document.write("Plunge in Storage Battery Costs Will Speed Shift to Renewable Energy, Says IEA
");document.write("\"In less than 15 years, battery costs have fallen by more than 90%,\" according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, \"one of the fastest declines ever seen in clean energy technologies.\" And it\'s expected to get even cheaper, reports Reuters:An expected sharp fall in battery costs for energy storage in coming years will accelerate the shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday... The total capital costs of battery storage are due to tumble by up to 40% by 2030, the Paris-based watchdog said in its Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions report. \"The combination of solar PV (photovoltaic) and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India,\" said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. \"And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States. Batteries are changing the game before our eyes.\" [...] The global market for energy storage doubled last year to over 90 gigawatt-hours (GWh), the report said... The slide in battery costs will also help provide electricity to millions of people without access, cutting by nearly half the average electricity costs of mini-grids with solar PV coupled with batteries by 2030, the IEA said. The Los Angeles Times notes one place adopting the tech is California:Standing in the middle of a solar farm in Yolo County, [California governor] Newsom announced the state now had battery storage systems with the capacity of more than 10,000 megawatts — about 20% of the 52,000 megawatts the state says is needed to meet its climate goals. Although Newsom acknowledged it isn\'t yet enough to eliminate blackouts...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Why Are Laptops Moving to Soldered RAM?
");document.write("This year Dell moved to soldered RAM for its XPS 14 and 16, writes Digital Trends, which \"makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair.\" \"This was a big change from the past, where the XPS 15 and 17 were both celebrated for their upgradability.\"Of course, Dell isn\'t the first to make the transition. In fact, they\'re one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow. Where soldered RAM was previously limited to just MacBooks and ultrabooks, it\'s now affecting most high-performance laptops for gaming as well. Even the fantastic ROG Zephyrus G14 moved to soldered memory this year. After two months of research, the article\'s author acknowledges \"there are tangible benefits to companies using soldered RAM, and all the people I spoke to while writing this agree that they outweigh the downsides, but how that applies to the end-user is a bit more complicated.\"If there\'s one thing and one thing only that soldered RAM is indisputably good for, it\'s saving space. [Haval Othman, a senior director of experience engineering at HP] explained the benefits, saying: \"If battery life, mobility, form factor (thin and light), and power efficiency are my priority among other design choices, then my mind immediately goes to soldered RAM; because that\'s where soldered RAM can be beneficial and power-efficient, which will lead to longer battery life. Plus, it\'s going to give me more space on the motherboard, so I can design the product thinner and lighter. [...] If we want a thin product, the trade-off is soldering more of the devices onto the board.\" This tracks. In a laptop, there\'s only so much space that can be used for components, and that free space grows smaller by the year to make ultrabooks possible. They\'re an industrywide trend that was first popularized by Apple, and the rest of the laptop manufacturing world quickly caught on. Each year, laptops are released thinner and lighter, and that means having to squeeze the components together in new, innovative ways... Soldering the memory down onto the motherboard means that it can be attached almost anywhere within the laptop instead of being slotted into a specific part of it. It effectively makes the laptop thinner by cutting back on the space that the RAM module takes up. The space saved by soldering memory can be used for other things, such as a bigger battery.... All three companies that I spoke to stress the form factor much more than any tangible cost benefits... Stuart Gill, director of global media relations, campaigns, and corporate content [said] \"Both soldered and socketed RAM designs are now quite mature. As a result, we see no impact on the manufacturing process and, therefore, the cost to the consumer.\" SO-DIMM chips also have \"relatively limited bandwidth,\" according to HP\'s Othman, \"while when you solder the memory chips onto the board, you can build it for a much wider bandwidth.\" But the article ends by looking to the future. \"The good news is that SO-DIMM memory might eventually be replaced by the CAMM2 standard.\"Recently approved by JEDEC, CAMM2 is said to be significantly thinner, and it\'ll be available both in soldered and non-soldered variants. Using CAMM2 will allow laptops to stack up to 128GB of RAM, and the frequencies are said to be going up, too. CAMM2 can also activate dual-channel memory with just a single module.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Behold the World's Largest 3D Printer
