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US chip manufacturing

Dallas-based Texas Instruments is betting big on American-made chips, with an ambitious plan to invest up to $30 billion to build as many as four new semiconductor fabrication plants in Sherman.

TI said Wednesday it will begin construction next year on the first two plants producing its 300-millimeter wafers used in everything from cars and trucks to industrial machinery. It estimates chip production will start by 2025.

Two additional plants could be added at the 4.7 million-square-foot site in Grayson County to meet future chip demand. The company said the plants could employ as many as 3,000 workers when complete.

NBC DFW

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The Apple M1 Chip

For now, Apple's new M1 chip — fast, power-smart, and literally cool — is just a major hardware upgrade that's winning rave reviews.

But down the road, the M1 will pave the way for new Apple devices that could bridge the divide between Mac and iPhone/iPad computing and transform the devices we use every day.

Axios

 

Google Stadia

Stadia, as the company calls it, is the official name of a long-rumored service with the code name Project Yeti. It's both a cloud-gaming platform and a new piece of hardware: a Wi-Fi-enabled controller that connects to said platform. And since Google owns YouTube—where more than 50 billion hours' worth of game content was watched in 2018—Stadia is so tightly integrated with the streaming company as to seem nearly inextricable.

Wired

 

 

 

How Microsoft reinvented the PC

Many companies would have given up at that point, but not one run by Steve Ballmer, who famously described Microsoft's approach as "long-term, tenacious, and partner-centric."

As he once told an arena full of partners, "We don't go home. We just keep coming and coming and coming. Tenacious, tenacious, tenacious." (As Ashlee Vance noted when transcribing those remarks for the New York Times, "The man likes to talk in threes.")

In fact, while PC shipments overall have been flat or down for the past four years, the Surface business has been growing at a compound annual rate of better than 22 percent a year.

ZDNet

Nanosecond speed trading

If you read Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys, you will be particularly interested in the quest for nanosecond speed trading.

“Because the orders are placed from locations around the world, they frequently arrive at the exchange’s computers out of sequence. The new system allows each computer to time stamp an order when it takes place.

As a result, the trades can be sorted and executed in correct sequence. In a networked marketplace, this precision is necessary not only to prevent illicit trading on advance information known as “front-running,” but also to ensure the fair placement of orders.

The importance of technical advances in measuring time was underscored by European regulations that went into effect in January and that require financial institutions to synchronize time-stamped trades with microsecond accuracy.”

New York Times

The PC-Phone Convergence

The long-predicted PC-phone convergence is happening, but rather than phones becoming more like computers, computers are becoming more like phones.

Laptops with lower-end processors have been tried before, with limited success. Why is now potentially the right time? Because these systems aren't being pitched as bargain basement throwaways -- and in fact, they'll cost $600 and up, the same as many mainstream laptops in the US. Instead, they promise some very high-end features, including always-on LTE connectivity (like a phone) and 20-plus hours of battery life with weeks of standby time, which also sounds more like a phone than a PC.

CNet

Image laptops with phone chips

The most powerful computer

The supercomputer — which fills a server room the size of two tennis courts — can spit out answers to 200 quadrillion (or 200 with 15 zeros) calculations per second, or 200 petaflops, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the supercomputer resides.

"If every person on Earth completed one calculation per second, it would take the world population 305 days to do what Summit can do in 1 second," according to an ORNL statement.

LiveScience

BP’s massive supercomputer

The Center for High-Performance Computing provides critical support to BP's upstream business segment, where it serves as the worldwide hub for research computing. BP’s computer scientists and mathematicians at the CHPC have enabled industry breakthroughs in advanced seismic imaging and rock physics research to help with reservoir modelling.

BP’s downstream business also is using the supercomputer for fluid dynamic research to study hydrocarbon flows at refineries and pipelines to improve operational safety.

Working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel using HPE’s Apollo System and Intel’s Knights Landing processors, the recent upgrade has boosted the processing speed of BP’s supercomputer from four petaflops to nine petaflops. A petaflop of processing speed is one thousand trillion floating point operations, or “flops,” per second.

The supercomputer has a total memory of 1,140 terabytes (1.14 petabytes) and 30 petabytes of storage, the equivalent of over 500,000 iPhones.

BP

 

 

 

The ISS gets a supercomputer

The Space Station orbits Earth (and sees a sunrise) once every 92 minutes. Soon it will have a computer that can keep up.

The HPE supercomputer headed to the ISS uses 2-socket “pizza-box” servers from the HPE Apollo 40 family with Broadwell class processors and a high-speed 56 Gigabit per second interconnect. With a speed of over 1 TeraFLOP, while it's not going to give serious competition to the world's fastest supercomputer (China's Sunway TaihuLight), this really is a supercomputer.

You can't just plug this into the ISS's solar-array-charged 48 volt DC power supply. The computer uses NASA-supplied power inverters to feed it the 110AC the computer needs to work.

Cooling the supercomputer was another obstacle. “Typically, an HPE computer similar to this one would be air-cooled. But for the ISS, HPE created (and the astronauts will be installing) a water-cooled ‘locker’ – not your standard datacenter rack enclosure,” says Dave Petersen, the mission’s co-principal investigator for hardware and SGI’s product design and compliance engineer.

HP Enterprise

IBM’s Z mainframes

IBM says it has a way to encrypt every level of a network, from applications to local databases and cloud services, thanks to a new mainframe that can power 12 billion encrypted transactions per day.

The processing burden that comes with all that constant encrypting and decrypting has prevented that sort of comprehensive data encryption at scale in the past. Thanks to advances in both hardware and software encryption processing, though, IBM says that its IBM Z mainframe can pull off the previously impossible. If that holds up in practice, it will offer a system that's both accessible for users, and offers far greater data security than currently possible.

Wired