows 8 is similar to early nettop problems in Windows 7. When Nvidia launched Ion, one of its major talking points was the way Windows 7′s UI didn’t stutter.

Windows 8 relies on GPU acceleration much more than Windows 7 did; it’s entirely possible that the lag and high CPU utilization during video playback are a result of an unoptimized driver stack.

So does Surface win this round? Not hardly. No MKV support meant I had to re-encode the movie into a format the Windows RT tablet could play. The 32GB tablet’s minuscule available storage meant deleting everything else just to watch a single high-quality film. We suspect the Ativ’s playback capabilities could be substantially improved with better video drivers, but as things stand, you can choose between a tablet with excellent video offload and minimal storage, and a lot of re-encoded data files — or a tablet with slightly more storage, full application compatibility, and problematic high-detail playback.

Playback power consumption

Playback power consumption favors Surface, since the two devices have 30Wh batteries.

Smidgen of storage, wonky WiFi

The Ativ Smart PC 500T has a hat trick of problems that effectively nuke its strong points. We’ve discussed the storage problem at some length, but the bottom line is this: Samsung is advertising this as a 64GB tablet and shipping it with roughly 32GB of usable storage.

That’s not just an advertising problem. The entire benefit of buying an Intel tablet is supposed to be x86 compatibility, but a lot of desktop software isn’t exactly sized to fit on a 32GB device. Office 2013 is 2GB. Start adding browsers, Photoshop, photos and video, and some work applications and poof — you’re out of room.

Cloud services like SkyDrive can be helpful here, but they only work as “extra” storage if you tell them not to synchronize with local folders. Otherwise they keep local mirrors on each device and could actually exacerbate the problem.

Still, cloud storage could help solve this problem, if the WiFi didn’t have problems of its own. The 500T’s signal strength and performance once a connection has been established is excellent. We were able to download files via wireless nearly as quickly as via wired connections, and had no problem using the tablet while several rooms (and an entire floor) away from the router.

But actually connecting to the router? That’s a major problem.

At boot or upon resume, the 500T regularly takes between 90 and 120 seconds to connect. It regularly claims to be connected to the internet, even as web pages refuse to load, as shown below.

This is infuriatingly common

Clicking on “Fix Connection Problems” almost never fixes the problem. Usually, it just makes the router vanish for an indefinite period of time. Rebooting the tablet will restore the router as a detected device, but won’t solve the connection issue. Sometimes Metro apps like News will load but Desktop Internet Explorer won’t. Sometimes it’s the other way around.

Intel confirmed to us that this is an issue, but told us the solution is stuck in Samsung’s QA process, with no targeted release date.

This bug single-handedly kills the idea that a tablet is a computing device you can pick up and use the same way you’d use your smartphone. Simply leaving the tablet on and waiting a few minutes doesn’t work; the user has to actively attempt to use the internet, have it fail, than muddy through enabling and disabling the connection.

Samsung’s update application, meanwhile, is prone to errors. The screenshot below was taken after checking both the Windows 8 Store and Windows Update for available Microsoft patches.

It made me download the update twice, for no apparent reason. I’m still not sure it actually changed anything.

Dodgy Desktop

Finally, there’s the state of Desktop performance. In Metro, the 500T shines. Application load times and overall performance are measurably faster than Surface. This is particularly true in twitch games, like Jetpack Joyride. Surface has a noticeable stutter; the Samsung keeps things smooth.

In Desktop mode, responsiveness and performance are great until you actually try to do something. Even small tasks, like simultaneously playing a video file while moving the mouse, lag noticeably. We couldn’t, for example, keep the Task Manager open while playing either of our high end Star Trek encodes. Attempting to manage both windows at once, even with one of them minimized, was too much for the 500T.

Desktop gaming is also out. While the 500T may be theoretically compatible with x86 games, the SGX545 can’t handle anything recent. Even Torchlight, in 640×480 netbook mode, with all details at their lowest values, was barely able to manage a mid-teens frame rate.

