Dina Genkina

3 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum Hafþór Björnsson—who played the the Mountain in “Game of Thrones”—“lifted” more than 282 petabytes of data when he dead-lifted a custom barbell with 453 kilograms of Pascari solid-state drives. Original photos: Phison; VDURA At the SC24 supercomputing conference held in November in Atlanta, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the actor who played the Mountain in “Game of Thrones”), dead-lifted a custom barbell weighed

5 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum Paul Gagniuc’s recent book explores the little-known history of antivirus software. We live in a world filled with computer viruses, and antivirus software is almost as old as the Internet itself: The first version of what would become McAfee antivirus came out in 1987—just four years after the Internet booted up. For many of us, antivirus software is an annoyance, taking

Michael Frank has spent his career as an academic researcher working over three decades in a very peculiar niche of computer engineering. According to Frank, that peculiar niche’s time has finally come. “I decided earlier this year that it was the right time to try to commercialize this stuff,” Frank says. In July 2024, he left his position as a senior engineering scientist at Sandia National Laboratories to join a startup, U.S. and U.K.-based Vaire

6 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum Aleutie/iStock This year, IEEE Spectrum readers had a keen interest in all things software: What’s going on in the tumultuous world of open-source, why the sheer size of code is causing security vulnerabilities, and how we need to take seriously the energy costs of inefficient code. The ever-growing presence of artificial intelligence also made itself known in the computing world, by

3 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum The semiconductor industry’s long held imperative—Moore’s Law, which dictates that transistor densities on a chip should double roughly every two years—is getting more and more difficult to maintain. The ability to shrink down transistors, and the interconnects between them, is hitting some basic physical limitations. In particular, when copper interconnects are scaled down, their resistivity skyrockets, which decreases how much information

2 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum The National Nuclear Security Administration’s newest supercomputer, El Capitan, is the fastest known computer in the world. Garry McLeod/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory In 1965, the United States and other nuclear powers committed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a successor to the Manhattan Project, now tests nukes only in simulation. To that

9 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum Clark Johnson has had a 7-decade career as an engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur that continues to this day. Chuck Weinstock Clark Johnson says he has wanted to be a scientist ever since he was 3. At age 8, he got bored with a telegraph-building kit he received as a gift and repurposed it into a telephone. By age 12, he set

Walking into Jun Ye’slab at the University of Colorado Boulder is a bit like walking into an electronic jungle. There are wires strung across the ceiling that hang down to the floor. Right in the middle of the room are four hefty steel tables with metal panels above them extending all the way to the ceiling. Slide one of the panels to the side and you’ll see a dense mesh of vacuum chambers, mirrors, magnetic

3 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum BrainChip’s Akida Pico could be used with their AI model architecture in devices like smartwatches. Neuromorphic computing draws inspiration from the brain, and Steven Brightfield, chief marketing officer for Sydney-based startup BrainChip, says that makes it perfect for use in battery-powered devices doing AI processing. “The reason for that is evolution,” Brightfield says. “Our brain had a power budget.” Similarly, the

3 min read Dina Genkina is the computing and hardware editor at IEEE Spectrum Flow Computing In an era of fast-evolving AI accelerators, general purpose CPUs don’t get a lot of love. “If you look at the CPU generation by generation, you see incremental improvements,” says Timo Valtonen, CEO and co-founder of Finland-based Flow Computing. Valtonen’s goal is to put CPUs back in their rightful, ‘central’ role. In order to do that, he and his