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bobcat

Qinetiq robo-loaders heading to Fukushima

Robots and Bobcat loaders from Qinetiq North America have arrived in Tokyo, and workers are training with them before being deployed to the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which continues to pose a serious radiation threat.

The Virginia-based defense contractor sent 20,000 pounds worth of equipment to Japan this week, including kits that can turn loaders into remote-controlled bulldozers in minutes.

One of the biggest obstacles to getting the Fukushima crisis under control is the continuing radiation threatening workers. This might be a perfect opportunity for robots to help out, but operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) didn't have its own bots to deploy.

Japan's Nuclear Safety Technology Center sent its Moni Robo A, a 5-foot-tall radiation-detecting robot developed by Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding, to the plant. But debris from the March 11 tsunami and explosions that damaged buildings have prevented it from being used, TEPCO said in an IDG News report.

From Denver, Bobcat sent T300 loaders that are powerful enough to lift cars, and Bobcat staff in Japan have completed training on how to control them from laptops. Qinetiq also sent its Robotic Applique Kits, which can convert Bobcat loaders to unmanned vehicles in 15 minutes.

"You can attach anything to them, from bulldozer parts to hooks, to move debris," said Qinetiq spokeswoman Jennifer Pickett, who added that the machines should be at the plant site next week. … Read more

Intel, AMD vie to rewire PC's brain

Intel and AMD are off to the races again. This time it's about making PCs not just faster, but more versatile.

The two longstanding PC chip rivals seem to agree, roughly, on one thing: the need to meld the two key PC chips, the central and graphics processing units, into one processor. But they both bring different strengths to achieve that end.

Why combine chips? Put simply, it takes less energy to move electrons across a chip than to move those same electrons between two chips, so this saves energy, resulting in better battery life for laptops. A point made by Insight 64 principal analyst Nathan Brookwood in a white paper written for AMD, but which, in some fundamental respects, applies equally to Intel.

And CPUs and GPUs are suited to different kinds of computing. CPUs can handle a broad array of tasks, while GPUs are more specialized but much faster at certain types of operations. Future heterogeneous chips could find photos and videos in your library that contain particular faces or places. Or recognize your face when you log in. In short, putting both capabilities on one piece of silicon creates a brainier chip with more processing brawn.

The question, of course, is which company will deliver the goods and drive cutting-edge PC--particularly laptop--designs in 2011? AMD claims that because it is also a supplier of GPUs, via its ATI graphics chip unit, its products are more forward-looking because of the increased emphasis on graphics that tap into key multimedia technologies like Microsoft's DirectX and Apple's OpenCL.

"Intel is understandably more CPU centric. That's Intel's view," said John Taylor, director of marketing for Fusion at AMD. "We're a provider (via ATI) of graphics chips. We're incorporating world-class GPU intellectual property into a new type of design. We look at the GPU in a consumer notebook as a very efficient compute engine as well as all of the wonderful 2D and 3D graphics capabilities," Taylor said, adding that Intel is just "sprinkling" low-level graphics on its CPUs. … Read more

This Week: A Salute to Bad Ass American Rides

This coming weekend, our country will be celebrating the annual Fourth of July holiday. And what better way to celebrate the rich history of the USA than with a week long tribute to some of the most bad ass American automobiles ever made? I sure can't think of a better way, so here we go with the Super Muscle Car Shootout!

This web video is actually a trailer for the Muscle Car Shootout that aired on the Speed Channel in 2006, but the cars showcased here are simply timeless. Some of the most powerful American performance car classics are … Read more

AMD eyeing netbooks with low-power chip?

AMD took a big step toward improving its mobile offerings earlier this month, but it reportedly has other plans to match Intel's moves into this market.

Electronista spotted a post from a German site called Eee PC News on an AMD processor apparently known as the "BGA CPU," according to what appears to be a presentation slide authored by AMD. As The Register notes, the BGA CPU sounds an awful lot like a processor core called Bobcat that AMD first unveiled in 2007 but has said very little about since.

Bobcat was supposed to be a sub-10 … Read more