Lifeboat Foundation

The move by Intel is a substantial increase in memory speeds from prior generations.

Engineers and developers at Intel are always working to push the boundaries of what’s possible, leaning on Moore’s Law — the idea that the number of transistors on a single chip will double every two years with a minimal increase in cost.

But over the last five years, Intel has had its ups and downs, demonstrated by the wavering value of its stock. It went from a high of $68 per share to more recently trading at $36 per share.

Continue reading “Machine at Intel’s Hillsboro campus can produce chips so advanced, they don’t yet exist” »

Approximately 22,500 exposed Palo Alto GlobalProtect firewall devices are likely vulnerable to the CVE-2024–3400 flaw, a critical command injection vulnerability that has been actively exploited in attacks since at least March 26, 2024.

CVE-2024–3400 is a critical vulnerability impacting specific Palo Alto Networks’ PAN-OS versions in the GlobalProtect feature that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute commands with root privileges using command injection triggered by arbitrary file creation.

The flaw was disclosed by Palo Alto Networks on April 12, with the security advisory urging system administrators to apply provided mitigations immediately until a patch was made available.

Indeed, the costs of building fabs in Germany, Japan, and the U.S. are higher than the costs of building fabs in Taiwan and TSMC has complained about it a number of times in the past. The company even had to delay production start at its Fab 21 near Phoenix, Arizona, due to problems with tools installation and negotiations with trade unions.

Therefore, if a TSMC customer wants to produce its chips at a specific location, then the foundry will charge a premium. How high is that premium will be remains to be seen, but last year a media report indicated that chips made in Arizona on TSMC’s N5 and N4 production nodes could be from 20% to 30% more expensive than the same chips produced in Taiwan.

Due to higher construction and operational expenses of fabs in Japan, Germany, and the U.S., TSMC plans to transfer these additional costs to its customers to sustain its target gross margin of 53%. Although American chip designers may not welcome the increased production costs in the U.S., they will probably manufacture chips intended for government and other markets less sensitive to price increases at the Arizona facility. Consequently, they should manage to pass on these higher costs to at least some of their end customers without jeopardizing their market competitiveness.

MRI scans of long COVID patients with brain fog suggest that the blood brain barrier may be leaky.

Superconductivity continues to revolutionize technology in so many ways. While some technological advances rely on finding ways to encourage zero-resistance currents at warmer temperatures, engineers are also considering better ways of fine-controlling the super-efficient flow of electrons.

Unfortunately, many processes that would work just fine for run-of-the-mill electronics, such as the application of external magnetic fields, risk interfering with the properties that make superconductors so efficient.

An international team of scientists has succeeded in confining an exotic state of superconductivity that’s controlled by strong magnetism rather than disrupted by it.

Researchers at the University of Würzburg have developed a method that can improve the performance of quantum resistance standards. It’s based on a quantum phenomenon called the Quantum Anomalous Hall effect.

The precise measurement of electrical resistance is essential in the industrial production of electronics – for example, in the manufacture of high-tech sensors, microchips, and flight controls. “Very precise measurements are essential here, as even the smallest deviations can significantly affect these complex systems,” explains Professor Charles Gould, a physicist at the Institute for Topological Insulators at the University of Würzburg (JMU).

With our new measurement method, we can significantly improve the accuracy.

A team of geologists and planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Santa Cruz, New York University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center reports evidence that Io’s volcanic activity has been ongoing since the beginning of the solar system. In their study, published in the journal Science, the group studied sulfur isotopes in Io’s atmosphere to determine how long the moon has been volcanically active.

An international collaboration of researchers, led by Philip Walther at University of Vienna, have achieved a significant breakthrough in quantum technology, with the successful demonstration of quantum interference among several single photons using a novel resource-efficient platform. The work published in Science Advances represents a notable advancement in optical quantum computing that paves the way for more scalable quantum technologies.