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Purdue University innovators are working on inventions to use micro-chip technology in implantable devices and other wearable products such as smart watches to improve biomedical devices, including those used to monitor people with glaucoma and heart disease.

The Purdue team developed a fully implantable radio-frequency transmitter chip for wireless sensor nodes and biomedical devices. The research is published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II. The transmitter chip consumes lowest amount of energy per digital bit published to date.

The transmitter works in a similar fashion to communication technology in mobile phones and smart watches, but the Purdue transmitter has an unprecedented level of miniaturization and low-energy consumption that it can be implanted into an eye to monitor pressure for a glaucoma patient or into another part of the body to measure data related to heart functions.

The St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.

Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, and lead author on the paper, first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He visited the ice caps with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.

“When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape,” said Serreze. “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.”

Confidential computing is the solution that allows both people and entities to keep data confidential and still put it to use.

If you’re on the look out for a desktop PC that’s small enough to sit under a TV, Chinese brand XCY has a very small computer they’d like to sell you.

As Liliputing reports, the XCY X51 is about as small as you could possibly make a fully-featured desktop PC. It measures 2.4-by-2.4-by-1.7-inches and weighs a mere 121 grams. However, inside you’ll find a quad-core Intel Celeron N4100 clocked at 1.1GHz (2.4Ghz burst frequency) complete with UHD Graphics 600 GPU. The processor is complemented by 8GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 RAM, a 128GB M.2 SSD, and a micro SD card slot for further storage expansion.

Continue reading “XCY Squeezes a 4K-Capable Desktop PC Into a 2.4-Inch Case” »

Nvidia Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire Arm Ltd., the chip designer that SoftBank Group Corp. bought for $32 billion four years ago, according to people familiar with the matter.

The two parties aim to reach a deal in the next few weeks, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Nvidia is the only suitor in concrete discussions with SoftBank, according to the people.

A deal for Arm could be the largest ever in the semiconductor industry, which has been consolidating in recent years as companies seek to diversify and add scale. But any deal with Nvidia, which is a customer of Arm, would likely trigger regulatory scrutiny as well as a wave of opposition from other users.

Researchers devise an on-off system that allows high-fidelity operations and interconnection between processors.

MIT researchers have introduced a quantum computing architecture that can perform low-error quantum computations while also rapidly sharing quantum information between processors. The work represents a key advance toward a complete quantum computing platform.

Previous to this discovery, small-scale quantum processors have successfully performed tasks at a rate exponentially faster than that of classical computers. However, it has been difficult to controllably communicate quantum information between distant parts of a processor. In classical computers, wired interconnects are used to route information back and forth throughout a processor during the course of a computation. In a quantum computer, however, the information itself is quantum mechanical and fragile, requiring fundamentally new strategies to simultaneously process and communicate quantum information on a chip.

Even in a dual-socket AMD EPYC Rome/Milan server and 4 x MI100 PCIe-based accelerators, we’re looking at 128GB of HBM memory on offer with 4.9TB/sec of bandwidth. We see a drop down to 136 TFLOPs here as well.

We are looking at the purported AMD Radeon Instinct MI100 accelerator being around 13% faster in FP32 compute performance over NVIDIA’s new Ampere A100 accelerator. The performance to value ratio is much better, with the MI100 being 2.4x better value over a V100S setup, and 50% better value over Ampere A100.

Here’s the story – our protagonist rewinds history, locates baby Hitler, and averts global war by putting him on a path to peace … but, oh noes! This sets off a domino chain of events that stops our hero from being born, or worse, kicks off the apocalypse.

Unintended ‘butterfly effect’-style consequences of time travel might be a juicy problem in science fiction, but physicists now have reason to believe in a quantum landscape, tweaking history in this way shouldn’t be a major problem.

Since going back to a previous moment in time is still in the ‘too hard’ basket, a pair of physicists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US went with the next best thing and created a simulation using an IBM-Q quantum computer.

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Ultimately, the MIT engineers hope that their giant atoms lead to a simpler, enhanced form of quantum computers.

“This allows us to experimentally probe a novel regime of physics that is difficult to access with natural atoms,” MIT engineer Bharath Kannan said in a press release. “The effects of the giant atom are extremely clean and easy to observe and understand.”