In processor manufacturing, Taiwan based TSMC is considered to be the best in the world. Many companies like AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm (Snapdragon) and others ask TSMC to make chips for them. This is because TSMC is the market leader, in both quantity and in latest technologies.

The far second on the list of processor manufacturing is Samsung. Samsung too makes chips for other companies, which use these chips in their products. Samsung is a market leader in memory chips manufacturing, but trails a lot to TSMC in processor manufacturing.

In the world of technology, the smaller the transistors are, the more you can put them inside a single chip. The more transistors you can put inside a chip, the more powerful and fast it becomes. 7nm was a standard size a couple of years ago. Now it’s 5nm. Soon it’s going to be 3nm.

Most companies are going to TSMC to manufacture their 3nm chips. This is due to the fact that Samsung is using a newer technology called GAAFET (Gate-all-around FET) to make their next-gen 3nm chips. This new process is causing output yield problems for Samsung, where only half of the chips made currently are usable, with numbers expected to reach 70% only in April next year.

Compared to that, TSMC, in-spite of having tested the new GAAFET technology, is not switching to it yet. Instead, it’s using the tried and tested FinFET (Fin field-effect transistor) technology in it’s 3nm process, which everyone is using since the 14nm days. The outcome of that is that TSMC is going to charge 25% more for it’s next-gen 3nm process. Not everyone seems to be interested in it, though. Especially Nvidia.

Nvidia 3nm GPUs To Be Made By Samsung

The Korea Economic Daily has reported that Samsung has bagged the contracts from Nvidia and others to manufacture their 3nm chips. It’s expected that Nvidia is going to use these chips in their next-gen graphics cards, possibly named RTX 50 series.

The article mentions the idea behind this is in consideration of Samsung’s 3nm technology and to secure multiple suppliers. We do however believe TSMC charging premium for it’s 3nm tech might also be a reason, as we don’t think Samsung can easily beat TSMC either in numbers or performance. Another possibility is that TSMC is completely booked.

While the relations between TSMC and Nvidia goes back at least two decades, this is not the first time Samsung is going to make chips for Nvidia. Back in 2016, Samsung started making GPUs for Nvidia for it’s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and lower graphics cards.

But the biggest contract Samsung got from Nvidia was perhaps the previous-gen RTX 30 series. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 30’s GPUs were made by Samsung on its custom 8nm process. This was an upgrade over the 12nm process used in the RTX 20 series made by TSMC.

The RTX 30 graphics cards performed nicely over the previous generations and allowed Nvidia to continue its lead over its rival AMD Radeon graphics cards. However, the big problem with these Samsung chips is that it had huge yield problems, causing big shortages, which was only amplified by the shortages caused by international lock-downs. The result was that Nvidia got frustrated by Samsung and decided to switch back to TSMC for it’s RTX 40 series graphics cards, which are giving impressive results irrespective of their expensive price.

So Nvidia going Samsung for it’s next-gen 3nm process chips is interesting, but it’s not alone though.

Others Too Join Samsung 3nm Process

Nvidia is not alone in using Samsung’s 3nm process. The Korea Economic Daily report mentions that other companies like Qualcomm, IBM and Baidu too have given a contract to Samsung to make their 3nm processors.

It is said that IBM will use these chips for their CPUs. Qualcomm will use these chips for its smartphone (Snapdragon) processors. While China’s Baidu will use these chips for artificial intelligence in their cloud data centers.

These are not small names. If we ignore others for a moment, Qualcomm Snapdragon processors alone might be powering half of the world’s smartphones these days. So Samsung bagging its contract is a massive win for it.

Samsung claims that its “3nm process achieves 45% reduced power usage, 23% improved performance, and 16% smaller surface area compared to 5nm process”.

The article mentions that Samsung wants to start making 2nm process chips in 3 years and be a market leader (beat TSMC) by 2030.

The report mentions that this move towards Samsung is also happening due to international political uncertainties. With companies trying to cut their translations with Taiwan and look for other suppliers. Where else to look at other than the South Korea based Samsung.

Outcome Of This Move

Make no mistake. Samsung is a big player in the chip making industry, but its processors are always lagging behind TSMC’s ones. From AMD, Nvidia to Qualcomm, everyone has tried Samsung’s chips but have gone back to TSMC. Some either due to yield issues, some due to power usage issues and some due to performance issues.

So Samsung getting their contracts for the 3nm process is impressive. Now whether it’s geopolitical reasons, or whether Samsung has somehow sweetened the deal or whether Samsung has convinced hem about their 3nm process we don’t know.

What can be said for sure is that this move is interesting. Let’s see how it goes and whether Samsung will be able to fulfill its promises and deliver on it.

Next-Gen Nvidia Graphics Card GPUs Might Be Made By Samsung

Using the numbers provided by AMD, we estimated the expected performance of the flagship $999 RX 7900 XTX as well as the $899 RX 7900 XT. The estimated performance is pretty much in line with what one would have guessed from judging by the last gen, ie, the rasterization throughput is better than the RTX 4080 but it cannot compete in terms of ray tracing. The $1,599 RTX 4090, though, remains untouched as neither the 7900 XT nor the 7900 XTX is anywhere close.

Aside from these two, AMD is also supposedly going to launch the RX 7800 series next year. While the 7900 series is based on Navi 31, the RX 7800 series, which is a tier-below product, is expected to be based on the Navi 32 instead. And like early reports had suggested, we now know that the Navi 32 consists of 30 Work Group Processors (WGPs) or 60 Compute Units. That's because AMD's ROCmWMMA GitHub repository posted the following information recently which confirms the CU counts of the Navi 3x hardware.

60 CU RX 7800 XT or RX 7800?

While we have the overall specifications of the Navi 3x now, it is hard to say right now what the exact specifications of the RX 7800 series will be. However, if the RX 7800 XT is indeed a 60CU SKUthen, depending on how AMD prices that SKU, it will likely be seen as a failure as the 6800 XT had 12 more compute units at 72. This means the performance uplift gen-on-gen will be extremely poor if not non-existent for the 7800 XT.

Another possibility is that the full Navi 32 60 CU die actually becomes the RX 7800 non-XT. This will make much more sense as an upgrade over the RX 6800. If the latter is the case then AMD will cut the Navi 31 further down beyond 84 CUs that we have on the 7900 XT.

However, early rumors do not indicate of such any such chip existing which means AMD may not have any RX 7800 XT in the works at all. So users who have a 6800 XT now will have to move up a tier to the RX 7900 series, which is priced significantly higher than what the 6800 XT or even the 6900 XT are currently selling for.

Source: AMD (GitHub) via Kepler (Twitter)

Official RDNA 3 spec leak suggests AMD RX 7800 XT may not even exist

Reuters has reported that the European Commission (EC) is looking to launch an investigation against Microsoft for purported anti-competitive practices related to its Teams software.

The basis for this scrutiny is a complaint filed by Slack in 2020 in which it stated that bundling Teams with the Microsoft 365 suite of products forces it to be installed on many machines while "hiding the true cost to enterprise customers". It urged the regulator to force Microsoft to remove Teams from its Microsoft 365 suite and offer it separately at "fair" commercial prices.

At that time, Slack's Vice President of Communications and Policy Jonathan Prince was quoted as saying:

This is much bigger than Slack versus Microsoft – this is a proxy for two very different philosophies for the future of digital ecosystems, gateways versus gatekeepers. [...] Slack offers an open, flexible approach that compounds the threat to Microsoft because it is a gateway to innovative, best-in-class technology that competes with the rest of Microsoft’s stack and gives customers the freedom to build solutions that meet their needs. We want to be the 2% of your software budget that makes the other 98% more valuable; they want 100% of your budget every time.

According to the report, the EC sent out a new set of questionnaires last month, which is a sign that it's considering ramping up its investigation against Microsoft. Two sources familiar with the matter noted that:

• The Commission is looking at (Microsoft's) interoperability and bundling but more detailed this time. They are looking for information that allows them to define remedies.
• They are preparing the ground for an investigation.

This is not the first time Slack and Microsoft have clashed. At one point, Microsoft even considered acquiring Slack for $8 billion but ended up launching Teams itself. Both companies have thrown shade at each other from time to time. Slack's CEO once said that he doesn't see Teams as a threat, while Microsoft noted that "little companies (like Slack) come and go", and that the Redmond tech giant has it all covered.

Either way, this would not be a good time for Microsoft to be engaged in yet another antitrust investigation. It's already being probed by European regulators over its $69 billion proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Source: Reuters

EU reportedly gearing up to investigate Microsoft over Teams antitrust complaints from Slack

Quantum physics is known for its weird characteristics, such as entanglement — what Einstein once called “spooky action at a distance” — and superposition, the bizarre ability of atomic particles to be in more than one place at the same time. 

Following this modern branch of physics often leads to delightful (or disturbing, depending on your point of view) speculations about the nature of reality. But just like the rest of us, quantum physics has to get up in the morning, put on its shoes and go to work. Here are a few places quantum physics shows up in your everyday life.

Your Smartphone

Though we don’t have fully operational quantum computers quite yet, we wouldn’t have any electronic computers without quantum mechanics. Superposition — the weird property of quantum physics that keeps Schrödinger’s cat alive and dead at the same time — is what makes possible the computer you’re using to read this.

Thanks to quantum physics, scientists gained an understanding of the dual nature of electrons; namely, that they have properties of both particles and waves. Or as Italian physicist Carlos Rovelli put it in his book Reality Is Not What It Seems, an electron “is diffused in a cloud of probability in all places.”

This means an electron can belong to more than one atom at the same time. In fact, an electron can be shared among lots of atoms. (This is how chemical bonds are formed.)

