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Blog – Page 3301

Alongside their EPYC server CPU updates, as part of today’s AMD Data Center event, the company is also offering an update on the status of their nearly-finished AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator family. The company’s next-generation HPC-class processors, which use both Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA 3 GPU cores on a single package, have now become a multi-SKU family of XPUs.

Joining the previously announced 128GB MI300 APU, which is now being called the MI300A, AMD is also producing a pure GPU part using the same design. This chip, dubbed the MI300X, uses just CDNA 3 GPU tiles rather than a mix of CPU and GPU tiles in the MI300A, making it a pure, high-performance GPU that gets paired with 192GB of HBM3 memory. Aimed squarely at the large language model market, the MI300X is designed for customers who need all the memory capacity they can get to run the largest of models.

First announced back in June of last year, and detailed in greater depth back at CES 2023, the AMD Instinct MI300 is AMD’s big play into the AI and HPC market. The unique, server-grade APU packs both Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA 3 GPU cores on to a single, chiplet-based chip. None of AMD’s competitors have (or will have) a combined CPU+GPU product like the MI300 series this year, so it gives AMD an interesting solution with a truly united memory architecture, and plenty of bandwidth between the CPU and GPU tiles.

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Germanene – a two-dimensional, graphene-like form of the element germanium – can carry electricity along its edges with no resistance. This unusual behaviour is characteristic of materials known as topological insulators, and the researchers who observed it say the phenomenon could be used to make faster and more energy-efficient electronic devices.

Like graphene, germanene is an atomically thin material with a honeycomb structure. Like graphene, germanene’s electronic band structure contains a point at which the valence and conduction bands meet. At this meeting point, spin-orbit coupling creates a narrow gap between the bands within the material’s bulk, causing it to act as an insulator. Along the material’s edges, however, special topological states arise that bridge this gap and allow electrons to flow unhindered.

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Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a genius new plot to add some interest to Meta-owned products: just jam in some generative AI, absolutely everywhere.

Axios reports that in an all-hands meeting on Thursday, Zuckerberg unveiled a barrage of generative AI tools and integrations, which are to be baked into both Meta’s internal and consumer-facing products, Facebook and Instagram included.

“In the last year, we’ve seen some really incredible breakthroughs — qualitative breakthroughs — on generative AI,” Zuckerberg told Axios in a statement, “and that gives us the opportunity to now go take that technology, push it forward, and build it into every single one of our products.”

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He hasn’t even made it to Mars yet, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s wandering eye is already on a new planet — this one completely outside our star system.

Over the weekend, Musk seemed to ideate on the prospect of visiting the relatively nearby Promixa Centauri B, an exoplanet that sits a little over four light-years away in Alpha Centauri, the star system that James Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise is based on. First discovered back in 2016, Proxima B is believed to be particularly viable as a potentially life-supporting world, and it looks like Musk is paying attention.

“Practically next door,” the Twitter owner tweeted on Sunday, in response to a tweet featuring a Space Academy blog post about the tantalizing planet.

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