The nearly constant lag turns x86 software compatibility into more of a bullet point technicality than it really ought to be. It’s the sort of situation that might be fixable via driver updates, or might be a symptom of an underlying hardware bottleneck.

Who’s supposed to want this?

All of the companies that dominate the modern tablet industry have content stockpiles and product ecosystems. Companies like Samsung, that lack such options, have little choice but to double down on hardware capability. Compare the specs on the 500Tagainst Samsung’s own Series 3 NP350V5C, both at $749, and try not to wince. The laptop is 5.5lbs. The 500T is 3.28lbs with its dock attached. If you need something lighter, there are over a dozen Core i3/i5 SKUs in the 2lb – 3.9lb segment, including four that skate under the 3lb mark.

That’s a major problem. As much as Samsung might like to position the system as a tablet with an optional dock, it’s ridiculously underpowered compared to the laptops in its price bracket. The instant-on premise is demolished by network problems, the prospect of doing Real Work is nuked by desktop lag, performance stuttering, and a ludicrously small amount of storage.

If all these issues were resolved, this tablet might be worth $549. That’s a $120 premium over the current crop of high-end 10.1-inch (1024×600) Atom netbooks, which typically use the N2600 (1.6GHz, dual-core) and an SGX545 GPU. Then again, those systems still ship with 2-3 USB ports and 320-500GB of storage.

What would I do? Wait. At the very least, wait and see if Samsung, Intel, and Microsoft can resolve the desktop performance lag and the wireless issues. Wait and see if Samsung does anything about available storage, or even acknowledges the problem. The Ativ gets some things right, but far too much of what’s billed as basic functionality doesn’t work or comes with caveats. Some of these issues very much extend to Surface, which is why I’m not waving it around as the alternative must-have. Some of them, like the network problems, don’t.

If the Ativ is representative of the hardware other PC OEMs are shipping, it’s no wonder thatuptake is markedly worse than Windows 7. It’s not that the Ativ 500T is a bad tablet, but it’s eclipsed on every side by better devices at lower price points.

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MIT creates tiny, 22nm transistor without silicon

Researchers at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Lab (MTL) have created the smallest transistor fashioned from indium gallium arsenide, a material that is being positioned as an eventual successor to silicon. MIT’s indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) transistor has a gate length of just 22nm — roughly the same size as the smallest features on Intel’s 22nm FinFET Ivy Bridge chips.

This tiny InGaAs transistor was mostly fashioned from normal semiconductor processes — molecular beam epitaxy, electron beam lithography, and so on. The breakthrough here is using an exotic, compound material, rather than straight-up silicon. In this case, the MIT researchers allow evaporated indium, gallium, and arsenic atoms to react, forming a very thin crystal of InGaAs that will become the transistor’s channel (the thin, lighter line at the tip of the inverted V). Molybdenum is then deposited at the source and drain, oxide is deposited at the gate (the inverted V) — and voila, a tiny, exotic transistor. MIT says it “performs well,” but its exact performance characteristics aren’t given.

It is fairly well understood at this point that silicon — the fundamental building block of almost every computer chip, and much of modern society — will eventually run out of steam. No one quite agrees when this will occur, but the general consensus is within 10-20 years. Basically, at some point in the future, as CMOS components continue to shrink, silicon simply won’t function as a semiconductor any more. When this happens, we’ll need to replace silicon with something else.

ITRS’s table for emerging silicon replacement technologies

As we’ve discussed before on ExtremeTech, the ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors) currently pegs III-V semiconductors such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) as one of the only short-term alternatives to silicon. “Short-term” is relative, though; we’re talking at least five to 10 years until GaAs (or MIT’s InGaAs) finds its way into commercial memory or logic chips. In MIT’s case, the researchers have managed to build a singleInGaAs transistor — scaling that up to the billions of transistors that will be in CPUs of the future will verge on the impossible.

