When Nvidia launched the at the end of February, it short-circuited its own highest-end product, the 6-month old Nvidia Titan X, thanks to higher clocks and a much lower price tag ($700, compared with $1,200). Now, Nvidia is rectifying that issue with a full-fat GP102 part — the Titan Xp. The Titan Xp sports 3840 cores, 240 texture units, and 96 ROPS, compared with the 1080 Ti’s 3584:224:88 configuration. We don’t know the card’s base clock yet, but Nvidia’s press release claims 3840 CUDA cores running at 1.6GHz. It’s not clear if that refers to the base clock — if so, the Titan Xp would be clocked significantly higher than any other GP102 on the market today.
You’ve probably seen many images over the years that represent a black hole, but none of them are actually images of a real black hole (including the one above). They’re all artist’s renderings, or possibly a real image of the superheated gas around a black hole. Astronomers around the world have banded together and flipped the switch on a project called . The international team hopes they’ll generate the first ever image of a black hole by linking up the data from radio telescopes all over the world. There are a number of problems that have prevented scientists from seeing a black hole.
Last week, Congress that would have prevented ISPs from selling your personal browser history to third party “trusted partners.” This week, President Trump signed that bill into law. Interest in VPNs has skyrocketed as a result, but at least a few scam companies are trying to take advantage of the trend. Vice has details , which appears to be linked to hacks of the Plex and Boxee forums, which exposed email addresses of forum users. In this case, a web “service” named “MySafeVPN” began sending messages to both Plex and Boxee users claiming to be affiliated with their respective services.
Tesla’s stock is surging, up 40% this year. A quarter of that growth has been this week, pushing the stock past $300 a share. Tesla’s market capitalization pushed it past Ford’s total value and it’s possible the market will close one day this week or next with Tesla worth more than General Motors. This from a company that produced 83,922 vehicles in 2016. Ford sold 2.6 million vehicles in the US last year (a slightly different metric), about 7 million worldwide. GM sold 3 million cars in the US in 2016. Stormy weather in Shortville … — Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Uber had a bad day in court on Wednesday during the ongoing trade secret litigation case brought by Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car division that grew out of a Google project. US District Judge William Alsup was not satisfied that had made a good-faith effort to find more than 14,000 documents allegedly taken to Uber by former Googler Anthony Levandowski. The judge has that would stall its self-driving car project. According to Waymo, Anthony Levandowski obtained the files shortly before he left an engineering position at Google. The documents were copied to a laptop, which was later wiped clean by Levandowski before being returned to Google.
The idea of a “science toy” sort of breaks down below a certain age. A toddler who cannot yet read does not need a scientific calculator, for example, and even the most science-oriented second-grader might struggle to make it through the collected works of Stephen Hawking. If you’ve got a youngling to buy for, we’ve put together some gift ideas we think they’ll enjoy. These gifts are things that will cultivate curiosity and stand up to whatever a kid might put them through, or at least be inexpensive enough to use hard and then grow out of. And they respect the idea that kids can be interested in things they maybe can’t yet do with all the finesse of an adult.
Several years ago, Google began working on its own custom software for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads, dubbed . Last year, the company announced that it had designed its own tensor processing unit (TPU), an ASIC designed for high throughput of low-precision arithmetic. Now, Google has released some performance data for their TPU and how it compares to Intel’s Haswell CPUs and Nvidia’s K80 (Kepler-based) data center dual GPU. Before we dive into the data we need to talk about the workloads Google is discussing. All of Google’s benchmarks measure inference performance as opposed to initial neural network training.
“This looks Photoshopped.” How many times have you heard — or said — those three skeptical words? And yet every year, Photoshop and tools like it get a little more sophisticated, and it gets tougher to tell what’s a ‘shop and what’s not. More research comes out, more programs are written to incorporate the new research, and then artists get their hands on the tools and develop a deft and subtle touch. Now a group of researchers from Cornell University and Adobe have layered neural nets atop an image style transfer AI, to create an even more powerful image manipulation tool they’re calling Deep Photo Style Transfer.
The head of the Russian Navy, Admiral Vladimir Korolyov, has stated that Russian submarines now spend more days at-sea and on-patrol than at any time since the Cold War. These remarks, made during the launch of Russia’s newest nuclear-powered attack submarine, the Kazan, sound ominous, particularly given recent remarks by a Putin spokesperson that US-Russian relations are worse than at any point since the Cold War. In reality, the objective threat scenario is smaller and less dangerous than it might seem. Kazan is a Yasen-class attack submarine (NATO reporting name, “Severodvinsk”), to the United States’ SSGN (nuclear guided-missile submarine).
