When GlobalFoundries canceled its 7nm ramp this year, it did so because it claimed it hadn’t found enough customers to justify the investment. The overall impact on AMD, GF’s major customer, was apparently negligible — plans were already in the works to bring Epyc and Ryzen up on 7nm. But GlobalFoundries major justification for canceling 7nm was that there simply weren’t enough customers to go around. At the time, we asked whether we might see companies like AMD being squeezed into smaller ramps than they might like due to these issues. Now, it looks like TSMC may have the opposite problem.
Google’s seeming inability to settle on a chat platform has been something of a running joke on the internet for years, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Barely two years after launching its Allo chat app, Google has announced that Allo . This follows a decision to “pause” development of Allo to focus on RCS messaging. In a blog post, Google says that Messages (its texting platform) has enjoyed increasing usage, and it wants to continue that “momentum.” Consequently, Google is giving up on Allo. The implication is that Allo does not have continued momentum. That’s not surprising for a product Google hasn’t updated in almost a year.
Microsoft is supposedly working on a second dual-screen device that it wants to bring to market. No, not Andromeda — that’s the dual-screen smartphone-sized hardware platform. This device, codenamed Centaurus, runs Windows Core OS and reportedly bears some resemblance to Microsoft’s Courier project from 2010. Microsoft is pushing the idea of this device as a “dual screen 2-in-1.” and the hardware is powered by Intel. Windows Central has more details on the writeup, and maybe I’m just blind to potential innovation in this space, but I’m really struggling to understand how this product is ever going to make sense to anyone.
If you’re still looking for some big holiday gifts, Amazon is offering up some particularly compelling deals right now. Save on a Raspberry Pi starter kit, a 32-inch monitor, a Radeon RX 580 graphics card, and much more. You’ll also find sales on 4K TVs, wireless chargers, video games, and more courtesy of our partners at … Featured Deals Amazon 12 Days of Deals: 1920×1080 Frameless IPS LED Monitor for $149.99 at Amazon (List price: $199.99). Amazon 12 Days of Deals: Complete Starter Kit (32GB Edition) for $57.99 at Amazon (List price: $79.99). for $137.99 (3 Cameras for $192, 5 Cameras for $300) at Amazon (List price: $229.99).
Google’s self-driving car program started as a secret project in the company’s “Google X” research arm, but it didn’t stay there. Google spun it off into Waymo as part of the Alphabet reorganization several years ago. Waymo has been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) testing autonomous driving technology, and now it’s finally . People can order a car, and it’ll show up to take them where they need to go without a human ever touching the wheel. The company feels confident enough in the roughly 10 million hours of practice driving to make this a real service that people pay to use, and it’s called Waymo One.
Most flagship Android phones run on the latest top-of-the-line Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm, but what will that mean in 2019? Qualcomm just unveiled the long-rumored Snapdragon 855. It’s an eight-core ARM system-on-a-chip (SoC) with faster CPU cores, a new GPU, onboard AI processing, and optional 5G. Qualcomm’s CPU story has changed a bit in recent years. The company used to design completely custom ARM-compatible cores under license from ARM, but now it uses mostly stock ARM reference cores with some modifications. The new Kryo 485 cores in the Snapdragon 855 are based on the Cortex-A76 (faster) and A55 (more efficient).
As the number of people telecommuting or otherwise making a living remotely has grown, many are looking at where to live based on factors like affordability as opposed to distance from a central office. We’ve even seen states offering incentives to people to move based on their ability to work remotely. (Anybody feel like making $10,000 in exchange for moving to Tulsa, OK ?) Ookla and Zillow teamed up to build a database of home affordability and fixed, wireline internet speeds. Here are the top results. Chattanooga’s top ranking isn’t surprising. Chattanooga’s municipal broadband has been recognized as the fastest in the country, with the .
On Dec. 1, Japanese TV networks began publicly broadcasting in both 4K and 8K. The Japanese broadcaster NHK is behind the world first, and it led with a classic bit of film — a newly restored 70mm version of 2001: A Space Odyssey designed specifically for this broadcast. Of course, actually seeing anything in 8K these days is anything but easy. Picking up the signal required a special receiver and antenna, and carrying data from the receiver to the TV requires a whopping four HDMI cables since no one is shipping HDMI 2.1 compatible hardware just yet. Until compatible displays arrive, jamming 8K into HDMI 2.0 is going to require a lot of cabling.
The classical Greek philosopher Plato (above) is responsible for some of the earliest serious intellectual work on concepts like truth, knowledge, and government. About 2,400 years ago, he also recorded the history of Atlantis by piecing together second and third-hand whispers. As far as we can tell, Atlantis didn’t actually exist, but that hasn’t stopped people from looking and occasionally claiming to have found the lost civilization. There’s another one of those right now, and are skeptical, to put it mildly. Plato wrote about Atlantis around 360 BCE, but he didn’t have any primary source material. What we know of the supposed lost island comes from stories relayed through various sources that stretch back thousands of years.
