I’m not entirely sure how useful or practical this would be in a real world sense, but it’s still a pretty cool thing to have. Basically, it’s a vest that you wear while out riding your bike and it will show your speed to all the cars (and other folks on the road) on your back.

The Speed Vest project comes by way of inventor Mykle Hansen. The wearable vest contains a series of sewn-in numerals made from electroluminescent (EL) wire and they automatically show your current speed based on an off-the-shelf bike speedometer sensor. There’s an Arduino microcontroller involved too.

It’s a pretty nifty creation, but all that criss-crossing EL wire looks pretty ugly when not illuminated. Wouldn’t it be better to do a more conventional seven segment digital display, not unlike what you see on typical digital watches and alarm clocks? Yeah, you get boxier numbers, but then you don’t get all that extra EL wire everywhere. Check out the MAKE page if you want to make your own.

The post Video: Cycling vest lights up with your current speed appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Our computers in their simplest form are just a series of tiny electronic circuits containing transistors that switch on and off in certain patterns to execute the functions that we need. At their conception computers were created using only one core processor; this is what reads and performs instructions. Now a computer that has at least two processors is commonplace, and with higher end systems having up to 16 cores.

But Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell have had a technological breakthrough and successfully developed a processor with more than 1000 cores on a single chip.

They achieved this feat by using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which contains transistors just like all other microchips, but they are unique in that rather than having their functions set at the assembly line, the circuits are essentially a blank slate and can be customized by the user. Dr. Vanderbauwhede was able to separate the transistors into small groups and assign them each to perform a different task. This effectively created 1000 small circuits in the chip, and as a result a 1000-core processor with each individual core capable of working solely on its own instructions was born.

Dr. Vanderbauwhede said: “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker – so they are also a greener option.”

They then tested the chip by processing an algorithm that is central to MPEG videos, like those used on YouTube; they came up with a speed of 5 GB/s, which is 20 times faster than current high-end desktops.

Nowadays it is expected that a computer should have a multi-core processor, they all still have to share access to only one memory source, consistently slowing down the computer. Dr. Vanderbauwhede and his team increased efficiency by giving each core is own separate amount memory.

He is planning to present his developments at the International Symposium on Applied Reconfiguable Computing in March.

[UKPA via Daily Mail]

The post 1000-Core processor is the future of computing appeared first on Mobile Magazine.