Fake computer chips have been an ongoing problem Intel and AMD have struggled to deal with for decades. It seems that such behavior is on the rise again, with more fake Intel CPUs showing up on the Chinese market. The post by via steps through some of the examples of how this sort of scam is pulled on unsuspecting customers. The methods vary. In some cases, companies will grind the label off the front of a CPU and repaint the lid, but you ultimately wind up getting a CPU that’s compatible with a motherboard you might attempt to stick it into, even if what you discover is that you’ve paid 9900K prices for a Pentium Gold G5400.
Even in the current pandemic, there are a few companies that have seen some positive trends amid the Great Cessation. After shelter-in-place orders began going out, home electronics sales started to surge, reflecting an increased need for office equipment, including PCs. The sales boost, however, already shows signs of having peaked, to The Information, and DigiTimes reports that the PC market is expected to sag by Q3 2020, even though that’s typically the best quarter for the industry. The electronics news is straightforward: Electronics sales have dipped after March 30, potentially indicating that demand is falling off as consumers gear up to work from home.
There are certain terms of art in semiconductor technology that have become common touchstones. Moore’s law, Dennard scaling, and concepts like the “” refer to long-established trends in technology that often resurface across many different areas of expertise. In that vein, there’s a concept we’re going to discuss today that some of you may be familiar with, but that has gotten comparatively little attention: Makimoto’s wave. While it doesn’t date back quite as far as Gordon Moore’s seminal paper, Makimoto’s argument has a direct bearing on the booming market for AI and machine learning devices. First presented in 1991 by Dr.
After we covered the ever, it’s now time to revisit some of the worst CPUs ever built. To make it onto this esteemed list, a needed to be fundamentally broken, as opposed to simply being poorly positioned or slower than expected. The annals of history are already stuffed with mediocre products that didn’t quite meet expectations but weren’t truly bad. Note: Plenty of people will bring up the Pentium FDIV bug here, but the reason we didn’t include it is simple: Despite being an enormous marketing failure for Intel and a huge expense, the actual bug was tiny. It impacted no one who wasn’t already doing scientific computing and the scale and scope of the problem in technical terms was never estimated to be much of anything.
Conventional wisdom says that the best way to rid yourself of malware is to reset your device to factory defaults and start over. Security researchers sounded the alarm several months ago after detecting a piece of malware that survives factory resets, but no one was able to figure out exactly how it worked. Now, we know, and . The malware, known as xHelper, started appearing on devices early this year with infections concentrated in Russia. It has not appeared in the Play Store because Google’s automated systems would immediately flag it as suspicious. Once installed on a device, xHelper attempts to gain root access, which allows it to modify the system software and set up a backdoor through which it can install other applications.
The numbers are pretty staggering. Battle royale MMO juggernaut Fortnite has . And in a survey last year, said they’d played a battle royale game such as Fortnite, Apex Legends or PUBG in the past month. Battle royale contests pitting hordes of players against each other all at once dominate the gaming world. Seeing one of these amazing worlds in action, it’s practically impossible not to think about how such a vast canvas is even created. The truth is that it isn’t simple…but the tools are probably a lot more accessible to even an inexperienced coder than you might think. walks even a first time programmer through all the steps needed to create their own fully immersive game world and produce their own battle-royale-style game from scratch.
Space vehicles, once launched, generally don’t get brought into the shop for maintenance. The one exception to this rule has been the Hubble Space Telescope, and even then, we were only able to repair and restore that specific piece of equipment because of the types of failures it suffered. Now, a satellite has successfully brought another satellite back online without human intervention. Long-term, advances like this could dramatically extend the lifespan of satellites. The Northrop-Grumman satellite MEV-1 (Mission Extension Vehicle) has docked with Intelsat 901 and is now serving as the satellite’s engine. The Intelsat 901 was launched in 2001 and provided service until it ran low on fuel.
With students and business personnel alike forced to work at home for the time being due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it has become essential to have a capable computer for work. For a limited time, Lenovo’s well-built ThinkPad laptops are being offered with sizable discounts. Any of these systems would be excellent options for clearing your in-tray or finishing up your child’s homework. This lightweight system weighs in at just 2.4 pounds, and it comes equipped with a modern Intel Core i5 processor as well as a 1080p 14-inch display. In addition to the solid build quality, this system also features a fingerprint sensor and exceptional battery life; it can last for up to 18.3 hours on a charge.
Our solar system has most likely had many interstellar visitors over the eons, but we’ve only managed to spot a few. The first was ‘Oumuamua in 2017, but amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov spotted the object now known as 2I/Borisov late last year. Scientists have been able to take a closer look at this object as it nears the sun, even managing to . And it’s pretty, well… alien. Astronomers all over the world turned their telescopes toward 2I/Borisov in the months following the discovery, and among them was a team from NASA using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).