Understanding this behavior makes it possible to manipulate the properties of semiconductors, such as silicon. Combining silicon with various other elements to take advantage of their different properties is the basis for creating the tiny transistors inside computers, phones and other electronic devices. In other words, much of what makes the modern world possible.

Your Smartphone’s Camera

Your phone’s camera also relies on the quantum physics behind semiconductors. The photo detectors or photo diodes in the camera respond to light in the form of a current of electrons. Again, it’s our knowledge of the behavior of electrons that enables us to take advantage of the properties of semiconductors — and the more we understand these properties, the better we can tweak our cameras.

So, if you’re continually amazed at the quality of your cell’s photos (and notice that they get better with each phone upgrade), you have the weird behavior of quantum particles to thank.

Your Clock

You might have gained an hour of sleep when daylight savings time changed to standard time, but you probably didn’t have to remember to reset your clocks on your phone and computer. That’s because the clocks on our electronic devices get the correct time from atomic clocks, which utilize one of the properties of the quantum world.

Like the pendulum in an old-fashioned grandfather clock, the frequency of transitions between two energy states in a cesium-133 atom tick back and forth. Because these oscillations are extremely regular, they provide a very accurate way to keep time. Making use of this fact of nature requires an understanding of quantum physics.

GPS uses this super-accurate timekeeping as well: Satellites have very accurate clocks that continually broadcast their time, and your GPS device can figure out where on Earth it is by noting how long it takes satellite signals to reach it.

So, yes, quantum physics is weird. But what would we do without it?

Source

India's IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has called for development of global standards to ensure that artificial intelligence does not harm humanity.

"We all should be concerned about user harm," Chandrasekhar told this week's meeting of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) – a 29-member created in 2020 after the G7 bloc decided the world needs a multilateral think tank to consider the impacts of AI.

"I would encourage member states to think about evolving a common framework of rules and guidelines about data governance, about safety and trust as much to do with the internet as to do with AI," Chandrasekhar said.

As India is set to take over presidency of the GPAI for 2023, Chandrasekhar's remarks carried some weight.

The body already seems to agree with the theme of the minister's remarks, as a post-conference ministerial declaration saw the organization "Oppose unlawful and irresponsible use of artificial intelligence and other technologies, which is not in line with our shared values."

Another resolution called for Multistakeholder Experts Groups convened by the GPAI to "promote greater alignment between governments and the AI multistakeholder community."

India also holds the presidency of the G20 bloc, and has previously signalled it will use that status to promote global regulations that reduce opportunities to use cryptocurrencies for money laundering.

In an interview this week, India's "Sherpa" to the G20, Amitabh Kant – formerly CEO of the National Institution for Transforming India – said one theme of the nation's presidency will be to promote its digital governance model.

That model is expressed in the form of India Stack – open source versions of the digital infrastructure the nation uses to run its own government digital services. India hopes other nations will adopt the Stack and the digital governance model it expresses.

The government sees digital services as transformative, because they allow direct interaction between citizens and governments – replacing inefficient and potentially corruptible bureaucratic processes.

Kant said he hopes the G20 presidency helps other nations to understand India's successes in the field.

He also said the G20 presidency, and the many ministerial meetings it involves, will promote India as an alternative source of manufacturing resources. Kant explicitly pointed out that COVID-19 has shown the world that concentration of manufacturing in China has proven unhelpful – making India a natural alternative. ®

Source

Chinese AI and search giant Baidu has shrugged off the impact of the United States' ban on export of certain semiconductor technologies to the Middle Kingdom, saying it will not have any noteworthy effect on its AI business or autonomous driving operations, and may indeed accelerate China's drive for silicon self-sufficiency.

Speaking on the company's Q3 2022 earnings call, executive vice president and head of AI Cloud group Dou Shen described the impact of US sanctions as "limited" – at least in the near future.

Shen explained that Baidu's AI business does not rely "too much" on highly advanced chips, and said the company has stockpiled parts it needs to carry on as usual. The VP added that Baidu can find "some alternatives to the restricted chips."

"We have the technologies to use these alternatives to achieve most of the same effectiveness and efficiency in our AI Cloud and wider AI businesses," said Chen, pointing out that automotive chips are not on the prohibited list, so in-vehicle computing is not affected.

Baidu has its own AI chip, called Kunlun. Shen said Kunlun is already used to serve external customers.

"We expect to see more auto parts, including core chips, to be manufactured in China in the future," said the veep. Shen said this will translate to the auto industry supply chain possibly becoming less reliant on imports.

In October, the Biden administration enacted export restrictions that effectively barred several Chinese entities from importing American chip design and manufacturing tools.

The industry has already seen companies produce workarounds by making chips with nerfed performance so they squeak under the export restriction threshold.

China's homegrown chips have thus far lagged behind the banned ones – but there are signs the Middle Kingdom is catching up. Two processors that rival the performance of AMD and Intel chips are expected in 2023.

In addition to the claim that Baidu is doing just fine with chips after all thanks mate, Baidu's Q3 2022 earnings report revealed a 24 percent increase year-on-year in AI Cloud revenue to $630 million in the quarter. Total revenues were up two percent year-on-year to $4.5 billion. ®

Source

Report: FTC “likely” to file suit to block Microsoft/Activision merger

Two years after the original announcement and multiple delays, the next-gen enhanced version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is almost here. Today, CD Projekt RED has shared details on the project's features as well as gameplay footage for the first time. Watch the free update's trailer above, which shows off recorded footage from a high-end PC.

The studio is touting ray-traced global illumination support across all current-gen platforms with this update. Other graphical additions include screen space reflections, dynamic resolution scaling, as well as texture and foliage upgrades.

Specifically on the consoles side, quality and performance modes (60 FPS) are being introduced, while PlayStation 5 players will be happy to know that haptic feedback and adaptive triggers support is incoming.

Other additions include Netflix show-inspired content that include a new mission and its recognizable Nilfgaardian armor, pause during cutscenes, HUD customization, a photo mode, a new camera, and even features from popular mods on PC. Cloud-based cross-save support across all platforms are here too, letting players pick up the adventure where they left off from PC, Xbox Series X|S, or PlayStation 5.

While anyone who already owns the current versions of the game is getting the upgrade content for free, CD Projekt will be releasing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition as well. It will contain the base experience plus all post-launch content, from the free DLC to the story expansions - Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Only a digital release will be available at first, with a physical edition coming at a later date.

Lastly, the last-generation version still available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch aren't being completely left behind either. The studio plans to bring gameplay improvements and the Netflix show-themed add-ons to these platforms later.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's next-gen update and the Complete Edition version will be available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on December 14, 2022. A remake of the original The Witcher as well as a new trilogy set in the same universe are currently in development.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's next-gen update gets its first gameplay trailer

Asia Times published on November 19 remarks made at a Harvard seminar this month by China expert William Overholt, “Why Xi Jinping will not enjoy his third term.”

Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers led a Q and A after Overholt’s speech. Excerpts edited for length and clarity from that session follow.

Lawrence Summers:

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a growing consensus in favor of a policy that treats China as an adversary, that seeks across a multiple range of issues to confront and challenge China, that sees isolating China with respect to technology as important for our continued leadership and that is more focused on our imperatives of maintaining pre-eminence than of accommodating gracefully their desire for a peaceful rise.

If you were advising the US government on the contours of China policy – looking out five years; it’s probably as far out as one can look – what would your advice be? And maybe you should precede your answer by giving a grade to US policy as you understand it to be during the Biden administration.

William Overholt:

D plus. Trump gets a D, no plus. If I were advising the US government, I’d lose my job within the first week.

You’ve asked a big question. So let me step back. How did we win the Cold War? We focused on growing our economy and creating a system where friends and allies around the world participated. The Soviet Union put all its money into the military under the opposite strategy and went bankrupt.

What’s happened in the Trump-Biden era – and Biden has just expanded on Trump’s policies – is that we’ve turned inward.

We want everybody to join economic alliances with us, but we’re not going to give anything. We’re not going to give access to our market. And we’ve done things that are very harmful to our own economy in doing that. I’ll come back to that.

China got the message of the Cold War. What’s Belt and Road? It’s a collection of institutions that work like the World Bank, building infrastructure around the world. It’s a set of institutions that sets common standards – like the IMF and WTO. They promote freer trade and investment around the world.

Now, obviously, China’s got its pretty severe limitations, but it got the message. It’s trying to do what succeeded for us in the Cold War. That’s the big picture.

Harvard University’s William Overholt would barely give Biden a passing grade on China policy. Image: CSIS / Twitter

And Biden’s protectionism gives up the possibility of having the kind of global success and admiration and cooperation that we had during the Cold War.

Now, on China policy in particular, when a company like Huawei comes along, or the battery company CATL, they get access originally to the whole world market: China, Europe, Japan, the US. And Western companies only get access to a tiny slice of the Chinese market.

So Huawei grew so big that there’s no way the Europeans can compete. They would just get wiped off the map. That’s what’s going to happen in batteries.

The right thing to do is, every time that happens, you get together with the Europeans and the Japanese and you shut them down. The way we partially shut down Toyota when the Japanese were behaving that way. Until China changes its policies and allows fair competition.

This approach is targeted. It’s not phony national security restrictions on steel and aluminum – that’s lying that was started under Trump and Biden has just expanded it. What he’s done is enormously damaging.

You look at the restrictions on solar panels. We are never going to be a big maker of solar panels. There’s no universe in which that happens. Keeping Chinese solar panels out, last estimate I saw, costs about 40,000 American jobs. And it slows down the transition to new energy, shooting ourselves in the foot.