The problem with GaAs, InGaAs, carbon nanotubes, graphene, and any number of exotic materials that we cover on ExtremeTech, is that they’re trying to replace the most advanced technology in the world. It is not hyperbolic to state that hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into CMOS R&D; maybe trillions. For these silicon replacements to even stand a chance, a similar investment will need to be made — and put simply, there is probably only one group in the world who has the requisite time or resources: Intel. We don’t even have definitive proof that the new materials will scale much further than silicon — so we’d be plowing billions of dollars into something that might only get us another few years of Moore’s law.

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Intel unveils 22nm SoC transistors, while TSMC and GlobalFoundries plan risky process jumps

Transistor announcements aren’t the sexiest occasions on the block, but Intel’s 22nm SoC unveil is important for a host of reasons. As process nodes shrink and more components move on-die, the characteristics of each new node have become particularly important. 22nm isn’t a new node for Intel; it debuted the technology last year with Ivy Bridge, but SoCs are more complex than CPU designs and create their own set of challenges.

Like its 22nm Ivy Bridge CPUs, the upcoming 22nm SoCs rely on Intel’s Tri-Gate implementation of FinFET technology. According to Intel engineer Mark Bohr, the 3D transistor structure is the principle reason why the company’s 22nm technology is as strong as it is. Other evidence backs up this point. Earlier this year, we brought you news that Nvidia was deeply concerned about manufacturing economics and the relative strength of TSMC’s sub-28nm planar roadmap. Morris Chang, TSMC’s CEO, has since admitted thatsuch concerns are valid, given that performance and power are only expected to increase by 20-25% as compared to 28nm.

Intel, in contrast, is predicting record gains. The company claims that its 28nm SoC “employs high speed logic transistors, low standby power transistors, and high-voltage tolerant transistors in a single SoC chip to support a wide range of products, including premium smart phones, tablets, netbooks, embedded systems, wireless communications, and ASIC products.” The company reports enormous improvements in leakage currents and Intel plans to take full advantage of the improved performance.

You’ve probably seen the image above trotted out when Intel talks about process node improvements. In this case, it’s the length of the line that’s more improvement than its rightward shifts. The diagram shows leakage current dropping more quickly than clock speed. At 65nm, Intel’s transistor performance and minimum leakage levels dropped off more quickly, while minimum leakage was much higher.

Here’s 65nm, 32nm, and individual data sets for SRAM cells across multiple process nodes.

At 65nm and a maximum input voltage of 1V, Intel’s SRAMs had a narrow operating range. 800MHz was the maximum effective frequency at that voltage — below 0.8v, the chip stopped working at any frequency. At 32nm (Medfield, Clover Trail), the company’s processors have considerable more latitude. 22nm pushes the envelope still further.

The challenge for both TSMC and GlobalFoundries is going to be how to match the performance of Intel’s 22nm technology with their own 28nm products. 20nm looks like it won’t be able to do so, which is why both companies are emphasizing their plans to move to 16nm/14nm ahead of schedule. There’s some variation on which node comes next; both GlobalFoundries and Intel are talking up 14nm; TSMC is implying a quick jump to 16nm.

I don’t want to say too much on how the three companies’ future processes might compare; tech papers at IEDM may shed more light on the particulars of each solution. What’s clear is that both GF and TSMC are going to try to accelerate FinFET development. GF’s tech papers imply that the company will deploy a hybrid 22nm-14nm process to make the jump more quickly.

Will it work? Unknown. TSMC and GlobalFoundries both have excellent engineers, but FinFET is a difficult technology to deploy. Ramping it up more quickly than expected while simultaneously bringing up a new process may be more difficult than either company anticipates. Given the advantages Intel claims for the technology, it might’ve made more sense to ramp FinFET on an established node. One of the most significant demonstrations of what Intel thinks it’s getting out of 22nm FinFET is the company’s decision to revise Atom for an out-of-order architecture. Intel has resisted the call to overhaul the in-order CPU; the current core at the heart of Medfield and Clover Trail offers nearly identical performance to the design that debuted in 2008.

22nm Atom should close the gap with existing ARM CPUs and give Intel a substantial advantage. Overall, the situation looks like Intel holds the cards until GF and TSMC manage to revise their roadmaps for the sub-20nm market.

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