");document.write("They\'re calling it \"the world\'s largest 3D printer,\" but also \"the factory of the future\" — not just a 3D printer, but a manufacturing system.It\'s the succcessor to a 3D printer that could create an entire house, cutting construction time and labor, according to the Associated Press. And this one \"may one day create entire neighborhoods.\"It has a voracious appetite, consuming as much as 500 pounds (227 kilograms) of material per hour... The university wants to show how homes can be constructed nearly entirely by a printer with a lower carbon footprint. The buildings and construction sector accounts for roughly 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions, largely due to the production and use of materials such as cement, steel and aluminum that have a significant carbon footprint, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Such printed buildings can be recycled, which is unique compared to current construction. \"You can basically deconstruct it, you can grind it up if you wish, the 3D printed parts, and reprint with them, do it again,\" Dagher said before the event... But it can be used for a variety of other creations and already has been used for a range of things, from boats to defense department structures. The project is partly funded by the U.S. military, according to the BBC. \"Maine University says it hopes the printer can be used to make affordable housing, as well as bridges, boats and wind turbines.\"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("The 'Ceph' Community Now Stores 1,000 Petabytes in Its Open Source Storage Solution
");document.write("1,000 petabytes.A million terabytes.One quintillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). That\'s the amount of storage reported by users of the Ceph storage solution (across more than 3,000 Ceph clusters). The Ceph Foundation is a \"directed fund\" of the Linux Foundation, providing a neutral home for Ceph, \"the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges\" (offering an architecture that\'s \"highly scalable, resilient, and flexible\"). It\'s a software-defined storage platform, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. And Friday they announced the release of Ceph Squid, \"which comes with several performance and space efficiency features along with enhanced protocol support.\"Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. The release of Ceph Squid represents a significant milestone toward providing scalable, reliable, and flexible storage solutions that meet the ever-evolving demands of digital data storage. Features of Ceph Squid include improvements to BlueStore [a storage back end specifically designed for managing data on disk for Ceph Object Storage Daemon workloads] to reduce latency and CPU requirements for snapshot intensive workloads. BlueStore now uses RocksDB compression by default for increased average performance and reduced space usage. [And the next-generation Crimson OSD also has improvements in stability and read performance, and \"now supports scrub, partial recovery and osdmap trimming.\"] Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, and welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved. Ceph Squid also brings enhancements for the CRUSH algorithm [which computes storage locations] to support more flexible and cost effective erasure coding configurations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("45 Drives Adds Linux-Powered Mini PCs, Workstations To Growing Compute Lineup
");document.write("Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives\' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC. Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive\'s parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives\' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn\'t require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn\'t just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers. [...] In terms of software, 45 Drives says it will offer a number of operating system images for customers to choose from at the time of purchase, and Linux will be a first-class citizen on these devices. It\'s safe to say that Milburn isn\'t a big fan of Microsoft these days. \"We run many hundreds of Microsoft workstations here, but we\'re kind of moving away from it,\" he said. \"With Microsoft, it\'s a control thing; it\'s forced updates; it\'s a way of life with them.\" Milburn also isn\'t a fan of Microsoft\'s registration requirements and online telemetry. \"We want control over what all our computers do. We want no traffic on our network that\'s out of here,\" he said. As a result, Milburn says 45 Drives is increasingly relying on Linux, and that not only applies to its internal machines but its products as well. Having said that, we\'re told that 45 Drives recognizes that Linux may not be appropriate for everyone and will offer Windows licenses at an additional cost. And, these both being x86 machines, there\'s nothing stopping you from loading your preferred distro or operating system on them after they\'ve shipped. These workstations aren\'t exactly cheap. They start at $1,099 without the dedicated GPU. \"The HL15 will set you back $799-$910 for the bare chassis if you opted for the PSU or not,\" adds The Register. \"Meanwhile, a pre-configured system would run you $1,999 before factoring in drives.\"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Honda To Spend $11 Billion On Four EV Factories In North America
