• A nanometer is so small that it takes a billion of them to make a meter. A billion is a huge number. A stack of a billion sheets of paper would be 100 km high. If you could walk a billion steps, you would go around the earth 20 times.
• The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 was large enough that it was pieced together by hand. By contrast, more than 60 million 32nm transistors could fit onto the head of a pin.
• More than 4 million 32nm transistors could fit in the period at the end of this sentence.
• A 32nm transistor contains gates that are so small, you could fit 3,000 of them across the width of a human hair.
• A 32nm transistor can switch on and off over 300 billion times in one second. It would take you 4000 years to flick a light switch on and off that many times.
• Compared to Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, introduced in 1971, a 32nm CPU runs over 4000 times as fast and each transistor uses about 4000 times less energy. The price per transistor has dropped by a factor of about 100,000.
• The “World’s Fastest Man,” Usain Bolt would have to take 3,125,000,000 steps in the 100 meter dash if his stride length was 32nm.
• If the pace of innovation in space travel had increased at the pace of Moore’s Law since 1971, you would now be able to travel at the speed of light, 671 million miles per hour.
• Intel has shipped over 200 million CPUs using high-k/metal-gate transistors – the kind used in 32nm processors -- since the technology was first put into production in November 2007. This translates to over 50,000,000,000,000,000 (50 quadrillion) transistors, or the equivalent of over 7 million transistors for every man, woman and child on earth.
• The price per transistor on a chip has dropped dramatically since Intel was founded in 1968. Some people estimate that the price of a transistor is now about the same as that of one printed newspaper character.

The GT 340 is spec-for-spec exactly the same as their lackluster GT 240 except it is only available as a GDDR5 variant. Meanwhile, the GT 320 has been upgraded with 72 CUDA cores compared to 48 for the GT 220, and the GT 330 is quoted as having either 96 or 112 CUDA cores with 256-bit, 192-bit and 128-bit variants. The new introductions join the GT 310 and 315 as part of the GeForce 300-series range.

The company also released a GeForce PC Kit with all the necessary components for beginner hobbyists to build themselves an Nvidia-branded system. This includes a MSI G31TM-P21 board, Intel Pentium E5300 CPU, GlacialTech Igloo 5058 cooler, 2GB of Corsair Value Select DDR2 667 memory, Seagate Momentus 7200.4 250GB HDD, LG DVD RW optical drive
, XFX 9800GT 512MB graphics card, Ultra LifeTime series 500W PSU, a Cooler Master Elite 334 Nvidia Edition chassis and a Microsoft Basic mouse and Comfort Curve 2000 keyboard -- all for just under $500.

It even includes a screwdriver so basically all you need is a monitor to plug in once you are done with the assembly and your own operating system to install. To ease the process, Nvidia's GeForce PC Kit comes with the CPU and cooler pre-installed on the motherboard, in addition to a complete guide to building a computer system. The kit is primarily targeted at first-time PC builders, as more seasoned enthusiasts will build their own rigs anyway.

USB 3.0 is the next major revision of the ubiquitous interface. Dubbed SuperSpeed USB, this new version promises a tenfold leap forward in transfer speeds as well as improved capabilities, all while maintaining compatibility with USB 2.0 devices. In the following few paragraphs we've rounded out all the relevant information that you as a consumer should know about the next-generation USB standard.

Some quick facts about USB 3.0

It's fast. The new standard breaks the 480Mb/s data transfer limit of USB 2.0 and takes it to a new theoretical maximum of 4.8Gb/s. Keep in mind that real-world performance can be considerably lower than that. USB 3.0 devices are not expected to reach their full potential at launch, but as the standard matures the USB-IF considers it reasonable to achieve a throughput of 3.2Gb/s, or just about enough to transfer a 27GB high definition movie in little over a minute rather than 15 or more with USB 2.0.

It's bi-directional. Unlike previous versions where data can only be piped in one direction at a time, USB 3.0 can read and write data simultaneously. This is achieved by adding two new lanes dedicated to transmit SuperSpeed data and another pair for receiving it, bringing the total number of connections from four on USB 2.0 (power, ground and two for sending/receiving non-SuperSpeed data) to nine counting the 3.0 ground contact.

Furthermore, the signaling method, while still host-directed, abandons device polling in favor of a new interrupt-driven protocol. This ensures that the USB host controller doesn't continually access a connected device in anticipation of a data transfer. Instead, USB 3.0 devices will send the host a signal to begin a data transfer.

It's more power efficient. The signaling method mentioned directly above also means that non-active or idle devices won't have their power drained by the host controller as it looks for active data traffic. Minimum device operating voltage is dropped from 4.4 V to 4 V. On the other hand, the USB-IF has upped the maximum bus power output from about 500 mA to 900 mA, which will enable power-hungrier devices to be bus-powered and USB hubs to support more peripherals. There's also the bonus that battery-powered devices should charge faster.

It's backwards compatible. Your existing USB 2.0 gear will work on version 3.0 ports and vice versa. You'll be able to maximize your bandwidth when using a USB 3.0 cable with USB 3.0 devices and ports, otherwise plugging a 3.0 device into a 2.0 port or a 2.0 device into 3.0 a port will get you standard USB 2.0 data rates.