Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics cards launched in laptop/mobile space, and everyone is wondering just how well the first generation of discrete graphics performs in actual, GPU-accelerated workloads. Tellusim Technologies, a software company located in San Diego, has managed to get ahold of a laptop featuring an Intel Arc A370M mobile graphics card and benchmark it against other competing solutions. Instead of using Vulkan API, the team decided to use D3D12 API for tests, as the Vulkan usually produces lower results on the new 12th generation graphics. With the 30.0.101.1736 driver version, this GPU was mainly tested in the standard GPU working environment like triangles and batches. Meshlet size is set to 69/169, and the job is as big as 262K Meshlets. The total amount of geometry is 20 million vertices and 40 million triangles per frame.

Using the tests such as Single DIP (drawing 81 instances with u32 indices without going to Meshlet level), Mesh Indexing (Mesh Shader emulation), MDI/ICB (Multi-Draw Indirect or Indirect Command Buffer), Mesh Shader (Mesh Shaders rendering mode) and Compute Shader (Compute Shader rasterization), the Arc GPU produced some exciting numbers, measured in millions or billions of triangles. Below, you can see the results of these tests.

ASUS today announced availability of ASUS Taichi 31, a sleek Ultrabook with a 13.3-inch dual-screen design that offers the mobile flexibility of a tablet with the performance and features of a notebook. ASUS Taichi 31 features a choice of Intel Core processors and joins the 11.6-inch ASUS Taichi 21, launched in October 2012.

With two Full HD 13.3-inch screens placed back-to-back, ASUS Taichi 31 combines the best features of a Windows 8 tablet and a powerful Ultrabook in a single sleek design. With the same stunning black-mirror finish and slender profile as the 11.6-inch ASUS Taichi 21, ASUS Taichi 31 is as elegant as it is innovative, and packs a host of features that help make light work of any productivity task.

Scientists at the University of Sydney claim to have found a technology that would possibly allow the internet to become up to hundred times faster than current networks. After four years of development they have created a switch that's "only" 60 times faster than current networks. With little extra work the scientists are confident that they can reach the 100 times faster speed rates. "This is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there. We are talking about networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any more," says Federation Fellow Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of CUDOS which is based within the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. The switch is created using a small scratch on a piece of glass. This scratched glass is actually a photonic integrated circuit that has the capacity to increase the slow rate of information carried by optical fibres. Using photonic technology that has terabit per second speed, the circuit uses the scratch as a guide or a switching path for information. Similar to when trains are switched from one track to another, this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. Therefore in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. Additional information on the new scratch switches can be obtained at the University of Sydney's website here.

The group of people who were previously responsible for creating the popular LEGO Mindstorms series of programmable capable robotics kits are responsible for creating Scratch a program which makes it easier for young kids above eight years old to learn programming. Scratch is available as a free 35 MB download, and so far runs on both Windows and Mac OS X. Programming commands are very simple and are separated into categories such as Motion and Sensing and the commands can be dragged and dropped into the scripts panel.