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How Apple’s M2 chip builds on the M1 to take on Intel and AMD.

The M1 is a great chip. Essentially an “X” variant of the A14 chip, it takes the iPhone and iPad processor and doubles the high-performance CPU cores, GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. The M1 chip is so good it’s equally amazing for tablets and thin-and-light laptops as it is for desktops, easily outperforming any competing chip with similar power draw and offering similar performance to processors that use at least twice as much energy.

Now a year and a half later, and after delivering three more powerful variants of the M1 (M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra), it’s time for the next generation. Announced at WWDC and appearing first in the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, the M2 is essentially the system-on-chip we predicted it would be: what the M1 is to the A14, the M2 is to the A15. It’s made of 20 billion transistors, 25 percent more than M1, and while it’s still built using a 5nm manufacturing process, it’s a new enhanced “second-generation” 5nm process.

Here are the most significant ways the M2 is improved over the M1.

Continue reading “How Apple’s M2 chip builds on the M1 with small but meaningful upgrades” | >

Italian company Energy Dome has opened the first of its remarkable grid-level energy storage plants. These “CO2 batteries” can store renewable energy over long periods and release it quickly, at less than half the cost of big lithium batteries.

Large-scale energy storage is going to be required on an epic scale all round the world, as green energy begins to take over the world’s power supply. Renewable energy is often generated at times and places where it’s not needed, and a variety of grid-level storage technologies are jockeying for various energy market niches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

We took a close look at Energy Dome’s CO2 battery technology last July, but here’s the guts of it: carbon dioxide expands dramatically when it moves to a gaseous state from a liquid state, which it’ll only settle in under pressures at least five times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure. How much does it expand? Well, at room temperature, 2.5675 litres of liquid CO2 kept at 56 atmospheres of pressure will expand into 1,000 litres of gaseous CO2. That’s a factor of nearly 400.

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A team of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with one colleague from MIT and another from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a biomimetic elastomeric robot skin that has tactile sensing abilities. Their work has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Roboticists continue to work on improving robot abilities and to make them more human-like. In this new effort, the researchers gave a the ability to detect such sensations as a pat, tickling, wind, or something stroking its surface. They accomplished this by partially imitating .

The new robot is multi-layered, like human skin, to allow for different functions. The top layer is made of a rubber-like polymer resembling human skin. Beneath that, the researchers added a hydrogel to imitate the human epidermis. They chose a hydrogel because it not only deforms when pressed, but jiggles when bumped. By embedding sensors to detect these reactions, the skin is able to sense things like a finger press by monitoring the pressure of the hydrogel and the direction of its movement. If something taps against it, the system senses and measures in the hydrogel to gauge what the tap felt like.

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Žilvinas DeveikaIt’s much sooner than that. My prediction (that is almost 10 years old now) of an “early” appearance of a strong AGI is 2029. I am completely sure that it will either emerge or will already be there in 2030s.

24 Replies.

Marc O MonfilsAnd what strategies do we have in place to guarantee humanity’s continued relevance in the era of super intelligent machines?

Empathy? Never saved any tribe in the past…

Human services and interaction? For what, to keep our irrelevance engaged?… See more.

Continue reading “Chinese hacking group Aoqin Dragon quietly spied orgs for a decade” | >