forests

Some Virginians will soon have forests to thank for their electricity.

Biomass manufacturer Enviva has signed a contract with Dominion Virginia Power, a subsidiary of Dominion, to supply wood waste chips to two power plants that are being converted from using coal to renewable biomass.

Dominion Virginia Power had announced in April its intention to convert three 63-megawatt coal-burning electricity plants into three 50-megawatt renewable biomass electricity plants. Specifically, it plans to convert its Altavista, Southampton, and Hopewell, Va., plants. The Southampton and Hopewell plants have contracted to use Enviva wood waste chips pending approval from the Virginia State Corporation … Read more

We love the sounds of nature, whether we're hiking in the woods or just listening from our kitchen window. Aura is a simple program that can bring nature sounds to wherever you are, whether that's your urban apartment or a windowless cube farm.

The program appears as an icon in the system tray, and right-clicking on it gives people access to the program's control board. This is where users can customize the sounds that Aura produces. We were quite impressed with the array of options that Aura offers; there are two profiles, the woods during the day … Read more

Fuel start-up Cobalt Technologies has figured out a way to use trees poisoned and killed by pine beetles to make biobutanol, the company announced Wednesday.

Cobalt develops biofuels that can be mixed with gas, diesel, or jet fuel, as well as used to make plastics. Up until now, the company has used forestry byproducts that originated from healthy trees to make its n-butanol. The result is a gasoline blend made up of 12 percent biobutanol, which the company has claimed can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 85 percent when compared to conventional gasoline. It's been touting the … Read more

Intel promotes the Turbo Boost technology in its new Core i7 Mobile processors as a way to adapt to the needs of the software and get more performance from the chip, but this isn't the real reason the technology exists.

The new "Clarksfield" Core i7 Mobile processors introduced at the Intel Developer Forum last week are certainly very impressive. They're huge high-performance quad-core chips with Hyper-Threading, support for two channels of DDR3-1333 DRAM, and an on-die PCI Express controller for the fastest possible connection to discrete graphics chips.

In his IDF session announcing these parts, Intel Vice President Mooly Eden said the best of these parts, the 2GHz Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition, is "the fastest quad-core processor, the fastest dual-core processor, and the fastest single-core processor"-- all in one chip.

The key to this dramatic claim is a feature called Turbo Boost technology. Basically, if the current application workload isn't keeping all four cores fully busy and pushing right up against the chip's TDP (Thermal Design Power) limit, Turbo Boost can increase the clock speed of each core individually to get more performance out of the chip.

It's easy to see how this works when just one or two cores are being actively used; whatever power the other two or three cores would have consumed can be redirected over to the active cores, allowing them to run at higher speeds.

The quad-core mode of Turbo Boost is a little more subtle; it works when the four cores aren't running a worst-case workload--for example, integer-heavy processing, since it's generally floating-point calculations that consume the most power--so they aren't bumping into the TDP limit. Turbo Boost can increase the frequency of all four cores until they're running as fast as they can for the current workload.

Eden said that the Turbo Boost controller… Read more

The mysteries of the Lynnfield and Jasper Forest die photos (from last week's post titled "Investigating Intel's Lynnfield mysteries") were all cleared up at the Intel Developer Forum last week, and as expected, there was nothing sinister going on--just some confusion in Intel's graphics arts department.

With the help of the always-helpful George Alfs of Intel's press relations department and Intel vice president Mooly Eden (general manager of Intel's PC Client Group), we got everything straightened out. Literally!

Here's the die photo of Intel's Lynnfield chip from my previous post:

This is the newest (shipping) part based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, differing from the earlier Bloomfield by the addition of an on-die PCI Express controller. Both chips are made in Intel's 45nm process technology.

According to Eden, the Lynnfield chip design is shared with several other Intel chips that will be on the market soon, including… Read more

Sometimes it's truly curious who or what inspires us to achieve our best.

There are those sports teams who, sadly, sing "Wonderwall" by Oasis before entering the arena.

There are artists whose muses turn out to be more Pamela Anderson than Laurie Anderson.

And now, according to the Telegraph, some rather honest scientists from Wake Forest University confess that they have been inspired to create rather progressive cybersecurity software by staring at ants for a very long time.

I've never realized this when I've stood on a few hundred of them heading for my kitchen … Read more

I have a few questions to ask at this week's Intel Developer Forum....

Why is Intel using a more expensive chip for the new Core i5 and cheaper Core i7 processors? Why does this new chip--code-named Lynnfield--appear to have features Intel isn't using? What's the connection between Lynnfield and a future Intel chip code-named Jasper Forest?

These questions arose as I've been getting ready for IDF by reviewing recent press releases and news stories about Intel's current and forthcoming products, and chatting with fellow analysts about what we're looking forward to seeing there.

The recent announcements of the Core i5 and new Core i7 processors seemed pretty straightforward. Consider Brooke Crothers' piece on CNET: "Out with the old: Intel makes Core 'i' chips cheap." As Crothers explains, the facts are simple: the new Core i7 800-series slots in under the existing 900-series and replaces some older parts. The Core i5 is a new line, clearly positioned below the Core i7. Features, performance, and prices are all lower. That's as it should be.

But in looking at the coverage on some enthusiast sites, a fact jumped out at me. The Lynnfield chip is 12.5 percent larger than the Bloomfield chip used in the higher-priced Core i7 900-series processors (296 square mm vs. 263 square mm), in spite of the fact that Lynnfield only has two memory interfaces and no QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) link.

The big difference between the chips is the addition of 16 lanes of PCI Express on Lynnfield, but that's only about 80 pins plus the control logic. The changes should have roughly canceled each other out. Maybe one chip would be a little bigger than the other, but not by this much.… Read more

LAKE GRANBY, Colo.--The question was: is it possible to set up a functional workspace deep in the wilderness?

That's what I set out to do, as one of my last goals of Road Trip 2009. I planned on driving well into the mountains of southern Wyoming to see if I could get some work done far from any modern communications infrastructure.

To that end, I ended up driving south from Rawlins, Wyo., and headed into the Sierra Madre mountains, not far from the Colorado border. However, the campground there that I had intended to try out had been … Read more

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont.--I'm kind of awestruck. For four years I've been doing CNET Road Trip projects, and every time I've hit a new thousand-mile milestone, I've stopped, photographed the odometer and the surroundings, and then blogged about the spot.

In almost every case, that new set of zeroes on the odometer has come at some nondescript location. There have been a couple cases where it happened near something incredible, but I'll be honest: I've cheated a little bit and, say, driven back and forth across a parking lot to have the milestone … Read more