Now, how about China policy more narrowly? This restriction on semiconductors is a declaration of economic war. It’s completely disproportionate to any of the problems we have with China. This is going 30, 40% of the way toward what we did with Japan, cutting off their oil before Pearl Harbor. Semiconductors are the key to the modern world.

New US ban on chip-making equipment to China will ultimately do more harm than good. Image: Twitter

This validates every crazy nationalistic Chinese professor who’s been arguing that our goal all along has been to keep China down, to prevent them from growing. In terms of the relationship, it’s just awful. It’s an escalation. People don’t realize this is a declaration of war.

It’s going to damage the American semiconductor industry. You notice what happened recently. Even though Washington offered $52 billion worth of subsidies to our semiconductor industry, the stocks all tanked. They’re looking at 15,000 to 40,000 layoffs.

And what’s going to happen on the Chinese side? In China, industrial policy has an implicit switch with one setting of business as usual. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego, has a wonderful organization chart of how the government subsidies usually get to the final users: a crazy-looking flow chart that guarantees wasted money. So far, perhaps US$150 billion went to the Chinese semiconductor industry and they didn’t catch up an inch.

The other setting of the switch: Emergency! Important! The nation depends on this! The space program success is a leading example. You clear out local interests, you clear out seniority, you clear out party politics, you hire the best people, you pay them whatever it takes.

You bring in whatever expertise you need from anywhere in the world and you build one hell of a program very fast. I think Biden’s sanctions will lead China to flick the switch to the emergency setting and then China will succeed.

Now, back to the bigger picture. In China policy, Biden has done two important things.

One is, he has completely reneged on the 1979 agreement that’s been the basis for peace in Taiwan. What did we say in that agreement? That we will not have official relations, we will not have an alliance.

Now Biden has said four times he will defend Taiwan. That’s called an alliance.

When Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan, she was very careful to label it an official visit. And then immediately after a meeting with Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen’s spokeswoman went on their national TV and said Taiwan is a sovereign and independent country.

That was the culmination of Pelosi’s visit—a complete breach of the US promises that have kept Taiwan safe for over four decades.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (L) waving beside Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. Photo: Handout

China has honored the agreement. We have broken the agreement.

People in Washington like Elbridge Colby don’t remember that all the peace and prosperity and democracy in Taiwan are built on that 1979 agreement.

Every time we send another congressional delegation and the Chinese protest by sending some airplanes and ships, we say, “Oh, those terrible, aggressive Chinese!”

On Taiwan, unlike for instance the South China Sea, we Americans are the problem. And Biden has, more explicitly than anybody else, repudiated the deal on which Taiwan’s success is built.

The Washington dynamic around Taiwan is that the admirals testify in Congress, saying that in five years China could win a hypothetical war. And the interpretation has been: In five years China intends to attack Taiwan. Well, intent and capability are two different things. Every intelligence officer and retired intelligence officer I’ve heard says that there is no indication of Chinese intent to invade Taiwan.

We are creating the problem that we think we’re trying to deter. The risk is nuclear war. The common Washington assumption that a Taiwan war would likely be confined to the area around Taiwan is utterly wrong. This is not Ukraine. It would almost certainly be more like a world war.

You put that together with this declaration of economic war, and the reason for the D plus is I think this potentially towers over George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. It could tower over Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate in Vietnam as a mistake.

We won’t see the consequences of that mistake for years. It’s not irreversible but this is potentially catastrophic.

[Summers questioned whether such a low grade, D+, was appropriate. Overholt stuck with it because of the potential catastrophic consequences globally.]

Question from the audience:

How do you see US-Chinese relations playing out in Africa?

Overholt:

China has caused a lot of problems in Africa. It’s done a lot more good. African growth since China started growing has gone from a 0-2 percent range to the 2-6 range. And an awful lot of that has to do with Chinese demand, with Chinese investment, with Chinese railroads, with Chinese roads, with Chinese telecommunications.

China is where Japan’s companies were in the sixties. We had a big problem with Japan, exactly the same problems we’re having with China now in Africa. And the Chinese learning curve tracks the Japanese learning curve. They bribe. They use their own people rather than training local people. They don’t understand political risk.

They take on unacceptable financial risk, causing problems for both the Africans and the Chinese banks. They’re initially un-transparent and uncooperative toward peers in dealing with debt problems. But they’re learning, as the Japanese learned and, earlier, as the US learned.

A screen grab of a TV show on China’s many projects in Africa. Photo: CGTN Africa

Yes, there are debt problems, [but] African countries’ problems with Western debt are a lot bigger than African problems with Chinese debt. And China has been handling the debt in an utterly responsible way.

Deborah Brautigam at SAIS did a study of 1,100 Chinese financial deals, many of which have come under pressure. They have never once called in collateral. They’ve never once said, “Since you owe me money that you can’t pay, I’m going to seize your road, your port.”

And I have to say it’s one of the most troubling things to me that the Republicans but also, under Biden, [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken in particular pushed this utterly false Chinese debt trap argument. On balance, China’s done a lot of good for Africa. It’s leaving America behind.

Question from the audience:

What in your opinion is the United States maddest at the Chinese about?

Overholt:

They take the privileges that they – and before them Japan or before them, Taiwan, South Korea – got as an impoverished developing country and they insist on retaining those privileges as a giant superpower. That’s a summary.

For instance, we tolerate a lot of intellectual property theft by poor countries. India’s still doing it. But when you’re the same size as the US economy, when it’s hundreds of billions of dollars a year, it’s unacceptable. It’s predatory.

At a recent venture capital conference, young entrepreneurs reported that, as soon as their inventions became public, their computer systems experienced more than 100,000 intrusions per day from China. So this is not just a few thefts from a few big companies. It goes deep into society and causes widespread resentment. President Xi promised President Obama that this would stop but, after declining for a while, it became even worse.

When you’re Huawei, you’re not a little tiny company in an impoverished country that deserves some special privilege. You’re just going to wipe out all the global competition because you have access to all the global markets whereas the Europeans have only minimal access to the Chinese market.

China says, “We’re a country that was invaded over a century by the Europeans and the Japanese. We’re a victim. So we’re going to build a navy and protect ourselves.” Fair enough. But later that becomes taking over everybody else’s stuff. Even pieces of Bhutan are being bitten off by China.

China claims traditional rights in the South China Sea, but according to Beijing’s behavior nobody else has any traditional fishing rights or territorial rights or anything.

Early on, China subsidized its fishermen, who were very poor and needed help. But now people are hungry or starving everywhere because of Chinese fishing predation. These guys are trained as militia. Catches off North Korea went down 70%. The Japanese find these – what they call – ghost boats, North Korean boats full of dead sailors from North Korea who have starved because China illegally took all the fish.

Chinese have depleted the fish off the coast of Africa, along the coast of India. Local fishermen are malnourished, often on the verge of starvation, because of this incredible subsidized Chinese fishing fleet.

Chinese fishing vessels set sail for the Spratly Islands. Photo: AFP

China says, “We’re a superpower but we’re also a victim or a developing country.” The claim to be a developing country is part of every Chinese major foreign policy speech. “But we’re a superpower. We’re going to create a community of common destiny for the world.”

I call this a problem of an adolescent power. On the economic side, we went through this with the Japanese. It got pretty rough with Japan. We put 10% tariffs on everything, we put quotas on their cars, we put quotas on lots of things and, finally, the Japanese realized, “If we’re going to play in the big league, we’ve got to play by fair rules.”

Now probably more Harvard professors drive a Toyota than any other car and nobody complains about that because Toyota wins its US market share by playing fair, not through government support that would enable it to kill all competitors. 

We don’t, most of the time, invite China to participate in making the rules, and that’s wrong, we have an obligation to do that. But China has become a predatory power that says, “We’re a victim. We have the right to take all the Philippine fishing areas because we’re a historical victim of the Europeans.”

Well, that’s the umbrella problem.

Source

WASP-39 b is a planet unlike any in our solar system – a Saturn-sized behemoth that orbits its star closer than Mercury is to our Sun. When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope initially began regular science operations, this exoplanet was one of the first to be examined. The exoplanet science community is buzzing with excitement over the results. Webb’s incredibly sensitive instruments have provided a profile of WASP-39 b’s atmospheric constituents and identified a plethora of contents, including water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium. The findings bode well for the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct a broad range of investigations of all types of exoplanets, including small, rocky worlds like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

This illustration shows what exoplanet WASP-39 b could look like, based on the current understanding of the planet. WASP-39 b is a hot, puffy gas giant with a mass 0.28 times Jupiter (0.94 times Saturn) and a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, orbiting just 0.0486 astronomical units (4,500,000 miles) from its star. The star, WASP-39, is fractionally smaller and less massive than the Sun. Because it is so close to its star, WASP-39 b is very hot and is likely to be tidally locked, with one side facing the star at all times. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Reveals an Exoplanet Atmosphere as Never Seen Before

Another first was just scored by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope: a molecular and chemical profile of a distant world’s skies.

While Webb and other space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings from Webb provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds.

A hint of how these clouds might look up close is also provided by the latest data: they are likely broken up rather than a single, uniform blanket over the planet.

The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, a “hot Saturn” (a planet about as massive as Saturn but in an orbit tighter than Mercury) orbiting a star some 700 light-years away.

The findings bode well for the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct the broad range of investigations of all types of exoplanets – planets around other stars – hoped for by the science community. That includes probing the atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

“We observed the exoplanet with multiple instruments that, together, provide a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until [this mission],” said Natalie Batalha. “Data like these are a game changer.” Batalha is an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research.