");document.write("Jonathan M. Gitlin reports Ars Technica: Honda announced today that it will spend $11 billion to expand its electric vehicle manufacturing presence in North America. The Japanese automaker already has a number of factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and it\'s this last one that will benefit from the expansion, with four EV-related plants planned for Ontario. Honda says it has begun evaluating requirements for what it\'s calling an \"innovative and environmentally responsible\" EV factory and a standalone EV battery plant in Alliston, Ontario, which is already home to Honda\'s two existing Canadian manufacturing facilities. Additionally, the automaker wants to set up another two sites as joint ventures. One will be a plant that processes cathode active materials and their precursors -- the various elements like nickel and manganese that are combined with lithium in lithium-ion batteries -- set up in a partnership with POSCO Future M, a South Korean battery material and chemical company. (POSCO is already working with General Motors on another joint venture battery precursor material facility in Betancour, Quebec, that is supposed to become operational in 2026.) A second joint venture will be a partnership with Asahi Kasei, which will manufacture battery separators, the material that keeps the anode and cathode apart. The locations of these two joint ventures have not yet been announced. Honda thinks it will be able to start making EVs in Ontario in 2028 and says the assembly plant will have the capacity to build 240,000 EVs per year. Meanwhile, the battery plant is planned to have an annual output of 36 GWh.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("TSMC Unveils 1.6nm Process Technology With Backside Power Delivery
");document.write("An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom\'s Hardware: TSMC announced its leading-edge 1.6nm-class process technology today, a new A16 manufacturing process that will be the company\'s first Angstrom-class production node and promises to outperform its predecessor, N2P, by a significant margin. The technology\'s most important innovation will be its backside power delivery network (BSPDN). Just like TSMC\'s 2nm-class nodes (N2, N2P, and N2X), the company\'s 1.6nm-class fabrication process will rely on gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors, but unlike the current and next-generation nodes, this one uses backside power delivery dubbed Super Power Rail. Transistor and BSPDN innovations enable tangible performance and efficiency improvements compared to TSMC\'s N2P: the new node promises an up to 10% higher clock rate at the same voltage and a 15%-20% lower power consumption at the same frequency and complexity. In addition, the new technology could enable 7%-10% higher transistor density, depending on the actual design. The most important innovation of TSMC\'s A16 process, which was unveiled at the company\'s North American Technology Symposium 2024, is the introduction of the Super Power Rail (SPR), a sophisticated backside power delivery network (BSPDN). This technology is tailored specifically for AI and HPC processors that tend to have both complex signal wiring and dense power delivery networks. Backside power delivery will be implemented into many upcoming process technologies as it allows for an increase in transistor density and improved power delivery, which affects performance. Meanwhile, there are several ways to implement a BSPDN. TSMC\'s Super Power Rail plugs the backside power delivery network to each transistor\'s source and drain using a special contact that also reduces resistance to get the maximum performance and power efficiency possible. From a production perspective, this is one of the most complex BSPDN implementations and is more complex than Intel\'s Power Via. Volume production of A16 is slated for the second half of 2026. \"Therefore, actual A16-made products will likely debut in 2027,\" notes the report. \"This timeline positions A16 to potentially compete with Intel\'s 14A node, which will be Intel\'s most advanced node at the time.\"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Seagate Joins the HDD Price Hike Party, Blames AI for Spike in Demand
");document.write("Seagate has joined Western Digital in increasing the prices of hard drives, with rising demand due to the huge data requirements of AI taking the blame. AI is also behind a rapid growth in orders for Enterprise solid state drives. From a report: One of the big three makers of traditional rotating hard disk drives, Seagate informed customers that it is increasing prices effective immediately for new orders, but also for any changes to orders that are \"over and above\" previously committed volumes. This was disclosed in a letter from the company seen by analyst Trendforce, and comes just a couple of weeks after rival manufacturer Western Digital sent out a similar letter to customers informing them of price hikes. According to Trendforce, the cause of the issue is two-fold: rising demand for high-capacity HDD products driven by the current craze for all things AI, and reduced production by hard drive manufacturers that means they are unable to meet the demand, leading to soaring prices. The rising demand comes from AI training requiring huge volumes of data: OpenAI\'s GPT-3 model is said to have been trained using 45TB of data, which may have been surpassed for newer models. And while flash-based SSDs boast high-speed and low-latency, storing everything in flash would still be costly. Seagate launched a 30TB hard drive line last year. Hard drive production was cut by as much as 20 percent over the last two years or so because of falling orders during the pandemic, and now manufacturers are unprepared for a sudden uptick in demand.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Apple Reportedly Developing Its Own Custom Silicon For AI Servers
