New Machines Break Speed Records

Sometimes new technologies hit the market so thick and fast, you just have to stop for a second and say "Gee whiz." The companies that make computers and game consoles are pushing one another to build machines that do more and more, faster and faster, and as a result the past week has a seen the fall of a series of previously unbreakable technological barriers. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the science that’s getting dropped.

In case you didn’t make it to the ISSCC (that’s the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference) in San Francisco last week, the buzz was all about what Sony's calling the "Emotion Engine." It’s an open secret that the Emotion Engine is the heart of what will become the Playstation 2, Sony’s answer to Sega’s hot-as-heck next-generation Dreamcast console. The Emotion Engine harnesses three separate CPUs that work together to render (in theory) up to 55 million polygons a second. MORE>>