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Amazon has set up a skunkworks project to explore using self-driving vehicles to deliver packages. Amazon wouldn’t necessarily develop the vehicles themselves. Instead, it wants to see how driverless vehicles would improve package delivery and make Amazon more efficient. The project was first Monday in the The Wall Street Journal. The group is small, only a dozen employees. The think tank, as Amazon calls it, is part of a larger and more ambitious plan that would have Amazon transport more Amazon packages itself. The big picture has Amazon buying or renting jet freighters, operating its own long-haul tracks, and making its own deliveries.
SK Hynix has announced the introduction of the world’s first GDDR6 modules, with a data rate of up to 16Gbps and a theoretical bandwidth of 768GB/s of bandwidth if paired with a 384-bit I/O bus. SK Hynix’ own press release suggests such a product is coming within the next 12 months, in fact, when it states “SK Hynix has been planning to mass produce the product for a client to release high-end graphics card by early 2018 equipped with high performance GDDR6 DRAMs.” This is an interesting , given that HBM2, not GDDR5X/6 has been broadly positioned as the future of next-generation memory.
Self-driving cars have existed for several years, but you can’t just hop in one and go for a spin. Until now, you had to know someone who could get you a ride in one of these vehicles, but Alphabet’s Waymo has started offering regular folks a lift in its driverless vehicles. The main catch being that you have to be in the Phoenix area. , which was , has been working on a new generation of self-driving car technology based on Fiat-Chrysler Pacifica minivans. The new design looks a bit less “prototypical” than the older Google cars, but there’s still a large white hump on the top with a lidar array poking upward.
When AMD launched its Radeon Pro Duo , it was clearly an attempt to simultaneously drive VR development and carve out a niche for a high-end Radeon solution that could drive each eye from a separate GPU. At the same time, however, the $1,500 price tag and limited VRAM (just 4GB per GPU) were less than ideal for a four-digit development board. AMD has a new Radeon Pro Duo this week, and despite wearing the same name, it’s a very different GPU under the hood. This Pro Duo is based on Polaris with 32GB of RAM in total (16GB per GPU), 2,304 stream processors, a 1243MHz engine clock, and 224GB/s of memory bandwidth per GPU.
We didn’t get pasted by that , which is arguably a good thing. Discovered in 2014, it was due to pass by Earth at a close but safe distance, which it won’t do again for another 500 years. Scientists all over the world took the opportunity to make a number of radar and other observations of the asteroid, so soon we’ll have some data on its structure and properties. While we’re talking about icy rocks from the outer Solar System, it would be a shame not to mention Enceladus. This week scientists have been discussing the hydrogen efflux from the frozen moon.
Humanity has been shooting things into space for a few decades now, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. What we haven’t gotten so good at is bringing things back down. Scientists have been sounding the alarm about the buildup of space junk for years, a point that was . The message was clear: we need to stop talking about doing something and actually do it before space gets too crowded. We’ve launched some 7,000 spacecraft as a species since 1957 when Sputnik kicked off the space race. however, there are considerably more than 7,000 objects to worry about up there.
In recent weeks, Microsoft has laid out some pretty for the upcoming Project Scorpio. And if the final hardware is as beefy as Redmond is promising, developers will be able to create some gorgeous console games in the coming years. But that leaves us wondering which existing Xbox One games should get a fresh coat of paint when Scorpio hits shelves. When the PS4 Pro shipped last year, we saw a surprising number of existing titles receive . We’re hoping that many current Xbox One games will get some much-needed attention, but today we want to call out the 10 releases that deserve it the most.
Viruses remain fascinating. We don’t know whether they predate more complex forms of life, like bacteria, or descended from them. Viruses have complex relationships with bacteria, one infectious agent preying on or competing with another. The Russians used phage therapy for years, injecting their soldiers with highly specialized viruses called “bacteriophages” that only prey on the bacteria causing an infection. In the same fashion there’s coevolution in computer systems, with software springing up just to deal with problems in one program, or add functionality to another, like lateral gene transfer. You may have heard of Mirai, a botnet that can turn your possessions into a vector for DDOS attacks (or ).
