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Category: computing – Page 448

Yet despite the chip giant’s manufacturing struggles, it still maintains nearly 90% market share in data-center chips, compared with AMD’s 10%, according to data from Mercury Research. Intel has lost more ground in desktop and laptop computers, holding onto 83% market share and 78% share respectively, with the remainder going mostly to AMD, according to Mercury data.

After years of hearing about these problems, Wall Street had largely written off the company’s manufacturing prowess. Investors expected the company to move to a hybrid approach to chip making, contracting more of its chip manufacturing to TSMC and potentially to Samsung. Some analysts suggested the company go as far as spinning out the manufacturing business, as AMD did with what is now known as GlobalFoundries years ago.

But weeks after Gelsinger took over, he announced that the company planned to double down on its manufacturing business in an effort to return Intel to its roots, including a bid to compete with TSMC as a contract manufacturer. Since his return to Intel after nearly nine years as chief executive of VMware, he has shaken up the company’s executive team. That includes re-hiring several notable Intel staffers, including Natarajan.

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The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as Andrew Granville of the University of Montreal put it. The new paper shows how to create much longer disordered strings of colored beads than mathematicians had thought possible, extending a line of work from the 1940s that has found applications in many areas of computer science.

The conjecture, formulated about 17 years ago by Ron Graham, one of the leading discrete mathematicians of the past half-century, concerns how many red and blue beads you can string together without creating any long sequences of evenly spaced beads of a single color. (You get to decide what “long” means for each color.)

This problem is one of the oldest in Ramsey theory, which asks how large various mathematical objects can grow before pockets of order must emerge. The bead-stringing question is easy to state but deceptively difficult: For long strings there are just too many bead arrangements to try one by one.

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When Patch Tuesday rolls around, we can usually expect a series of Windows problems to be fixed (and perhaps to see some new ones introduced), as well as new features added. But Microsoft also uses such updates to take things away — and this is precisely what has happened with the latest updates for Windows 10 and 11.

Microsoft, quite understandably, would like everyone to use its Edge browser, and has taken endless steps to ensure that it stays the default browser on as many computers as possible. With the latest operating system updates — specifically the KB5008212 and KB5008215 updates — the company has implemented a block on workarounds used by the likes of EdgeDeflector and Firefox to force links to open in a browser other than Edge.

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And he’s been searching for it for a decade.

It’s a nightmare scenario that might become increasingly common in a world of digital currency. A man threw away an old PC hard drive while doing a quick spring clean of his home in Newport Wales, U.K., in 2013. Fast-forward almost a decade and he’s still desperately petitioning to be allowed to go through his local landfill.

The reason the man, 35-year-old IT engineer James Howells, wants to trawl through his local trash site is that the hard drive he threw out included a wallet with 7,500 Bitcoin.

At the time he threw out the hard drive, that amount of Bitcoin would have been worth 665 thousand dollars (500 thousand pounds). Today, it would have made him a millionaire, as it would be worth a total of 357 million dollars.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, Howells explained how he had been looking through the landfill, which is roughly the size of a football field. “I had a word with one of the guys down there, explained the situation. And he actually took me out in his truck to where the landfill site is, the current ditch they’re working on. It’s about the size of a football field, and he said something from three or four months ago would be about three or four feet down,” Howells explained.

Continue reading “A Man Accidentally Threw Out a Hard Drive Worth 7 Million in Bitcoin” | >

One promising solution to plastic pollution is mycelium or mushroom packaging. It is made of 2 ingredients: mushrooms and hemp. Mycelium is the underground network of very durable, thread-like filaments called hyphae. It is mixed with agricultural waste like wood chips, oat hulls, cotton burrs or hemp hurds.

Link to my Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/Belinda_Carr.

Chapters.
0:00 Introduction.
1:00 How its made.
2:43 Products.
4:32 Advantages.
5:30 Disadvantages.
6:19 Myths.
7:12 Conclusion.

