Skip to main content

Intel celebrates Stephen Hawking’s birthday with personalized silicon wafer

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday last January. At the State of the Universe symposium, Intel promised Hawking a special present in honor of his momentous birthday. A year later, Intel has completed its ambitious gift. Presented by Martin Curley, Intel vice president and director of Intel Labs Europe, Hawking received a special 300mm silicon wafer.

The wafer, which would normally be used to produce Intel chips, is inscribed with the words “Happy Birthday Stephen Hawking” hundreds of times by nano-scale copper lines. The width of each letter is about ten microns, or ten times smaller than the width of a human hair. 

The ceremony took place at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in Cambridge, UK, where Hawking is the founder and director of research. The research base features the COSMOS Mk IX supercomputer, which runs on 1,856 of Intel’s Xeon E5 processors cores and 31 of the company’s Xeon Phi coprocessors. The combined processors give the supercomputer a theoretical top performance of about 75 TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second). Right now, the COSMOS Mk will dedicate its significant power to investigating the origins of our universe, possibly unravelling the first few moments of the Big Bang. Intel announced that it will sponsor 2013’s annual Conference on Particle Physics and Cosmology (COSMO) in Cambridge this September. 

According to  Slashgear, the birthday present isn’t all that Intel’s working on for Hawking these days. As Hawking’s degenerative motor neuron disease progresses, the physicist has lost control over more of his muscles, which makes it harder for him to communicate. With Hawking’s current system, he uses twitches of his cheek to control a cursor that spells out words one letter at a time. He can only speak about one word each minute. Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said that since Hawking is still able to control a few other features, he may be able to communicate more quickly through Morse code in a system that responds to multiple facial cues. Intel is working on a new setup for Hawking that would allow him to speak faster by registering inputs from his eyebrow and mouth movements as well as movements in his cheek. 

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Anna Washenko
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Anna is a professional writer living in Chicago. She covers everything from social media to digital entertainment, from tech…
The first Apple Silicon MacBooks: Specs, release date, price, and more
apple macbook pro 13 review 2020 07

Apple is abandoning Intel and forging ahead with the creation of its own ARM-based Apple Silicon processors, something the company says will increase both performance and efficiency in its range of Macs. Apple says the first of these new Macs will be with us before the end of 2020, and they are due to be announced imminently at the company's November event -- so what exactly should we expect?

We have rounded up all the latest news and rumors concerning this new era of Apple computers, from the expected prices to the performance and internal specs. If there is anything you have wanted to know about the upcoming Apple Silicon Macs, you will find it here.
Price and release date

Read more
Former Intel engineer reveals the truth about the Mac’s switch to Apple Silicon
Apple WWDC 2020

When Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that it was ditching Intel processors and working on its own Mac chips (dubbed Apple Silicon), the company said it was motivated by a desire to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption. But now another account has emerged to explain Apple’s dramatic switch.

Speaking to PC Gamer, former Intel engineer François Piednoël explained the decision was all about bugs, bugs, and more bugs.

Read more
Best Surface Laptop and Surface Pro deals: From $450
Microsoft Surface Go 3 sitting on table.

If you want a thin and light laptop that's similar to the MacBook Air but not in the Apple ecosystem, then the Microsoft Surface lineup of laptops is absolutely the way to go. In fact, if you've seen the recent unwrapping of the business version of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, you might be fired up and ready to grab your own surface. Unfortunately, the Surface lineup can be quite expensive, which is why we've gone out and scoured the retailers for the best deals we could find and collected them below. So, be sure to check out everything, as well as some of these other great laptop deals if you aren't fully committed to the Microsoft Surface lineup.
Microsoft Surface Go 3 -- $450, was $550

Functioning as a 2-in-1 laptop that can switch between tablet mode and laptop mode, the Microsoft Surface Go 3 won't have trouble dealing with basic tasks as it's equipped with the Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y processor and 8GB of RAM. The 10.5-inch touchscreen with 1920 x 1080 resolution is bright and colorful, and its 128GB SSD is more than enough for your documents. The Microsoft Surface Go 3 ships with Windows 11 Home in Mode, so you can start using it as soon as you unbox it. The device also promises up to 11 hours of battery life before requiring a recharge.

Read more