The atmospheric composition of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-39 b has been revealed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This graphic shows four transmission spectra from three of Webb’s instruments operated in four instrument modes. A transmission spectrum is made by comparing starlight filtered through a planet’s atmosphere as it moves in front of the star, to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet is beside the star. Each of the data points (white circles) on these graphs represents the amount of a specific wavelength of light that is blocked by the planet and absorbed by its atmosphere. At upper left, data from NIRISS shows fingerprints of potassium (K), water (H2O), and carbon monoxide (CO). At upper right, data from NIRCam shows a prominent water signature. At lower left, data from NIRSpec indicates water, sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and carbon monoxide (CO). At lower right, additional NIRSpec data reveals all of these molecules as well as sodium (Na). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

 

The suite of discoveries is detailed in a set of five new scientific papers, three of which are in press and two of which are under review. Among the unprecedented revelations is the first detection in an exoplanet atmosphere of sulfur dioxide (SO2), a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by high-energy light from the planet’s parent star. On Earth, the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is created in a similar way.

“This is the first time we see concrete evidence of photochemistry – chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light – on exoplanets,” said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of the paper explaining the origin of sulfur dioxide in WASP-39 b’s atmosphere. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres with [this mission].”

This led to another first: scientists applying computer models of photochemistry to data that requires such physics to be fully explained. The resulting improvements in modeling will help build the technological know-how to interpret potential signs of habitability in the future.

“Planets are sculpted and transformed by orbiting within the radiation bath of the host star,” Batalha said. “On Earth, those transformations allow life to thrive.”

The planet’s proximity to its host star – eight times closer than Mercury is to our Sun – also makes it a laboratory for studying the effects of radiation from host stars on exoplanets. Better knowledge of the star-planet connection should bring a deeper understanding of how these processes affect the diversity of planets observed in the galaxy.

To see light from WASP-39 b, Webb tracked the planet as it passed in front of its star, allowing some of the star’s light to filter through the planet’s atmosphere. Different types of chemicals in the atmosphere absorb different colors of the starlight spectrum, so the colors that are missing tell astronomers which molecules are present. By viewing the universe in infrared light, Webb can pick up chemical fingerprints that can’t be detected in visible light.

Other atmospheric constituents detected by the Webb telescope include sodium (Na), potassium (K), and water vapor (H2O), confirming previous space- and ground-based telescope observations as well as finding additional fingerprints of water, at these longer wavelengths, that haven’t been seen before.

Webb also saw carbon dioxide (CO2) at higher resolution, providing twice as much data as reported from its previous observations. Meanwhile, carbon monoxide (CO) was detected, but obvious signatures of both methane (CH4) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) were absent from the Webb data. If present, these molecules occur at very low levels.

To capture this broad spectrum of WASP-39 b’s atmosphere, an international team numbering in the hundreds independently analyzed data from four of the Webb telescope’s finely calibrated instrument modes.

“We had predicted what [the telescope] would show us, but it was more precise, more diverse, and more beautiful than I actually believed it would be,” said Hannah Wakeford, an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who investigates exoplanet atmospheres.

Having such a complete roster of chemical ingredients in an exoplanet atmosphere also gives scientists a glimpse of the abundance of different elements in relation to each other, such as carbon-to-oxygen or potassium-to-oxygen ratios. That, in turn, provides insight into how this planet – and perhaps others – formed out of the disk of gas and dust surrounding the parent star in its younger years.

WASP-39 b’s chemical inventory suggests a history of smashups and mergers of smaller bodies called planetesimals to create an eventual goliath of a planet.

“The abundance of sulfur [relative to] hydrogen indicated that the planet presumably experienced significant accretion of planetesimals that can deliver [these ingredients] to the atmosphere,” said Kazumasa Ohno, a UC Santa Cruz exoplanet researcher who worked on Webb data. “The data also indicates that the oxygen is a lot more abundant than the carbon in the atmosphere. This potentially indicates that WASP-39 b originally formed far away from the central star.”

In so precisely parsing an exoplanet atmosphere, the Webb telescope’s instruments performed well beyond scientists’ expectations – and promise a new phase of exploration among the broad variety of exoplanets in the galaxy.

“We are going to be able to see the big picture of exoplanet atmospheres,” said Laura Flagg, a researcher at Cornell University and a member of the international team. “It is incredibly exciting to know that everything is going to be rewritten. That is one of the best parts of being a scientist.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful space telescope ever constructed and the world’s premier space science observatory. It will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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“Can machines think?” In his ground-breaking paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” published in 1950, Alan Turing raised this epoch-making question for the first time. This launched a new field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as people’s insatiable curiosity about computers and intelligence.

Human civilization has now entered a new era of intelligence. As computing has grown more pervasive, society and every one of us are deeply embedded in the network of universal computing and reap the benefits of intelligent computing. Significant scientific discoveries and applications based on intelligent computing have emerged in many important areas, such as the solution of protein folding difficulties, the discovery of new antibiotics, and medical imaging diagnostics utilizing AI, thanks to the deep integration of machine intelligence, data, and computing methodologies. The advancement of civilization has been greatly aided by intelligent computing, and at the same time, the demand for computing is skyrocketing.

A number of difficult issues need to be resolved in order to meet the constantly increasing demand for computing. Computational speed is limited by the traditional von Neumann architecture, computational methods are challenged by big data, the computational power supply is limited by energy consumption, and computing resource use is limited by access technology… There are still many issues that need to be explored and solved, meanwhile, sustainable solutions must be found for the future.

The Zhejiang Lab and Science have jointly solicited fundamental scientific questions with a significant guiding role for the future research of intelligent computing. After a series of solicitations, shortlisting, and evaluations, 10 questions found to be most profound and challenging were put forward by a panel of experts from around the world.

1. How do we define intelligence and establish the evaluation and standardization framework for intelligent computing?
2. Is there a unified theory for analog computing?
3. Where will the major innovations in computing come from, and will quantum computing approach the computational power of the human brain?
4. What new devices will be built (transistors, chip design, and hardware paradigms: photonics, spintronics, biomolecules, carbon nanotubes)?
5. How could intelligent computing enable intelligent machines?
6. How can we understand the storage and retrieval of memory based on the digital twin brain?
7. What is the most efficient path to converge silicon-based and carbon-based learning?
8. How to build interpretable and efficient AI algorithms?
9. Can strong intelligent computing with features of self-learning, evolvability, and self-reflection be realized?
10. How can we use real-world data to discover and generalize knowledge?

The 10 fundamental scientific questions in the field of intelligent computing are presented here in the hope that they will enlighten researchers globally. It is expected that scholars and researchers will engage in lively discussions on these 10 scientific questions, jointly promote potential breakthroughs within the questions and technological advances, and contribute to the development of human society.

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Put off by Elon Musk’s muscular management style? Move to us! That’s the pitch being used by talent-starved technology firms trying to lure thousands of former Twitter employees laid off by the social media company under its new owner.

Twitter has fired top executives and enforced steep job cuts with little warning following Musk’s tumultuous takeover of the social media platform. About half of the workforce – around 3,700 employees – has been laid off.

Hundreds more are reported to have quit as a result of his sweeping reforms. On Monday, the head of French operations was the latest senior manager to leave.

Spying opportunity, some companies are now trying to pick up experienced engineering talent by appealing to their disdain for the methods of the world’s richest person.

Katie Burke, chief people officer at US software company HubSpot, condemned Musk over reports he had fired a group of employees that had criticized him on the company’s internal Slack channels. Reuters was not able to verify the reports.

“As a leader, getting criticized is part of your job,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Great leaders recognize debate and disagreement makes you better and is part of the process. If you want a place where you can disagree (in a kind, clear manner of course) with people, HubSpot is hiring.”

By late on Monday, Burke’s post had earned more than 35,000 positive reactions on LinkedIn.

Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Other companies are taking a similar approach to HubSpot.

Amanda Richardson, chief executive of recruitment software startup CoderPad, published an open letter to Twitter leavers.

Citing Musk’s initial ban on remote-working, Richardson described Musk’s takeover as a “shitshow” which had been “terribly frustrating, depressing and demotivating”.

“At CoderPad, we believe your skills say it all. Not where you sit. Not if you sleep at work. Not working seven days a week for 18 hours a day.”

Other big US tech firms including Meta and Amazon have also laid off thousands of staff in recent weeks due to the uncertain economic environment.

But the public criticism of Musk highlights strong demand in parts of the industry for highly skilled digital workers.

A recent report from market analysis firm Gartner found high attrition rates and a spate of digitalization efforts across business and government had created a “hyper-competitive” market for technical talent.

Mass job cuts and public resignations at Twitter have prompted worries the firm is shedding vital staff and fears the social media “town square” could face technical troubles.

Michael Weening, chief executive of US cloud and software company Calix, described recent events at Twitter as “disturbing”, and promised new recruits they would enjoy a corporate culture that “starts with our team members” in a similar LinkedIn post.

“From our perspective this is a great opportunity, as people who would not speak to us before are disillusioned and looking,” Weening told Reuters. “The toxic culture has people saying, ‘No more.’”

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In the world of computers, silicon wafers form a base for processor chips. This includes CPUs and GPUs, among many other things.

When it comes to chip making, the current king of the world is Taiwan’s TSMC. In terms of sheer volume, no one can even come near it in manufacturing of chips.

Most people don’t know, but many processor companies don’t actually make the chips themselves, many of them buy chips from chipmakers like TSMC. In-fact, many companies like AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm (Snapdragon) Broadcom, MediaTek and others buy chips from TSMC for their processors.

The big exception are Intel and Samsung, who make their own chips. Samsung for example takes orders from other companies to make theirs, just like TSMC. But Samsung’s chips these days are not having good outputs, so many have completely switched over to TSMC.

When in comes to manufacturing process, it’s said that the smaller the transistor size, the more you can put them into these chips and the faster these chips are. A few years ago, 7nm was considered the best. Now, 5nm processors are becoming a standard.

