Gizmodo: atom smasher

Historic, Gigantic Atom Smasher to Be Demolished

Adam Frucci — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Lawrence Berkeley National Labratory's Bevatron was the world's largest atom smasher when it was build for $9 million in the early '50s. Soon, it'll be reduced to a pile of rubble.

The 125,000-square-foot facility was one of the crown jewels of the world of particle physics back then, but at this point its sadly outdated and has outlived its usefulness. But back in the '50s, it earned a Nobel Prize for Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain, who discovered the antiproton within a year of the Bevatron's completion.

Just think: how long will it take for us to decide that the Large Hadron Collider is an outdated piece of junk? And what will we be replacing it with? [Wired Science]

LHC's $21 Million Single Joint Failure is the Most Expensive Soldering Error in Soldering History

John Mahoney — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:20:00 EST

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most complicated machine that was felled by a single faulty solder joint last month, won't be back until summer 2009 now, at the earliest—a few months later than CERN last speculated. And at what cost? $21 million in repairs. A drop in the bucket when the full $10 billion budget is considered, yes, but let's hope some of this dough is spent on a bit more magnet-meltdown-preventing solder redundancy. [AP]

Ancient AMD Athlon 64 Beats Intel Atom While Using Less Power

matt buchanan — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:20:00 EDT

A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How?

In part, because the K8 architecture is just damn good, but also because AMD's 780G desktop platform is more modern—so it has more features too—while the Intel 945GC chipset is old and busted. The AMD system is quieter too, because it doesn't even need a cooling fan. So while the 8-watt Athlon 64 2000+ processor technically uses more power, the AMD system on the whole consumes less than the Intel setup, idling or under a full load. AMD winning at something—between this minor victory and ATI's latest on top of the world, it's almost like the good ol' cutthroat days again. Almost. [Tom's Hardware]