Call Skype-to-Skype with an iPhone 3G

In today's podcast: China grabs second place in supercomputer rankings; call Skype-to-Skype with an iPhone 3G; and Intel unveils 32-core server processor.

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A Chinese supercomputer called Nebulae has taken second place in a ranking of the world’s fastest computers. The new machine was made by a company called Dawning for China's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. It uses a mix of Nvidia graphics processors and Intel Xeon CPUs. It has a maximum sustained performance of 1.27 petaflops, or over a million billion floating point operations per second. The world’s fastest supercomputer is still the U.S. Department of Energy's Jaguar, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It has a top speed of 1.76 petaflops. Jaguar was made by Cray and uses AMD’s six-core Opteron processors.

Skype has launched a new version of its client for Apple's iPhone that can make calls to other Skype users over a 3G network. Skype will not charge for Skype to Skype calls over 3G until next year, although network operators may make charges for data usage. The new software offers improved sound quality on the iPhone 3GS, and on recent models of the iPod Touch, which can only place calls over Wi-Fi.

Intel has announced a new 32-core server chip that mixes general x86 cores with specialized cores for faster processing of highly parallel scientific and commercial applications. Called Knights Ferry, the chip will be available to developers in the second half of 2010. However, the first commercial product based on the new technology will have 50 cores and will be part of a family of chips expected to go on sale next year.

Asus has unveiled two Eee Pad tablets running Windows at the Computex show. The larger of the two, the EP121, can slot into a folding dock with a keyboard to form a laptop-like device.

Apple has sold more than two million iPads since the tablet’s April 3 U.S. launch, it said Monday. The gadget received a boost on Friday when it went on sale in nine more countries, including Japan, France, Germany and the U.K. The first million iPads sold out in 28 days.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.