Lifeboat Foundation

Qualcomm kicked off its annual Snapdragon Technology Summit with its new premium smartphone SoC dubbed the Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 1. As expected, the new SoC improves performance and efficiency in every aspect of the chip, but enhancements in AI and image processing are especially important for the next generation of premium smartphones.

The new Series 8 Gen 1 SoC follows the previous Snapdragon 888 generation as Qualcomm’s premium smartphone SoC. And yes, there is a new naming convention with this generation. Rather than continuing to count up until the company runs out of numbers for new products, Qualcomm changed the naming convention to that basic series number (Series, 8, 7, 6, and 4) followed by a generational number, similar to what the company began doing with its Snapdragon 8CX SoCs for PCs. Since this is the first generation of smartphone SoCs to use the new nomenclature, the new family of devices will be “Gen 1”. For now, however, the company only announced the premium chip — the Series 8 Gen 1.

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Research has long strived to develop computers to work as energy efficiently as our brains. A study, led by researchers at the University of Gothenburg, has succeeded for the first time in combining a memory function with a calculation function in the same component. The discovery opens the way for more efficient technologies, everything from mobile phones to self-driving cars.

In recent years, computers have been able to tackle advanced cognitive tasks, like language and image recognition or displaying superhuman chess skills, thanks in large part to artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, the human brain is still unmatched in its ability to perform tasks effectively and energy efficiently.

“Finding new ways of performing calculations that resemble the brain’s energy-efficient processes has been a major goal of research for decades. Cognitive tasks, like image and voice recognition, require significant computer power, and mobile applications, in particular, like mobile phones, drones and satellites, require energy efficient solutions,” says Johan Åkerman, professor of applied spintronics at the University of Gothenburg.

When humans look at a scene, they see objects and the relationships between them. On top of your desk, there might be a laptop that is sitting to the left of a phone, which is in front of a computer monitor.

Many deep learning models struggle to see the world this way because they don’t understand the entangled relationships between individual objects. Without knowledge of these relationships, a robot designed to help someone in a kitchen would have difficulty following a command like “pick up the spatula that is to the left of the stove and place it on top of the cutting board.”

In an effort to solve this problem, MIT researchers have developed a model that understands the underlying relationships between objects in a scene. Their model represents individual relationships one at a time, then combines these representations to describe the overall scene. This enables the model to generate more accurate images from text descriptions, even when the scene includes several objects that are arranged in different relationships with one another.

According to reports, Samsung will increase the proportion of Exynos chips used in its own models in 2022 to reduce its dependence on Qualcomm chips. Samsung’s use of Exynos chips in its own models will increase by about 2–3 times next year. At the same time, Samsung has set a sales target of 300 million mobile phones next year.

Industry insiders pointed out that Samsung is vigorously supporting Exynos chips. On the one hand, it will increase the proportion of Exynos chips in its own models. On the other hand, it is open to partners. Recall that the company co-developed the Exynos 1,080 chip with Vivo which the latter used in the Vivo X60 series.

Four separate Android banking trojan Dropper campaigns that have affected over 300,000 devices in 2021 through the Google Play Store.

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Everything we do as living organisms is dependent, in some capacity, on time. The concept is so complex that scientists still argue whether it exists or if it is an illusion. In this video, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, science educator Bill Nye, author James Gleick, and neuroscientist Dean Buonomano discuss how the human brain perceives of the passage of time, the idea in theoretical physics of time as a fourth dimension, and the theory that space and time are interwoven. Thaller illustrates Einstein’s theory of relativity, Buonomano outlines eternalism, and all the experts touch on issues of perception, definition, and experience. Check Dean Buonomano’s latest book Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time at https://amzn.to/2GY1n1z.

Continue reading “Time: Do the past, present, and future exist all at once? | Big Think” »

Researchers have uncovered details of new vulnerabilities in MediaTek’s audio DSP chips embedded in 37% of all smartphones and IoT devices.

More than 9 million Android phones are infected with malware distributed through Huawei’s AppGallery Store.

Apple has filed a federal lawsuit against Israeli spyware firm NSO Group for illegally targeting users with the Pegasus malware.