Going ahead, the industry is moving towards the 3nm process. However, if reports are to be believed, it’s not going to be cheap.

TSMC’s 3nm Process To Cost $20,000 Per Wafer

A top Taiwan based tech industry news source DIGITIMES reports (translated) that TSMC is now demanding a huge $20,000 per wafer from its clients. Which is double than what it was charging for the 7nm process and about 25% more than what it is charging for the 5nm process.

For 7nm process, TSMC was charging $10,000 per wafer. For 5nm it started charging $16,000 per wafer, which is understood due to lock-downs. But TSMC increasing its prices so much for 3nm is big. If Twitter based tech industry expert @chiakokhua is to believed, then the prices can be even higher than the reported $20,000.

Reasons For Such An Increase In Wafer Costs

DIGITIMES says there are two reasons behind such a big rise in the price. First, a huge increase in manufacturing costs and two, lack of competition.

Samsung, for example, it mentions, is the first one to manufacture 3nm chips. However, it suffers from a big yield problems. Twitter based leaker @RGcloudS suggests that currently only half of the chips by Samsung on its 3nm process are good, with 70% yield rate expected to reach only in April next year.

DIGITIMES mentions that Samsung is having yield problems even on it’s 5nm and 4nm process. All this makes it very unattractive for buyers and hence, everyone is switching over to TSMC. It mentions how Qualcomm was considering to buy Samsung’s chips for its Snapdragon processors, but decided to go with TSMC for the same reason.

The report also mentions how the likes of Nvidia with RTX 40 series and also the likes of MediaTek have completely booked TSMC’s 5/4nm process. If that isn’t enough, Intel too is going to buy some chips from TSMC for its 3nm process.

The article mentions how the N3 process by TSMC has started being manufactured in the fourth quarter of this year itself and a better N3E version, which everyone is looking for, is expected to start manufacturing next year.

It must be mentioned, that increase in overall wafer cost might not mean that the chips too would be expensive by 25%. The reason is, the smaller the nm size, the more dense these chips are going to be and hence more chips are going to come out of one silicon wafer. But that’s not always the case, as both Intel and Nvidia, for example, are using larger chips in their latest generation of products compared to previous ones.

Silicon Wafers Explained

To explain it simply, silicon wafers form a base of computer chips. The standard wafer size these days is 300mm, that is about 12 inches. They are first made, then cut into various small sizes as required.

The image you see above, shared by Twitter user @aschilling, shows full sized Intel Raptor Lake chips cut from the wafer. TechPowerUP reports that there are about 231 processors that can be made out of this wafer. This is done by counting a huge 257 mm² per chip size. These chips are later made into proper CPUs like the Intel Core i9-13900K.

Compared to CPUs, Graphics cards have larger GPU chips. For example, the GPU chip used in the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is 608 mm² in size, which is more than double of an Intel CPU. So if we can get 231 Intel Core i9-13900K CPUs out of a wafer, we can get only 116 RTX 4090 chips out of a same sized wafer.

However, it’s not as simple as that. Not all silicon wafers are equal or of good quality. After being made, they are tested for quality and performance, among other things. The good chips are kept for top of the line products, medium ones half-shut electronically and kept for cheaper products in the line-up and outright useless ones are thrown away. Usually, different products in the same line-up use different chips, though.

TSMC remains the top wafer manufacturer not only because it has high output on latest technologies, but also because of it has a high average yield rate of 80% and peak yield rate of 90%. Meaning, a huge amount of chips made out of their wafers are of good quality and usable by everyone.

Next-Gen CPUs & GPUs To Be Expensive As 3nm To Cost 25% More

Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned by 2035, for at least a century

Have you ever been accused (or accused someone else) of spending too much time staring at your phone? It seems that the time might not be entirely squandered after all.

A recent study by Kaveh Abhari of San Diego State University and Isaac Vaghefi of the City University of New York found that monitoring cellphone screen time with the help of existing smartphone applications can improve focused or mindful cellphone usage, which in turn increases perceived productivity and user satisfaction. The study was recently published in the journal AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (THCI).

The Positive Effect of Self-Monitoring

While a lot of research has focused on the negative effects of cellphone screen time (tolerance, withdrawal, and conflict with work-related tasks), Abhari and Vaghefi’s study sought to see if self-regulatory behaviors could result in changed user behavior.

Abhari is an associate professor of management information systems at SDSU’s Fowler College of Business. Vaghefi is an assistant professor of information systems at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College.

“We theorized that individuals who tracked their cellphone usage and set goals surrounding that usage tended to have enhanced productivity and contentment with their productivity as they met their stated objectives,” said Abhari. “Previous research has shown that goal setting tends to raise performance expectations and we wanted to see if this theory held true for smartphone screen time as well.”

Putting it to the Test

To make this determination, the researchers surveyed 469 participating university undergraduate students in California, New York, and Hawaii. The three-week survey required all participants to complete four questionnaires and about half of them were required to download a screen-monitoring application to their phones. This app allowed users to monitor and set limits or goals with their cellphone screen time.

When the results were analyzed, researchers measured the perceived productivity of screen time reported by those surveyed, as well as the amount of screen time and the fatigue associated with self-monitoring. They also reviewed participants’ contentment with their productivity achieved through cellphone screen time. “Self-monitoring appears necessary to encourage the optimized use of smartphones,” said Abhari. “The results suggest that optimizing but not minimizing screen time is more likely to increase user productivity.”

The Effect of Fatigue

However, the researchers also found that self-monitoring induces fatigue and weakens the effect on productivity, though it was not a significant factor affecting the relationship between self-monitoring and contentment with productivity achievement.

In conclusion, Abhari and Vaghefi determined that while uncontrolled cellphone use (or cellphone addiction) could negatively impact people’s lives, monitored screen time — particularly monitored screen time with specific goals in mind — can result in positive outcomes and higher overall user satisfaction. “This study could lead system developers to embed features into mobile devices that enable self-monitoring,” said Abhari. “These features could improve quality screen time and enhance the relationship between humans and digital technology.”

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AI has already been successful at playing competitive games like chess and Go which can be learned using only self-play training. However, games like Diplomacy, which require natural language negotiation, cooperation, and competition between multiple players, have been challenging.

The new agent developed by FAIR is not only capable of imitating natural language, but more importantly, it also analyzes some of the goals, beliefs, and intentions of its human partners in the game. It uses that information to figure out a plan of action that accounts for aligned and competing interests, and to communicate that plan in natural language, the researchers say.

Playing anonymously against humans in 40 speed games in an online Diplomacy league, CICERO scored more than double the average score of human players and was in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game. CICERO “passed” as a human player against 82 unique players, and the researchers saw no in-game messages to suggest that the human players believed they were playing with an AI agent.

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The RAM sticks and SSDs we use in computers are, in simple words, just circuit boards with chips on them. While RAMs contain DRAM chips, SSDs contain NAND chips.

One of the biggest names in the world of RAM and SSD chip production is Micron, with almost 26% of market share revenue in DRAM manufacturing alone. Micron not only sells these chips to consumer RAM and SSD makers, but it also puts these chips into RAM and SSDs made by them under the Crucial brand made for consumers.

In the lock-down times, the demand for computers and its components had surged massively, leading to shortages and higher prices. Now as the things have opened up and so have the offices, the demand for PCs and laptops have slumped at massively too.

Slump In Demand

In September, we had reported that SSD prices are expected to get cheaper due to a lack of demand. It looks like things are way worse for these companies than we thought.

A few days ago, Micron announced that, due to the condition of the market, it’s cutting the production of both RAM and SSD chips by a massive 20% in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year, 2022.

Not only that, Micron says that as per its forecast of the year 2023, the growth in demand for RAM chips is going to go in minus. The demand for NAND chips (which power SSDs and others) too is going to see only single digit growth the whole year. These figures are year-on-year basis.

The inventory is big and the demand is less. So an aggressive cut in production, Micron says, is required, despite long term growth hopes.

Other Makers Hit Too

On the same day, Taiwan based tech market research analytics firm TrendForce has released information which shows not so great outlook for other RAM companies too.

TrendForce reveals that the DRAM chipmakers have seen a 30% drop in revenue in 3Q22, which is unprecedented and not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.

Samsung has seen the highest drop in revenue at 33.5%. SK hynix is not behind with a revenue drop by 25.2%.

It says that due to lack of demand in RAM, Samsung is moving its production elsewhere. It says Samsung was going to open a new DRAM making facility, but it’s going to slow itself down due to high inventories.

TrendForce mentions that SK hynix might put a brake on the migration to new technology. Micron too is expected to avoid moving to latest generation of RAM manufacturing yet.

Best Time To Buy RAM And SSD

This is a good as time as any to buy RAM and SSD for those who want to. The reason is simple, a cut in production will raise the prices of these products.

While those who want to buy DDR5 RAM can still wait due to high prices still, the best time to buy an SSD is right now. SSDs have never been cheaper than this and with a cut in the production of its chips, expect them to rise again. If not immediately, then by first or second quarter next year. Best to buy them when they are cheap as possible.

Major RAM & SSD Maker Cuts Production Due To Lack Of Demand

This won't be the only Ubisoft game to breach back into Steam either, as Eurogamer reports that titles like Anno 1800 and Roller Champions are on the way too. Only the latest Assassin's Creed entry has a Steam launch date attached to it though. Funnily enough, on the same day Valhalla will receive its final update, concluding Eivor's saga that began two years ago.

Note that Anno 1800 has been available for purchase on Steam before, albeit only in pre-order form. While those early pre-orders were honored on Steam, the game was pulled from the store at launch, and has only been purchasable on Ubisoft Connect and the Epic Games Store since then.

