The recent spate of issues with Tesla’s Autopilot features led some to worry the company would back-off on self-driving technology. However, it appears to be doing quite the opposite. CEO Elon Musk casually mentioned on Twitter that an upcoming update to Autopilot in its cars will enable “full self-driving features.” Musk didn’t offer more details on what these self-driving features will include, but vehicles can already stay in a lane, merge, and brake when necessary while driving on the highway. It’s already one of the most capable available to consumers. But it’s still very limited in the grand scheme of what’s possible in vehicle automation, and you can’t work miracles with a software update.
To celebrate the and the debut of the x86 architecture, we’re launching a new retrospective on some of Intel’s most important CPU designs. In this article, we’ve rounded up the first decades of history, from the 4004 in 1971 to the Pentium Pro in 1994. This period covers the first two eras of Moore’s Law (a concept we’ve discussed elsewhere), in which discrete capabilities were rapidly integrated on to a single contiguous wafer, and then as microprocessor transistor counts and clock speeds continued to rise.
Google is one of the leading technology companies in artificial intelligence, which landed it a juicy government contract last year to work on “Project Maven.” The goal of this project was to process and catalog drone imagery, and Google’s rank-and-file workers were none too pleased. After a series of protests, Google recently announced it would and release guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence. Now, that document is available. lists seven core values for its AI research and lists several applications that are off-limits. We are still in the very early days of useful artificial intelligence, so there aren’t a lot of specifics in Google’s new guidelines.
NASA launched the New Horizons probe to visit Pluto, and it became the first-ever spacecraft to do that several years ago. With that phase of the mission complete, what was a deep space robot to do? decided to keep New Horizons going and take a look at objects in the Kuiper Belt, and the probe has to prepare for its next flyby. The Kuiper Belt is a ring of icy objects out past the orbit of Neptune. After being a planet for decades, scientists realized Pluto was just a large Kuiper Belt object and downgraded it to a dwarf planet.
Android tablets have always been second-class citizens in the world of mobile devices. Flagship models are few and far between, purpose-built tablet apps skew towards the iPad, and aftermarket update support from device makers is spotty at best. Many of the units sold are low-end models, used in large part as inexpensive media players. Despite that, Android tablets now make up two-thirds of the overall tablet market, closing in on 100 million units a year. This has created an awkward situation for Google and Android, but Chrome OS may turn out to be the perfect answer. My Long History With Android Tablets
The US pioneered work in decades ago, but the most powerful systems have resided in China for several years. That’s changing today with the unveiling of Summit, a new supercomputer from IBM and the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). It’s an order of magnitude more powerful than current US supercomputers and fast enough to with a theoretical peak performance of 200 petaflops per second. More than that, it has the hardware to support machine learning and artificial intelligence processing on a previously unheard of scale. ORNL has spent the last couple years building Summit because of how ludicrously complex and powerful it is.
Last year, AMD’s Threadripper blew the doors off Intel’s HEDT business by offering far more CPU cores at a much lower overall price. The Threadripper 1950X proved far more effective at the $1,000 price point than the Core i9-7900X, though Intel was able to retain overall performance leadership with its — an 18-core chip at $1,999, though we’ve seen the chip for a bit lower than this retail. But now AMD is positioning itself to claim overall leadership again with the Threadripper 2, a new CPU family with up to 32 cores per CPU. When AMD first last year, keen-eyed enthusiasts soon realized the chip packed two “real” Zen die, with eight cores each, but also two “dummy” die that were simply intended to stabilize the overall package.
PC gamers have traditionally been tethered to their gaming machines, but Valve’s Steam Link app offered a potential escape. Steam Link lets you stream a PC game to your mobile device, and the Android launch went off without a hitch. Things weren’t so peachy on the iOS side, though. with a vague complaint about business conflicts. After the backlash, Apple has , and that might give Valve another shot. Steam Link is not running any games itself, but rather streams them from your gaming PC. It’s like having a Steam Link streaming box without the dedicated hardware. To use Steam Link, you just need a steam account, a controller, and a gaming PC on your local network with 15Mbps of bandwidth.
AMD unveiled its 7nm Vega GPU for machine intelligence workloads at Computex. This revised version of Vega 10 — the high-end solution that AMD debuted at the end of summer back in 2017 — increases total onboard HBM2 to 32GB, along with a raft of unspecified changes that AMD obviously wants to keep under its hat for now. The new Vega 7nm GPU wasn’t expected to show up quite this early. In fact, AMD is moving ahead of schedule with Vega, relative to its own previous plans. The original goal was to sample Vega in the back half of this year and to launch in early 2019.
