Circa 2016
Hunters in Mason County may need to be on the lookout for something other than deer when they hit the woods this week. The Point Pleasant Mothman is a local legend that over the years has gained worldwide fame. There hadn’t been any recent sightings of t.
AMD has filed a patent for something that everyone knew would eventually happen: an MCM GPU Chiplet design. Spotted by LaFriteDavid over at Twitter and published on Freepatents.com, the document shows how AMD plans to build a GPU chiplet graphics card that is eerily reminiscent of its MCM based CPU designs. With NVIDIA working on its own MCM design with Hopper architecture, it’s about time that we left monolithic GPU designs in the past and enable truly exponential performance growth.
AMD patents GPU chiplet design for future graphics cards
The patent points out that one of the reasons why MCM GPUs have not been attempted in the past is due to the high latency between chiplets, programming models and it being harder to implement parallelism. AMD’s patent attempts to solve all these problems by using an on-package interconnect it calls the high bandwidth passive crosslink. This would enable each GPU chiplet to communicate with the CPU directly as well as other chiplets via the passive crosslink. Each GPU would also feature its own cache. This design appears to suggest that each GPU chiplet will be a GPU in its own right and fully addressable by the operating system.
The world population is estimated to reach 9.5 billion by 2050. Given that most of our current energy is generated from fossil fuels, this creates significant challenges when it comes to providing enough sustainable electricity while mitigating climate change.
One idea that has gained traction over recent years is generating electricity using bacteria in devices called microbial fuel cells (MFCs). These fuel cells rely on the ability of certain naturally occurring microorganisms that have the ability to “breathe” metals, exchanging electrons to create electricity. This process can be fuelled using substances called substrates, which include organic materials found in wastewater.
This excavator operator took the aircraft for one last ride while probably doing plane noises. Watch the video here.
I concur.
Removing the use of animals in the food industry becomes a fact by 2035.
Continue reading “Food Technology Will Replace the Use of Animals by 2035” »
Researchers from Yokohama National University in Japan have developed a prototype microprocessor using superconductor devices that are about 80 times more energy efficient than the state-of-the-art semiconductor devices found in the microprocessors of today’s high-performance computing systems.
As today’s technologies become more and more integrated in our daily lives, the need for more computational power is ever increasing. Because of this increase, the energy use of that increasing computational power is growing immensely. For example, so much energy is used by modern day data centers that some are built near rivers so that the flowing water can be used to cool the machinery.
“The digital communications infrastructure that supports the Information Age that we live in today currently uses approximately 10% of the global electricity. Studies suggest that in the worst case scenario, if there is no fundamental change in the underlying technology of our communications infrastructure such as the computing hardware in large data centers or the electronics that drive the communication networks, we may see its electricity usage rise to over 50% of the global electricity by 2030,” says Christopher Ayala, an associate professor at Yokohama National University, and lead author of the study.
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Has a nice video on the subject.
AI is capable of self-reproduction—should humans be worried?
An international research team that included three scientists from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography has discovered single-celled microorganisms in a location where they didn’t expect to find them.
“Water boils on the (Earth’s) surface at 100 degrees Celsius, and we found organisms living in sediments at 120 degrees Celsius,” said URI Professor of Oceanography Arthur Spivack, who led the geochemistry efforts of the 2016 expedition organized by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Germany’s MARUM–Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. The study was carried out as part of the work of Expedition 370 of the International Ocean Discovery Program.
The research results from a two-month-long expedition in 2016 were published in December 2020 in the journal Science.
WASHINGTON — SpaceX has been awarded a $150.4 million contract to launch as many as 28 satellites for the Pentagon’s space agency, the Defense Department announced Dec. 31.
The contract is to launch a mix of small and medium spacecraft of different sizes that the Space Development Agency is acquiring from multiple vendors. That includes 20 data-relay satellites known as the Transport Layer and the other eight are missile-warning satellites known as the Tracking Layer.
SpaceX will launch these satellites from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
