It's because today was Google I/O, Google's developer conference, so a lot of projects were announced. Still, Slashdot could have combined all these into story with links to details rather than spam us with a ton of Google stories.
However, this TPU project might be the most interesting thing to come out of the conference. Not because the chips are novel (it's just the same principles as GPUs but taken to a further extreme), but because it sounds like Google's getting into low level chip manufacture. We'll have to wait and see if Google can deliver more FLOPS per dollar/watt than the leading co-processor manufacturer, NVIDIA.
I did a bit of research to try and find out how this thing actually works. I found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_disk_engine. According to Wikipedia this is a heat engine, so it has to be limited by the Carnot efficiency. Taking the ambient temperature to be 283K and the temperature of combusting gasoline to be 773K, that would make the Carnot efficiency to be about 63% (in comparison, the actual maximum efficiency of the Otto cycle, or the common combustion engine, is about 40%, and is rarely, if ever, reached by manufacturers). So according to them, this is a near perfect engine.
However, I'm a little unsure that this is actually a heat engine, so I might be off on this.
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It's because today was Google I/O, Google's developer conference, so a lot of projects were announced. Still, Slashdot could have combined all these into story with links to details rather than spam us with a ton of Google stories. However, this TPU project might be the most interesting thing to come out of the conference. Not because the chips are novel (it's just the same principles as GPUs but taken to a further extreme), but because it sounds like Google's getting into low level chip manufacture. We'll have to wait and see if Google can deliver more FLOPS per dollar/watt than the leading co-processor manufacturer, NVIDIA.
I did a bit of research to try and find out how this thing actually works. I found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_disk_engine. According to Wikipedia this is a heat engine, so it has to be limited by the Carnot efficiency. Taking the ambient temperature to be 283K and the temperature of combusting gasoline to be 773K, that would make the Carnot efficiency to be about 63% (in comparison, the actual maximum efficiency of the Otto cycle, or the common combustion engine, is about 40%, and is rarely, if ever, reached by manufacturers). So according to them, this is a near perfect engine. However, I'm a little unsure that this is actually a heat engine, so I might be off on this.