Ubisoft is not the only major publisher in recent times to dive into Steam's massive audience, with EA coming back in 2019. Even Activision-Blizzard has decided to release Call of Duty on the platform alongside Battle.net after a long absence.

While no announcements regarding Ubisoft's future PC plans have been made yet, it will be interesting to see if the company plans to bring its upcoming games to Steam on day-one — with more Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, and Avatar on the way — or will it use the platform as a way to double-dip on its more matured live-service games.

Ubisoft is coming back to Steam, starting with Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

The portable power bank first came on the scene in 2001, and since then, on-the-go charging has been a possibility for most mobile device users. Now, a new space company wants to bring the concept of mobile charging to the moon — not for cell phones, of course, but for rovers and landers.

Toronto-based Stells, founded by CEO Alex Kapralov and CTO Vital Ioussoupov in 2021, is developing a rover called Mobile Power Rover (MPR-1) that would be able to provide power to lunar spacecraft via wireless charging. The company has secured a launch date in November 2024 via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and an Intuitive Machines lander, with a tentative landing on the moon in January 2025.

 

Stells was initially interested in the lunar drilling industry, specifically in lunar craters. But early research proved that a power source for a drilling rover would likely be prohibitively expensive. That inspired MPR-1. “Why don’t we just provide power to others so they can have a redundancy in their power supply?” Kapralov tells TechCrunch.

 

Most spacecraft derive their power from one of two sources: solar panels and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG). Solar panels, of course, only function in areas that receive sunlight—deep craters don’t always receive any sunlight. Solar panels also require a lot of surface area. With rovers the size of cars, such as the ones on Mars, that’s not a problem. But the next generation of moon rovers will be much smaller. NASA, for instance, is developing Called Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorers that will be the size of shoe boxes.

 

RTG, on the other hand, is not reliant upon the sun, instead using the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 to create electrical power. The technology is, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite expensive, and it might not be cost-effective for small rovers.

Given the current push for moon projects — Artemis 1, for instance, launched with four CubeSats destined for the moon (along with six others heading elsewhere) — MPR-1 has the potential to be quite useful.

 

Illustration of a possible mining operation in dark crater, with power coming from solar at the edge.

 

“The way we’re planning on delivering power is by using a box we call the wireless charging box, or WCB,” says Kapralov. The WCB would harness the power via solar panels—in the case of a lunar crater, it would place those on the crater’s rim, then run power lines down to the crater floor, where the WCB would be stationed.

 

The WCB would then store that power in its batteries, then distribute it quickly to other rovers via wireless charging. Those rovers, which would need a specific wireless charging port compatible with the WCB, would be able to navigate to the WCB using a beacon or visual navigation. With no atmosphere to attenuate the wireless power signal, this process would be much more efficient than on Earth.

 

Kapralov also hopes that the WCB would be able to travel to power-drained lunar spacecraft to provide a jumpstart charge, though that’s a challenge for a future mission. The first mission would simply be a technology demonstration for the WCB.

 

Thus far, Stells has been building prototypes and testing them on Earth—and it’s been entirely self-funded. “But we are probably going to start close to the beginning of next year to try to secure some funds for the development and the flight launch,” says Kapralov.

 

 

Over the past two decades, there’s been a significant push for lunar exploration, and while development is rife, results have been minimal. Google’s Lunar Xprize competition, for instance, had companies developing lunar rovers for a $20 million grand prize. The competition commenced in 2007 and had a 2014 deadline for a lunar landing; when it was clear no one would be ready by 2014, that deadline was extended, ultimately to 2018.

 

Though five teams ultimately secured launch contracts, Google ended the competition without a winner. Moon Express and Team Indus of those teams had their contracts canceled, while Hakuto/ispace and Synergy Moon are still working toward launch. The fifth team, SpaceIL, did launch to the moon in 2019, but its landing attempt failed.

 

Still, the lunar industry continues to develop, and more missions are closer to reality than ever before. Nothing is guaranteed—there is fertile ground for well-meaning failure. But the moon is the limit for the dozens of companies like Stells hoping to get there.

 

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NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang and his wife Lori’s US$50 million donation for a new supercomputer research center at their alma mater Oregon State University (OSU) should remind investors, analysts and political economists that there is life after sanctions on China for America’s chipmakers.

Announced on October 14 and scheduled to open in 2025, the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex will feature a supercomputer incorporating NVIDIA’s most advanced central and graphics processing units (CPUs and GPUs), a clean room, laboratories, an “extended reality” theater and other facilities.

The supercomputer is expected to be one of the fastest available for university research, capable of handling the most complex artificial intelligence (AI) models and digital twin simulations.

Scott Ashford, dean of the College of Engineering, said on the university’s website that the facility “…will help OSU be recognized as one of the world’s leading universities for artificial intelligence and robotics. It will transform not only the College of Engineering, but the entire university, and have an economic and environmental impact on the state of Oregon and the nation.”

Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang met while studying at OSU’s College of Engineering. They issued a statement saying: “We discovered our love for computer science and engineering at OSU. We hope this gift will help inspire future generations of students also to fall in love with technology and its capacity to change the world.”

“AI is the most transformative technology of our time. To harness this force, engineering students need access to a supercomputer, a time machine, to accelerate their research. This new AI supercomputer will enable OSU students and researchers to make very important advances in climate science, oceanography, materials science, robotics and other fields.”

OSU provost Edward Feser stated that “The collaborative innovation complex will be a key component of efforts championed by federal and state, business and academic leaders to support the competitiveness of Oregon’s semiconductor industry.”

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden said, “It’s no secret that advanced computer chips are the linchpin of the 21st-century economy. This state-of-the-art facility provides opportunity for Oregon State faculty and students to make generation-defining discoveries to push our tech industry forward.”

The total cost of the supercomputer complex is estimated at $200 million. OSU has already raised another $50 million in addition to the Huangs’ donation, is in the process of raising an additional $25 million and will ask the Oregon state legislature for the remaining $75 million.

Oregon State University’s new supercomputer complex will be running towards the AI future. Image: Agility Robotics

Oregon State is one of three land-, sea-, space- and sun-grant universities in the US. As such, it receives federal benefits related to agriculture, fisheries and marine science, space science and engineering, and bio-energy technologies.

Founded in 1889, OSU’s College of Engineering offers coursework on topics raning from bridges and dams to computer science and artificial intelligence. Alumni innovations, according to its website, include the first replacement heart valve, the computer mouse and the concept of email. 

Spin-offs from OSU include small modular nuclear reactor developer NuScale and advanced photoresist maker Inpria. NuScale works with governments and engineering companies in North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea. Inpria was recently purchased by Japanese photoresist maker JSR.

Jen-Hsun Huang was born Taiwan, from where his family moved to the US when he was nine years old. After receiving his undergraduate degree from OSU and a master’s degree from Stanford, both in electrical engineering, he worked for LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 together with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, who had previously worked at Sun Microsystems.

In 2020, Malachowsky and NVIDIA each donated $25 million to the University of Florida’s HiPerGator AI supercomputer project.

In 2021, Huang was awarded the Semiconductor Industry Association’s Robert N Noyce Award – its highest award, named for the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel – and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Founder’s Medal in 2020. In 2019, he was named the world’s best-performing CEO by the Harvard Business Review.

NVIDIA introduced its first GPU in 1999, which was used in computer game machines (the 1994 PlayStation featured a “Sony GPU” designed by Toshiba). GPUs have become key components in numerous high-tech applications including robotics, autonomous vehicles and, most prominently, AI.

On September 1, the US Commerce department ordered NVIDIA to stop exporting its top-of-the-line A100 and H100 GPUs to China. Nvidia’s share price promptly dropped 12% and by mid-October, it had declined by almost 70% from its 52-week high. But most other semiconductor stocks were also down due to cyclical weakness in the industry and NVIDEA’s share price has since rebounded by more than 40%.  

The China-related sanctions were expected to cost NVIDIA about $400 million in lost sales, but on November 7, the company announced that it had started production of a scaled-down GPU, the A800, specifically for AI applications in the Chinese market.

NVIDIA is pivoting quickly from US Commerce Department export sanctions on China. Image: NVIDIA blog site

According to a company statement, the processor “meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.” Demand for the new device is reportedly high.

The $400 million sanctions hit represents less than 7% of Nvidia’s third-quarter revenue, which was down 17% year on year to $5.93 billion. While a significant blow to business, it is already proving less-than crippling and at least partially offset.

Speaking at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in September, Huang said

“Moore’s Law’s dead… the ability for Moore’s Law to deliver twice the performance at the same cost, or at the same performance, half the cost, every year and a half, is over. It’s completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past.”

But, he added, “Computing is advancing at incredible speeds. The engine propelling this rocket is accelerated computing and its fuel is AI.”

This explains why the US government is obsessed with stifling China’s AI development and why Nvidia will have plenty of work regardless of the Commerce Department’s strict new export restrictions.

NVIDIA is a fabless design company, meaning it has no factories. TSMC currently makes its most advanced integrated circuits (ICs) in Taiwan. It has also used Samsung’s foundry services and in the future may outsource to Intel.

Huang told the press in March that Intel is “interested in us using their foundries. We’re very interested in exploring it.” In April, Intel announced an expansion of its factory in Hillsboro, Oregon, where, perhaps tellingly, its primary R&D facilities are also located.

Source

The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, had invented a powerful new computer chip, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Acorn released a new computer line, the Archimedes, that used these ARM chips. But the world wasn’t beating a path to the company's door. (Read part one here.)

