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indianexpress: THE Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) now has a new president with Brigadier R J Sharma taking oath to the office on Monday evening. Brig Sharma, who also assumed command of the Pune Sub Area, has taken over after the PCB was without a regular president for over month. The officer, who took a tour of the PCB office and met senior officials, has promised to come out with a road map for the cantonment area within a month to address all issues.

“A priority will be to make the cantonment area cleaner and greener. A lot of environmental activities are already in place and I would follow them up aggressively,” Brig Sharma said, at a media interaction after the swearing in ceremony. He added that improving the civic amenities in the area would also be on his target list while drawing up the action plan.

The officer said that there would be closer interaction between PCB and the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to carry out faster and more efficient developmental works. “A roadmap (for PCB) will be prepared within two months with time frames and targets to be achieved,” the Brigadier said. However, he added that ongoing projects and existing civic amenities would be accorded top priority. “Before taking on new projects we must ensure that all current ones are working,” he said.

techtree: At the 3GSM show, Nokia unveiled an array of devices and services, including the next generation of Eseries devices, plus navigation and Mobile TV devices targeted at the mass market to lead the next phase of mobility.

Nokia announced a trio of new Eseries devices, designed for business professionals, including E61i emailer device, E65 slider, and E90 Communicator, each packed with features and using 3G and WLAN technologies plus the flexible S60 software platform. The devices also feature high-quality cameras.

The E90 Communicator is claimed to be an all inclusive business device with advanced technologies, such as HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) and integrated GPS. It is expected to be available during the second quarter of 2007, with volume global availability during third quarter of 2007.

The E65 slider is now available in select markets, with volume availability scheduled for the first quarter of 2007, while the E61i will be available during the second quarter of 2007.

Nokia also released its first mass market navigation-enabled mobile phone, the 6110 Navigator.

Using integrated GPS (Global Positioning System), the phone enables consumers quickly and easily view their current location on map, search for destinations, find specific routes, or locate nearby services such as restaurants, hotels, or shops. In addition, the full turn-by-turn 3D navigation feature suggests the best route using voice or visual instructions on a map. The Navigator phone is expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2007.

Another Nokia device unveiled at the 3GSM show is the N77 multimedia phone designed to accelerate the taking-up of DVB-H mobile TV devices. This particular market is predicted to reach between 5 to 10 million units by end of 2008, and around 20 million units by the end of 2009.

techtree: Intel has developed a chip dubbed “Tera Research Chip” that promises to deliver supercomputer-like performance and consume less electricity.

Being labeled as the world’s first programmable processor, this 80-core chip is the result of Intel’s “Tera-scale computing” research aimed at delivering Teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) performance for future PCs and servers.

The 80-core research chip achieves teraflops of performance while consuming only 62 watts, which is less than that consumed by many single-core processors today. It offers specific insights into new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects, and energy management approaches.

Intel believes that Tera-scale performance, and the ability to move terabytes of data, will play a pivotal role in future PCs with everywhere access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of HD entertainment on PCs, servers, and handheld devices.

The company has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating point cores to market. However, the Tera-scale research is active in investigating new innovations in processor or core functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer interconnects required to best move data. Also, it is active in finding, how software needs to be designed to best leverage multiple processor cores.

The first time Teraflops performance was achieved was in 1996, on the ASCI Red Supercomputer by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. Taking more than 2,000 square feet, the computer was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity.

Interestingly, the new research chip achieves the same performance on a multi-core chip.