AMD has released an investor presentation focused on the products the company will introduce later this year. The deck mostly rehashes the advances the company has already publicized regarding 7nm, Epyc versus Xeon performance comparisons, and the improvements to its Radeon Instinct family. There is, however, one slide that confirms 3rd Generation Ryzen will debut mid-year: A mid-year launch for 3rd Generation Ryzen has always made the most sense given AMD’s communicated timelines. Mid-year likely means at the beginning of Q3 (July-September), though it’s possible that AMD could also go for a late Q2 launch in June.
Skylum, formerly MacPhun, has been making waves recently with its Aurora HDR and Luminar image processing products. While those are still the company’s flagships, it has added an intriguing new product to its portfolio. AirMagic has the single purpose of helping drone photographers make quick work of enhancing their images. Using AI technology (like just about every tool these days) it rolls up lens correction, white balance adjustment, haze removal, tone mapping, and color enhancement into a single click. We took a pre-release version of the software for a test drive, using it on a variety of images from DJI’s Mavic Pro and Mavic 2 Pro drones.
The numbers are starting to rack up for electrified vehicles. Nissan just announced it has sold 400,000 Nissan Leaf EVs worldwide since the first Leaf whirred off a dealer lot in 2010. By early 2020, it should be a half a million, maybe the very end of 2019 if Nissan Leaf Plus sales get into high gear. Earlier, Tesla reported it sold almost 146,000 Tesla Model 3’s worldwide in 2018 — way more than any other plug-in vehicle in a single year ever, meaning battery electric vehicles (BEVs) plus plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). Both are proof the market for electrified cars is picking up at a measured pace.
We’ve written a fair bit about Google’s Cloud TPU, the AI inference and ML training accelerator the company developed for handling specific workloads more effectively than a GPU or CPU. These large-scale TPUs, however, are intended to power server rooms and major data centers. Google has also developed hardware for smaller devices, use-cases, and the network edge, appropriately dubbed the Edge TPU. The Coral FAQ describes the Edge TPU as : The Edge TPU is a small ASIC designed by Google that provides high-performance ML inferencing for low-power devices. For example, it can execute state-of-the-art mobile vision models such as MobileNet V2 at 100+ fps, in a power efficient manner.
One of the situations we’ve been tracking on an ongoing basis in 2019 is the adoption rate for Nvidia’s latest GPUs. While it’s impossible to get precise figures, there are signs that Pascal’s exit from the market has improved the situation for Nvidia. Data from the Steam Hardware Survey also confirms that the situation may be improving for Nvidia, in at least in certain SKUs. Our first data point comes from the bestselling lists at Amazon and Newegg. At Christmas and before, these lists were dominated by GTX 1080 and 1070 cards. The steady release of new cards and the retirement of old ones have changed this, and now only a relative handful of lower-end Pascal cards hold the space.
It’s not a matter of if but when another giant asteroid or comet strikes the Earth. It’s happened all throughout history, and our mere presence on this planet won’t protect it. Although, we are the only species in the history of Earth with rockets and explosives (that we know of). Uncountable sci-fi movies have told us that explosions are the answer to an impending strike, but a new analysis from Johns Hopkins University suggests that asteroids are probably considerably harder to damage than we thought, and even if you blow one up, . The physics involved in an asteroid collision are well understood, but it’s difficult to apply them on such a grand scale.
Volvo is a company on a quest for zero deaths from its cars. Thus this week’s announcement that Volvo will cap the top speed of its cars at 180 kph, or 112 mph, starting in 2020. It’s a good thing to do for safety (probably) and it’s also a good marketing tool to help Volvo set itself apart from the competition. Volvo says auto fatalities have three significant causes: speeding, intoxication (drugs as well as alcohol), and distraction. Volvo’s announcement this week tackles one part of the first issue (high-end speed) and hints there could be ways to reduce speed in special zones such as around schools or hospitals.
There’s a nasty but not entirely unexpected surprise waiting for buyers of Samsung’s latest smartphone. As is tradition, iFixit has disassembled the Galaxy S10 to see how easily you can repair it. The results are never good with modern smartphones, but this is a — the Galaxy S10 is even harder to fix than the Galaxy S9. iFixit used the Galaxy S10 and S10e for this teardown. The Galaxy S10+ is almost identical to the GS10 on a hardware level, so they’re bundled together. The GS10+ has a . As usual, both phones are sealed glass and aluminum sandwiches.
Things have been going swimmingly for NASA’s lander on the surface of Mars. After a textbook landing, InSight found itself in a nice, flat area perfect for deploying its seismic sensors. The weather monitoring package even allowed NASA to set up the first interplanetary weather report. It wouldn’t be a robotic mission on another planet without at least a few problems. NASA says the probe’s temperature probe is stuck just below the Martian surface. InSight has three main instruments for studying Mars. There’s the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), which was successfully deployed early this year. There’s also the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), which uses the lander’s x band radio to take precise rotational readings of Mars.