From the beginning, it was hard to get anyone to care about this amazing technology. A few months after the first ARM chips had shipped, Acorn Computers' Steve Furber called a tech reporter and tried to get him to cover the story. The reporter replied, “I don’t believe you. If you’d been doing this, I’d have known.” Then he hung up.

 

As Acorn struggled, Furber tried to imagine how the ARM chip could be spun off into a separate company. But he couldn’t figure out how to make the business model work. “You’d have to sell millions before royalties start paying the bills,” he said in an interview. “We couldn’t imagine selling millions of these things.”

 

The future looked bleak—until a representative from another computer company walked through the door. A little company called Apple.

A new company

How had Apple heard about ARM in the first place? Two engineers in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, Paul Gavarini and Tom Pittard, had built a prototype computer called Möbius. It used an ARM2 chip and ran both Apple ][ and Macintosh software, emulating the 6502 and 68000 CPUs faster than the native versions. Upper management at Apple was confused by this machine and quickly killed it, but Gavarini and Pittard kept beating the drum of ARM at internal presentations, showing impressive benchmarks when running LISP.

 

LISP was a heavyweight language, and Apple was using it internally to test new graphical interfaces. But it was considered too bulky for embedded applications. When Apple veteran Larry Tesler saw these benchmarks, a lightbulb turned on in his head.

Tesler had just taken over the Apple Newton project, and he needed to replace its slow and buggy CPU, the AT&T Hobbit. The ARM chip looked like a winner. Not only was it a speed demon, but its incredibly low power draw made it ideal for the handheld Newton device.

 

Apple CEO John Sculley demonstrating a pre-production version of the Newton. - Time

 

Tesler arranged a meeting with the ARM team, and he liked what he saw in their road map. But there was a problem. Apple was a computer company, and Acorn was a direct competitor.

 

This set the stage for a fateful decision. The ARM employees wanted to be free from Acorn’s declining fortunes. Acorn’s majority owner, Olivetti, was more interested in making IBM PC clones. VLSI Technology, the silicon foundry that manufactured the ARM chip, wanted more customers. And Apple wanted to license the chip. Spinning off ARM was in everyone’s interest.

 

In November 1990, a three-way deal was reached. Apple invested $3 million in cash for a 30 percent stake. VLSI invested half a million, plus its knowledge and tooling. Acorn transferred all its ARM intellectual property and twelve employees, valued at $3 million. At Apple’s request, the new company was renamed Advanced RISC Machines. ARM was now on its own.

A new leader

The first ARM headquarters. Yes, it was a converted barn! - Arm

 

Before Apple put its money down, it wanted to choose a CEO for ARM. Apple hired the same headhunting firm that had found John Sculley, but this time, it had far better results. The man they hired was Robin Saxby.

 

Saxby was born in 1947 in Chesterfield, England. As a child, he was fascinated by electrical wiring, and as a teenager he started his first business, repairing radios and televisions. He went to university in Liverpool, studying electronic engineering. After he graduated in 1968, his first job was helping design England’s first transistor-based television.

 

He joined Motorola in 1973 and was quickly promoted to sales engineer. This meant his job was to travel around to the firm’s customers and help them build their designs using Motorola products. When he moved to the CPU division, he thought his customers would all be mainstream computer companies. To his surprise, most people wanting Motorola CPUs had niche embedded applications in mind. At one point, he wrote a proposal for Motorola to spin off its CPU design team and offer design services, but management didn’t like the idea.

 

Robin Saxby in the 1990s. - Daily Mail

 

After Motorola, Saxby joined a startup called ES2 that was trying to develop a new silicon chip manufacturing technology. ES2 had built some test chips for ARM, so Saxby already knew about the company. But when he was asked to join ARM as its first CEO, he doubted he was the best man for the job.

To make sure, he set up a lunch meeting at a pub with the ARM staff. At the time, the company lacked leadership. Steve Furber had left to pursue other opportunities, and Sophie Wilson had made the “difficult decision” to stay behind at Acorn, although she was still available for consulting. The 12 remaining ARM employees were late for lunch, and Saxby nearly left. But when they got there, the meeting was a resounding success. All 12 engineers agreed unanimously that Robin Saxby was the right choice.

 

Even then, he needed a little push. He asked his 11-year-old daughter if he should take the risk of this new job. She said, “Dad, I’ve got a dice, and if you throw it and it says six, you’ll be a millionaire.” He threw it. It was a six. He became ARM’s first CEO in early 1991.

 

It took me literally 23 tries to throw this six. - Jeremy Reimer

Trying times

The first thing the company needed was a business model. Saxby dusted off his old Motorola proposal and modified it for ARM’s needs. The company would license its technology for an upfront fee, in addition to a percentage royalty for each chip sold. The combination would theoretically be enough to keep the lights on. Saxby’s vision was ambitious from the start: He wanted ARM to be “the global RISC standard.”

 

Stating a goal is one thing, but achieving it is something else. The rest of the computing world had also jumped on the RISC bandwagon. IBM released the 6150 RT in 1986, followed by MIPS and HP’s PA-RISC and SUN with SPARC. Motorola shipped its 88000 in 1988, Intel released the i860 and i960 in 1989, and DEC was working on its Alpha chip. Competing with just one of these giants would have been hard. Defeating all of them seemed impossible.

 

But these companies were mostly using RISC to make high-end desktop workstations. Saxby remembered from his time at Motorola that embedded applications were an overlooked market. Maybe the global RISC standard was out of reach for now, but the global embedded RISC standard was achievable. And ARM chips had fewer transistors and drew less electrical power than the competition. That made them cheaper to manufacture and suitable for a wider range of applications.

 

Some of the first licenses were for fax modems and other small applications. Early on, money was tight. Acorn had originally promised the founding engineers they would get salary increases the following year, but in 1991, ARM was running out of cash. Saxby said that if the company got a major new contract, he would make good on this promise. He signed a deal with the British defense contractor Plessey, and he gave the engineers backdated raises.

 

The company’s first new product was the ARM6 core, a successor to the ARM3. It was built on a 0.8-micrometer process and ran at 20 MHz. Keeping with the Reduced Instruction Set Complexity philosophy, it had only two new instructions. The core itself had only 35,000 transistors, not much more than the original ARM’s 27,000. (In contrast, Intel’s 386 had 275,000 transistors!) For the Newton, ARM packaged this core together with a memory management unit and 4 KB of Level 1 cache. This was the ARM610.

 

At the same time, the company introduced the ARM250. It had the older ARM3 core but also included all the support chips that had been in the Archimedes computers: the memory controller, the I/O chip, and the video chip. It was a true “system on a chip,” or SoC. At the time, it didn’t have much of a market other than making the Archimedes a bit cheaper to manufacture. But it was a hint of things to come.

 

The ARM250 SoC. A glimpse into the future. - BBC Acorn User Magazine

 

In 1993, Apple finally released the long-delayed Newton. In its first year, it sold 60,000 units. For a big company like Apple, that was considered a massive flop. But for ARM, with a royalty of $20 per chip, it was a windfall. Saxby invested the cash back into ARM, doubling the company size from 30 to 60 employees. It was a gamble. For it to work, ARM would need some major licensing wins.

Convincing the big guys

Being a small company sometimes made dealing with larger firms difficult. In a meeting with his former employer Motorola, Saxby recalled the executive closing by saying, “And of course, we won’t be able to pay you any license fees or royalties.” The company expected ARM to be happy to be paid in “exposure” since Motorola could have done the job itself. Saxby asked the executive how many engineers he had working on the project. The answer was about 200. “Do you realize,” Saxby asked, “that the license fee you’d pay to us is a quarter of what you’re paying for your engineers?” He still refused to give ARM money, and Saxby walked away from the deal.

 

Texas Instruments was another company that thought it could do better than ARM with its own internal resources. When the head of TI’s CPU division asked his boss for an ARM license, he shot back: “You’re telling me we can’t even compete with other companies in the design of a microprocessor core to embed in a baseband chip?” Later, in a meeting to discuss a potential partnership, the TI folks arrived without having signed a non-disclosure agreement. Saxby insisted that they leave immediately and come back when they had signed. ARM may have been small, but Saxby wasn’t going to let the company get pushed around.

 

TI dithered but eventually decided to introduce ARM to one of its largest customers: Nokia. It was a test. If ARM could convince Nokia to use its designs, they would be good enough for TI to build them.

 

In 1993, Nokia was already a rising star in mobile phones, having sold 3 million handsets in the previous year. It had big plans for its new models, but the company was happy enough with 16-bit Hitachi H8 CPUs, which were traditional CISC chips. A 32-bit RISC chip offered great leaps in speed and efficiency, but at the cost of a higher amount of instructions for equivalent code—and each instruction took twice the memory. On the desktop, this extra memory requirement was no big deal, but mobile phones had tiny amounts of RAM and storage.

 

On the flight home from a meeting with Nokia, the ARM engineers decided that if 16-bit was what Nokia wanted, 16-bit was what Nokia was going to get. They created a brand new set of simplified 16-bit instructions and designed circuitry that would map them to the existing 32-bit instruction set. That way, you could have smaller program code that took up less memory, but it would run at nearly twice the speed of a fully 16-bit chip. As a joke, the engineers called these extensions “Thumb” since a thumb is something you have on the end of an arm. The name stuck.

 

When Nokia engineers saw the plans for the Thumb architecture, as well as the more advanced ARM7 core that would come with it, they got very excited. TI realized that the small British company had passed the test, and it finally got an ARM license in 1994. Now TI could make advanced chips for a new generation of Nokia phones.

 

The first of these phones, the Nokia 8110, was the first GSM handset with an ARM core. It would become famous a few years later when it appeared in the movie The Matrix.

