Computers

The USA has gained ground in the world supercomputer rankings, with 116 supercomputers listed among the top 500, but China continues to dominate the list with 219 top-500 supercomputers.

The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, UK is marking the 75th anniversary of the Colossus Mark II computer today with new revelations about its role in winning the Second World War.

Supercomputers will take a huge leap forward when the “exascale” era kicks off in 2021 with the launch of Aurora. But now it looks like that world-leading machine will be usurped before it’s even set up. The Frontier system has been announced, which will boast the power of over 1.5 exaflops.

Four years after the original Surface Hub arrived, and a year after announcing its successor, Microsoft is now launching the Surface Hub 2S in 50-inch and (eventually) 85-inch versions. The giant, interactive digital whiteboard can be yours for a mere $9k from June.

The Heath Robinson, a reconstruction of a major piece of cybernetic history and the precursor to Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer, has made its public debut at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, UK.

Intel and the US Department of Energy will deliver the world’s first exascale supercomputer in 2021, boosting many different fields of research. Named Aurora, the new system will be a thousand times more powerful than the petascale generation that began in 2008 and is still in wide use today.

Revealed at the Embedded World expo in Nuremberg, Germany, last week, the BeagleBone AI has been developed to fill the gap between small single board computers and bigger, more powerful industrial computers.

If you buy a USB-equipped gadget today, you'll get the latest USB 3.1 standard, if you're lucky – but the technology isn't standing still. The preliminary specs for the USB4 standard have just been announced, promising a doubling of potential speeds and a range of new capabilities.

​Though many alternatives are available, the Raspberry Pi computer boards are probably the most well known and widely used in the maker community. Hardkernel recognizes that there's a strong market for more powerful, more capable and more expensive boards. The Odroid N2 ticks all of those boxes.​

Ahead of CES next week, Samsung has revealed three new 2019 monitors it will be showing off at the expo. Leading the line-up is the Space Monitor, designed to take up as little room as possible, along with an ultra-wide gaming monitor and a 4K curved display aimed at content creators.

At its first artificial intelligence developer conference in Beijing, China, last week, Intel unveiled a second generation neural network in USB form, the Neural Compute Stick 2. Designed to level the neural net development playing field, the thumbdrive-sized device is shipping worldwide now.

​When you think of home-brewed computer projects, Raspberry Pi or Arduino may be the first maker boards to spring to mind. But Hardkernel has been selling ARM-based single board computers for a good while and has now revealed the Odroid H2, its first built on Intel's x86 architecture.​