One of the largest mushroom packaging manufacturers in the world is Ecovative Design, a New York based biotech company founded in 2006. They sent me these samples of their product. Their manufacturing process is pretty straight forward.

Continue reading “Can Mushrooms replace EVERYTHING? | Concrete, Plastic, Meat, Leather” | >

Officials from IBM and Samsung announced at this year’s IEDM conference in San Francisco a collaboration on a new chip design that adds transistors vertically on a chip. As part of their announcement, they suggested that their vertical transport field effect transistors (VTFET) could double the speed of processor chips, or alternatively, reduce the power they use by up to 85 percent.

Since the beginning of digital technology, processing chips have been made by placing tiny transistors on a chip and connecting them. Over time, engineers have placed increasingly more transistors on chips that have remained roughly the same size—adhering, generally, to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a should double every year. Engineers have known for a long time that there are limits to Moore’s Law—eventually, it would become impossible to add even one more transistor, much less double the number that are there.

So researchers are looking for other ways to make chips. But in the meantime, engineers continue to look for ways to add more transistors to conventional chips. In their announcement, IBM and Samsung have explained that they are taking steps to begin designing chips that can expand vertically. In a practical sense, the move was inevitable. As an analogy, when towns grew too big to be efficient, engineers began making buildings taller, essentially turning 2D towns into 3D cities. Officials and engineers at IBM and Samsung (and doubtless other corporations, such as Intel) suggest that now is the time to begin doing the same with microprocessors.

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The months-long project demonstrates the physics behind the CPUs we take for granted.

Computer chips have become so tiny and complex that it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are real physical principles behind them. They aren’t just a bunch of ever-increasing numbers. For a practical (well, virtual) example, check out the latest version of a computer processor built exclusively inside the Minecraft game engine.

Minecraft builder “Sammyuri” spent seven months building what they call the Chungus 2, an enormously complex computer processor that exists virtually inside the Minecraft game engine. This project isn’t the first time a computer processor has been virtually rebuilt inside Minecraft, but the Chungus 2 (Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit) might very well be the largest and most complex, simulating an 8-bit processor with a one hertz clock speed and 256 bytes of RAM.

Continue reading “This 8-bit processor built in Minecraft can run its own games” | >

Stacking transistors could be the next big thing in chips.

IBM and Samsung have announced their latest advance in semiconductor design: a new way to stack transistors vertically on a chip (instead of lying flat on the surface of the semiconductor).

The new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) design is meant to succeed the current FinFET technology that’s used for some of today’s most advanced chips and could allow for chips that are even more densely packed with transistors than today. In essence, the new design would stack transistors vertically, allowing for current to flow up and down the stack of transistors instead of the side-to-side horizontal layout that’s currently used on most chips.

Continue reading “IBM and Samsung say their new chip design could lead to week-long battery life on phones” | >

Abstract. The cnidarian model organism Hydra has long been studied for its remarkable ability to regenerate its head, which is controlled by a head organizer located near the hypostome. The canonical Wnt pathway plays a central role in head organizer function during regeneration and during bud formation, which is the asexual mode of reproduction in Hydra. However, it is unclear how shared the developmental programs of head organizer genesis are in budding and regeneration. Time-series analysis of gene expression changes during head regeneration and budding revealed a set of 298 differentially expressed genes during the 48-h head regeneration and 72-h budding time courses. In order to understand the regulatory elements controlling Hydra head regeneration, we first identified 27,137 open-chromatin elements that are open in one or more sections of the organism body or regenerating tissue. We used histone modification ChIP-seq to identify 9,998 candidate proximal promoter and 3,018 candidate enhancer-like regions respectively. We show that a subset of these regulatory elements is dynamically remodeled during head regeneration and identify a set of transcription factor motifs that are enriched in the enhancer regions activated during head regeneration. Our results show that Hydra displays complex gene regulatory structures of developmentally dynamic enhancers, which suggests that the evolution of complex developmental enhancers predates the split of cnidarians and bilaterians.

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