");document.write("Hartley Charlton reports via MacRumors: Apple is said to be developing its own AI server processor using TSMC\'s 3nm process, targeting mass production by the second half of 2025. According to a post by the Weibo user known as \"Phone Chip Expert,\" Apple has ambitious plans to design its own artificial intelligence server processor. The user, who claims to have 25 years of experience in the integrated circuit industry, including work on Intel\'s Pentium processors, suggests this processor will be manufactured using TSMC\'s 3nm node. Apple\'s purported move toward developing a specialist AI server processor is reflective of the company\'s ongoing strategy to vertically integrate its supply chain. By designing its own server chips, Apple can tailor hardware specifically to its software needs, potentially leading to more powerful and efficient technologies. Apple could use its own AI processors to enhance the performance of its data centers and future AI tools that rely on the cloud. While Apple is rumored to be prioritizing on-device processing for many of its upcoming AI tools, it is inevitable that some operations will have to occur in the cloud. By the time the custom processor could be integrated into operational servers in late 2025, Apple\'s new AI strategy should be well underway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
");document.write("Updating California's Grid For EVs May Cost Up To $20 Billion
");document.write("An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two researchers at the University of California, Davis -- Yanning Li and Alan Jenn -- have determined that nearly two-thirds of [California\'s] feeder lines don\'t have the capacity that will likely be needed for car charging. Updating to handle the rising demand might set its utilities back as much as 40 percent of the existing grid\'s capital cost. Li and Jenn aren\'t the first to look at how well existing grids can handle growing electric vehicle sales; other research has found various ways that different grids fall short. However, they have access to uniquely detailed data relevant to California\'s ability to distribute electricity (they do not concern themselves with generation). They have information on every substation, feeder line, and transformer that delivers electrons to customers of the state\'s three largest utilities, which collectively cover nearly 90 percent of the state\'s population. In total, they know the capacity that can be delivered through over 1,600 substations and 5,000 feeders.[...] By 2025, only about 7 percent of the feeders will experience periods of overload. By 2030, that figure will grow to 27 percent, and by 2035 -- only about a decade away -- about half of the feeders will be overloaded. Problems grow a bit more slowly after that, with two-thirds of the feeders overloaded by 2045, a decade after all cars sold in California will be EVs. At that point, total electrical demand will be close to twice the existing capacity. The problems aren\'t evenly distributed, though. They appear first in high-population areas like the Bay Area. And throughout this period, most of the problems are in feeders that serve residential and mixed-use neighborhoods. The feeders that serve neighborhoods that are primarily business-focused don\'t see the same coordinated surge in demand that occurs as people get home from work and plug in; they\'re better able to serve the more erratic use of charging stations at office complexes and shopping centers. In terms of the grid, residential services will need to see their capacity expand by about 16 gigawatts by 2045. Public chargers will need nine gigawatts worth of added capacity by the same point. The one wild card is direct current fast charging. Eliminating fast chargers entirely would reduce the number of feeders that need upgrades by 12 percent. Converting all public stations to DC fast charging, in contrast, would boost that number by 15 percent. So the details of the upgrades that will be needed will be very sensitive to the impatience of EV drivers. Paying for the necessary upgrades will be pricey, but there\'s a lot of uncertainty here. Li and Jenn came up with a range of anywhere between $6 billion and $20 billion. They put this in context in two ways. The total capital invested in the existing grid is estimated to be $51 billion, so the cost of updating it could be well over a third of its total value. At the same time, the costs will be spread out over decades and only total up to (at most) three times the grid\'s annual operation and maintenance costs. So in any one year, the costs shouldn\'t be crippling. All that might be expected to drive the cost of electricity up. But Li and Jenn suggest that the greater volume of electricity consumption will exert a downward pressure on prices (people will pay more overall but pay somewhat less per unit of electricity). Based on a few economic assumptions, the researchers conclude that this would roughly offset the costs of the necessary grid expansion, so the price per unit of electricity would be largely static. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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