Qualcomm supposedly plans to exit the server business, just a few years after prominently positioning itself as the only ARM vendor with the chops to take on Intel in servers and data centers across the world. Back in 2015, Qualcomm announced that it would launch CPUs into this space. By last year, of the Centriq platform suggested it could put up a fight against Intel, in at least some markets. In single-threaded tests, Intel’s excellent CPU cores outstripped Qualcomm’s, but the sheer number of cores available to the Qualcomm chip gave it better overall performance in several multi-threaded tests.
Breakthrough Listen is a program designed to comb the stars for evidence of alien life across the Milky Way and beyond. The program began in January of 2016 and is now gearing up for a new phase of work — a huge survey of the plane of our galaxy, with millions of stars surveyed over the next two months. The Parkes Observatory in Australia is set to scan for stars in a much broader target area than the initial investigations carried out by the Breakthrough Listen team. The Parkes Observatory’s 64m radio telescope has been in operation for decades, and was used by NASA to maintain contact with the Apollo 11 landing and served as the signal source for most of the initial moon landing broadcast.
For the past few years, Google has been building its own TPU (Tensor Processing Units) to handle various processing tasks related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Google first announced the existence of TPUs in 2016, but said it had been using them internally for more than a year. The company’s second-generation TPUs have made the news recently for significantly improved performance, and the third-generation hardware will apparently continue that trend. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the new TPU 3.0 pods are 8x more powerful than the Google TPU 2.0 pods that we’ve previously covered, and Pichai declared that they’re power-hungry enough to need water cooling — something previous TPUs simply haven’t required.
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Ever since Nintendo launched the Wii, it’s brought a version of its Virtual Console service to all of its handhelds and living room consoles. The titles available for each platform have varied with the system and the region in which you live, but broadly speaking, the VC has been used to round up titles from classic Nintendo systems including the NES, SNES, Game Boy, GBC, GBA, N64, GameCube, Genesis, MegaDrive, TurboGrafx-16, and Neo Geo. Games brought to the Virtual Console service were supposed to be as identical to their original versions as it was possible to be. While there are some issues with slowdowns or glitches in specific titles, Nintendo has hewed fairly close to this goal.
Humans and viruses have had a long and turbulent history together. Like a married couple that can’t stop feuding, we’ve exchanged barbs with these old foes on down the ages. In our present epoch, it’s estimated that as much as 8 percent of human DNA is a relic of ancient viruses – the wreckage of battles long forgotten. But now a group of scientists led by Harvard’s George Church are working to affect a permanent divorce between us and our embattled adversaries, accompanied by a restraining order that would end all contact between the two parties. If you haven’t heard of Project Recode, you are missing out on one of the most ambitious science experiments of our time.
It’s no secret Tesla is struggling, thanks to a prominent death that potentially implicated the company’s Autopilot technology and problems ramping up Model 3 production. But Elon Musk’s behavior of late has been downright bizarre. During a conference call last week, before spending ~25 minutes talking to one young retail investor on YouTube. Now, he’s apparently declared that all Tesla contractors are fired, effective immediately — unless employees are willing to put their jobs on the line to defend specific individuals and why those individuals should be retained by Tesla. Musk has made his feelings about contractors extremely clear.
Nvidia is promoting their own high-end performance in major AI and machine learning benchmarks, as apparently some kind of floodgate has popped open on companies talking about performance metrics for their own hardware solution (This isn’t literally true, but we’ve been seeing a lot of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and similar data cross our desks of late). According to Nvidia, it’s hit some major milestones, including:A single V100 Tensor Core GPU achieves 1,075 images/second when training ResNet-50, a 4x performance increase compared with the previous generation Pascal GPU;A single DGX-1 server powered by eight Tensor Core V100s achieves 7,850 images/second, almost 2x the 4,200 images/second from a year ago on the same system;A single AWS P3 cloud instance powered by eight Tensor Core V100s can train ResNet-50 in less than three hours, 3x faster than a TPU instance.
Most scientific research is, by its nature, rather boring. Research projects that reshape the way we think about fundamental topics are rare by definition, which means most progress happens piecewise, built up by a series of papers and articles, which then spawn more papers and articles, which collectively lead to advances in the field. Every now and then, however, you hear about projects that sound rather interesting — including one experiment in which scientists drugged crocodiles and shoved them into MRI machines to find out how they’d respond to classical music. This is rather less ridiculous than it might seem at first glance.