 

The Nokia 8110. That’s an ARM chip powering those fingers. - Wikipedia

 

Onward and upward

 

After the TI deal, ARM never looked back. The company now had real credibility in the electronics industry. It signed deals with Sharp, Samsung, and NEC. By 1995, the company was up to ten licensees.

 

ARM7 was a hit. The CPU was built on a 0.35 micrometer process and ran at speeds of up to 66 Mhz. The Thumb extensions were useful for mobile applications or anywhere that code density was important, but the chip could also run 32-bit code at full speed. Four more companies bought ARM licenses in 1996: Oki, Alcatel, Yamaha, and Rohm. Even Motorola eventually came around, signing a deal the following year.

 

Why did so many companies, including big electronic firms that already made their own chips, want to sign up with ARM? Part of it was the advantage in cost—ARM licenses weren’t prohibitively expensive, and they were certainly cheaper than paying hundreds of engineers for years to design new chips from scratch. Another part was the technological legacy that Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber had created. The ARM chips were fast and easy to manufacture, and they sipped power.

 

But there was another ace up ARM’s sleeve: the fact that it wasn’t just another chip manufacturing company. When ARM worked with other firms, it became a partner, helping design a solution that could be customized to the other company’s specific needs. The invention of the Thumb extensions for Nokia was only one such example. ARM also worked with Digital Equipment Corporation to create StrongARM, a much faster version of the chip that ran at speeds up to 233 MHz. These powerful chips ended up in the Apple MessagePad 2000 (an improved Newton), the Eidos Optima video editing workstation, and Acorn Computers’ newest RISC PCs (the new name for the Archimedes line).

 

For Robin Saxby, the idea of working with rival chip companies was always part of the strategy. “Turn your enemies into friends,” he would say. “Why should they fight you if they can make more money for themselves by collaborating with you?”

 

This feeling pervaded the company. In an interview with Ars, an ARM spokesperson explained it: “The ARM business model is a success-based business model based on the idea that ARM succeeds when its partners do.” After a slow start, the company was now proving that this wasn’t just a lofty ideal. It was working.

 

ARM’s dramatic growth in the 1990s. Data and graph compiled by author. - Jeremy Reimer

 

But ARM still had to be strategic. When LSI Semiconductor asked the company for a license, Saxby turned it down, even though the CEO offered him a lot of money. He did so because LSI would be competing directly with ARM’s manufacturing partner, VLSI. Instead, he asked the CEO of LSI to first bring them some new business and then he would reconsider. He came back with an offer from the hard drive company Western Digital. Every deal was expected to grow the market and help make ARM the standard.

Going public

By 1998, ARM had outgrown its original barn. The company had 274 employees, it had earned $44 million in the previous year, and it had made over $8 million in profit while shipping nearly 10 million ARM processors. ARM wasn’t quite yet the global RISC standard—MIPS had taken the crown there, thanks largely to the Sony PlayStation—but it was in third place and had overtaken Intel’s i960 and Motorola’s PowerPC. It was also the fastest growing of all the RISC chip suppliers.

 

All this positive growth made it a good time to take the company public. On April 17th, 1998, the company successfully raised an initial public offering (IPO) on both the London Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. The initial price of the stock was 5.75 pounds, or just under $10. Later that year, when ARM reported selling 51 million processors, the shares skyrocketed. ARM, which had started with twelve people and a dream, was now a billion-dollar company.

 

The ARM team celebrating going public on the NASDAQ. - Arm

 

Two of ARM’s founding investors were headed in the opposite direction. Apple had lost over a billion dollars in 1997, and its operating cash was getting dangerously low. Starting the day after the ARM IPO, Apple unloaded most of its shares, going from a 42.3 percent stake to under 6 percent. This cashout helped Steve Jobs stabilize the company at a crucial time.

 

Acorn was also struggling. The company abandoned the development of its RISC PCs after sales continued to drop, and it canceled the final “Phoebe” model, leaving behind only its distinctive yellow case. At one point, the capital value of the company was worth less than its 24 percent holding of ARM shares. Acorn sold its stock and used the money to refinance and restructure the company.  In 1999, the company renamed itself “Element 14” and changed its focus to developing telecommunications products.

 

This would have been the most yellow computer to ever exist. - Wikipedia.

 

VLSI Technology continued to grow, buoyed by the success of ARM. In June 1999, it was acquired by Philips Electronics for $1 billion.

A changing world

ARM had started as a crazy dream. Back in 1985, Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber had looked at a number of available CPUs and found them all wanting. Incredibly, they led a 10-person team in developing an advanced, 32-bit RISC CPU from scratch, taking only eighteen months to go from idea to working silicon.

 

Initially, the idea was to take these amazing CPUs and build great personal computers around them, thus taking over the world. But the world had changed, and there was no more room for new, incompatible computer platforms. Instead, thanks to Apple, VLSI, and the vision of Robin Saxby, the ARM chip found itself free to go wherever it was needed the most. And for the next decade, it was needed most in all kinds of small devices, from fax modems to hard drives to mobile phones.

 

But as the new millennium approached, these small devices were becoming more and more powerful. Although the Newton had flopped, the general personal digital assistant market was booming, and mobile phones were starting to get PDA-like features themselves. The stage was set for ARM’s greatest opportunity—and its greatest challenge.

 

Source

If you are considering buying the Surface Laptop Studio, get the 16GB variant with 256GB (which is now extra stable) with a hefty 19% discount for only $1,299.

What is new in the November 2022 update for the Surface Laptop Studio?

• This update improves SSD stability and reliability.

Here is the list of new drivers:

And here is more information about the update:

The Surface Laptop Studio is not the only Surface device Microsoft has updated this month with new firmware. Several days ago, Microsoft released security patches for the first and second-gen Surface Duo (and Android 12L for the AT&T-based Surface Duo). Also, the November 2022 update recently fixed compatibility issues with Adobe Fresco on the Surface Book 3.

Our stories may contain affiliate links for products/apps where Neowin is paid an affiliate fee if you complete a purchase via those links.

Surface Laptop Studio's SSD is now more stable thanks to the latest firmware update

“Just a bunch of idiots having fun”—a photo history of the LAN party

In August this year, AMD announced its Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000 series processors. These processors have provided great performance increase over the previous Zen 3 based Ryzen 5000 processors. This despite the fact that the new Intel Raptor Lake processors have been defeating them comfortably in gaming benchmarks.

Another problem these new AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors are facing is the overall cost of buying the platform. The new motherboards required for Ryzen 7000 processors are quite expensive. This is unlike both previous gen AMD motherboards and also its competitor Intel CPU’s motherboards, which are significantly cheaper than the Ryzen 7000 motherboards.

The reason is simple. AMD went futuristic with their aims. The Ryzen 7000 series works with only DDR5 RAM, supports PCIe 5.0 and also requires an entirely new CPU socket. All this adds to the overall motherboard cost. This is why these new processors from AMD, in-spite of being good, are not that attractive to the buyers. Looks like AMD wants to do something to change that.

New Non-X Ryzen Processors Coming

When AMD released the Ryzen 7000 processors, it released just 4 processors in the line-up. AMD Ryzen 7950X, 7900X, 7700X, 7600X. If rumors are to be believed, AMD might add more processors to the line-up. Specifically non-X processors.

Twitter based leaker chi11eddog (@g01d3nm4ng0) is claiming that AMD is planning to release three new non-X processors. Specifically AMD Ryzen 7600, 7700 & 7900. All these processors are claimed to be releasing in the first quarter of next year, 2023.

As per the claims, the AMD Ryzen 7900 based CPU will have a max speed (boost clock) of 5.4 GHz, which is 200MHz slower than Ryzen 7900X. It is expected to cost $429, a whole $120 cheaper than the 7900X, which released with a MSRP of $549.

The AMD Ryzen 7700 will have a max speed of 5.3GHz, which is 100MHz slower than 7700X. It’s said to cost $329, which is $70 cheaper than the 7700X, which came with an original MSRP of $399.

The third on the list is the cheaper AMD Ryzen 7600 with a max speed of 5.1GHz, which is 200MHz slower than the 7600X. It’s claimed to cost $229, which again is $70 cheaper than 7600X, which came with an original MSRP of $299.

All of them, however, the leaker claims, will come with a TDP of just 65W. Which is a puts a massive limit in their power consumption. While the Ryzen 7600X and 7700X come with a TDP of 105W, the 7900X has a TDP of 170W. Now for all of that to change to just 65W raises many questions, both about AMD’s plans and also leaker’s claims.

Conclusion

AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors are not selling as they should and so big is the problem that AMD is massively cutting their production. So the new cheaper processors are much welcome if they come out to be true. It will make the Ryzen platform cheaper and more attractive.

However, the limited TDP can be a big concern. While it’s true higher power does not always provide a huge uplift in performance, such a hard limit on the base power of Ryzen 7900 can be an issue. However, PC manufacturer only Ryzen 5900 CPU did have such limit, but as these processors are not available to common consumers directly, so we cannot say for sure. Nor can we say whether these new processors are being made for the public or will be made available only to the PC manufacturers.

Another possibility is AMD releasing a cheaper motherboard chipset to power these processors. Namely, the A620 chipset, which does not have any release date or any specifications yet. Nor AMD seems to have spoken anything about it. Up-till now, we only know about the X670E, X670, B650E, B650 chipsets and none of the motherboards using these chipsets are really cheap.

Whatever it can be. These rumors do give us a fair bit of an idea of what AMD is considering to do. These specs, however, are never final and could always change as AMD engineers experiment with the speed and power requirements and then AMD considers the market position in order to price them competitively. What we can do is to wait and see what AMD does.

AMD Might Release Non-X Ryzen 7600, 7700 & 7900 CPUs in Q123