Today you can pick up an Apple Watch Series 6 smartwatch with a $70 discount. Apple’s Series 6 smartwatch has built-in hardware for tracking your blood oxygen level and heart rate. These features as well as a built-in fitness tracker make the Watch Series 6 an excellent accessory for any exercise routine. This model is also up to 20 percent faster than its predecessor, the Watch Series 5. You can now get one of these watches from Amazon marked down from $399.00 to $329.00. Dell’s new G15 gaming laptop has an edgy aesthetic design and comes equipped with powerful hardware for running the latest games.
Google reports that it is now using AI to build its future Tensor Processing Units. The company has published some work in this area about a year ago, but today’s announcement indicates the technology has matured. Alexis Mirhoseini led the project. The semiconductor industry has invested in various tools that automate parts of the design process for decades. Back when a CPU had 10,000 to 100,000 transistors, hand-drawn floor plans and circuit layouts were the only way to build a chip. Today, much of the design work is automated, though engineers may still be used in specific, critical paths.
There are uncountable mysteries in the universe, some of which may require the work of future generations to solve. Others we might be able to unravel in the not-too-distant future. For example, scientists are zeroing in on fast radio bursts, or FRBs. These anomalous pulses of energy were discovered in 2007, and a new data set is being made available. This could be the advancement that helps us understand FRBs once and for all. The first FRB was detected on Earth in 2001, but no one knew about it until the data was analyzed in 2007. FRBs are so intense they can outshine entire galaxies but only for a few milliseconds before the burst ends.
Intel is rumored to have made a $2.1B offer for RISC-V chip designer SiFive. SiFive is not a chip manufacturer itself. Somewhat like ARM, it designs CPUs for market and then sells those designs to others. We’ve covered of the company’s development boards in the last few years as RISC-V has . Intel has previously invested in SiFive, and Intel told the press that it was working to be able to build RISC-V CPUs for customers as part of its overall foundry effort. The talks are said to be in the early stages and nothing has been finalized.
IBM has sued GlobalFoundries for its failure to deliver a function 10nm node or the 7nm node that was supposed to replace it. The details in the case date back to 2014, when the two companies signed a deal for GlobalFoundries to build 10nm chips and POWER9 CPUs for IBM. IBM gave GlobalFoundries its Microelectronics division, and GlobalFoundries promised to support IBM for a decade. It was expected that GF would deliver 14nm on time, followed by a transition to 10nm. Things didn’t go as planned. GlobalFoundries was late delivering 14nm and eventually canceled 10nm development altogether. IBM was apparently willing to work with GlobalFoundries on that issue, and would have accepted the company’s 7nm process as a substitute, had that node come to market.
As a , having access and high-level skills to use the tools and accessories necessary to your job – or even those that will simply make your job easier – is essential. Many of the most commonplace tools in IT and web or software development are simply assumed knowledge, and might not even be mentioned on job postings. So learning about these tools independently, before you’re in a situation where you might unexpectedly need them, is common sense. Some of the tools you will need in a developer career include Git, GitOps, Github, and Kubernetes. They’re vital to the tech industry.
The cryptocurrency Chia has had a significant impact on the hard drive market. SSD demand doesn’t seem to have risen the same way, but both Western Digital and Seagate are reporting significantly higher demand. That’s according to executives from both companies, who spoke at a pair of separate events. Seagate CFO Gianluca Romano presented at the , while Western Digital CFO Bob Eulau and VP Peter Andrew attended the (transcripts linked via SeekingAlpha). According to Seagate, the boom in demand has helped it keep its factories full. Apparently, the hard drive industry added too much capacity in the last few years and the increased demand is filling manufacturing lines that would otherwise go idle.
Apple’s WWDC event this year was filled to the brim with big software announcements, including new versions of iOS and macOS, but the rumored MacBook Pro revamp didn’t happen. However, Apple may have in that regard. Among the tags on Apple’s YouTube stream of the event were “M1X MacBook Pro” and “M1X.” As the event approached, sources like Bloomberg said redesigned MacBook Pros could be on the way this summer. No one knew if the unveiling would happen at WWDC, but it looks like Apple at least considered it based on those tags. Since someone went to the trouble of adding them, we can safely surmise that Apple is indeed developing new MacBook Pros with improved ARM chips.
When Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti first appeared on radar, the persistent rumor was that these GPUs would feature much more memory than the base cards — 20GB and 16GB, respectively. Rumors of GPU memory shortages were reportedly behind Nvidia’s decision to delay the cards. When they finally launched recently, the RTX 3080 Ti got a very modest bump to 12GB, while the RTX 3070 Ti keeps its 8GB buffer. A new report from suggests an ongoing and severe DRAM shortage in the market. The company writes: Quotes for graphics DRAM products continue to rise in the contract market as the severe undersupply situation persists.
