126908510
submission
bigwophh writes:
As the number of publishers pulling out of NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud game streaming service continues to grow, the company has found an ally in Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, who vowed on Twitter to "wholeheartedly" support the company's efforts. He also took potshots at Apple and Google over the royalty rate each one charges on their respective app stores and expects them to go to battle as game streaming gains momentim. "Just waiting till later this year when Google is lobbying against Apple for blocking Stadia from iOS, while Google blocks GeForce NOW, xCloud, and Fortnite from Google Play, and this whole rotten structure begins collapsing in on itself," Sweeney added. It remains to be seen how things will pan out with GeForce NOW. NVIDIA maintains that "game removals will be few and far between" and that it has 1,500 additional games queued up. However, NVIDIA only has so much control over the developers willing to continue supporting the platform.
99078613
submission
bigwophh writes:
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage at GTC today to unveil a number of GPU-powered innovations for Machine Learning, including a new AI super computer and an updated version of the company’s powerful Tesla V100 GPU that now sports a hefty 32 Gigabytes of on-board HBM2 memory. A follow-on to last year’s DGX-1 AI supercomputer, the new NVIDIA DGX-2 can be equipped with double the number of Tesla V100 processing modules for double the GPU horsepower. The DGX-2 can also have 4 time the available memory space, thanks to the updated Tesla V100’s larger 32GB of memory. NVIDIA new NVSwitch technology is a fully crossbar GPU interconnect fabric that allows NVIDIA’s platform to scale to up to 16 GPUs and utilize their memory space contiguously, where the previous DGX-1 NVIDIA platform was limited to 8 total GPU complexes and associated memory. NVIDIA claims NVSwitch is 5 times faster than the fastest PCI Express switch and offers and aggregate 2.4 Terabytes per second of bandwidth. A new Quadro card was also announced powered by Volta, the Quadro GV100. The Quadro GV100 pack 32GB of memory and supports NVIDIA’s recently announced RTX Real-Time Ray Tracing technology
94250559
submission
bigwophh writes:
The upheaval of the high-end desktop processor segment continues today with the official release of Intel’s latest Coffee Lake-based 8th Generation Core processors. The flagship in the new line-up is the Core i7-8700K. It is a 6C/12T beast, with a base clock of 3.7GHz, a boost clock of 4.7GHz, and 12MB of Intel Smart Cache. The Core i5-8400 features the same physical die, but has only 9MB of Smart Cache, no Hyper-Threading, and base and boost clocks of 2.8GHz and 4GHz, respectively. The entire line-up features more cores, support for faster memory speeds, and leverages a fresh platform that’s been tweaked for more robust power delivery and, ultimately, more performance. The Core i7-8700K proved to be an excellent performer, besting every other processor in single-threaded workloads and competing favorably with 8C/16T Ryzen 7 processors. The affordably-priced 6-core Core i5-8400 even managed to pull ahead of the quad-core Core i7-7700K in some tests. Overall, performance is strong, especially for games, and the processors seem to be solid values in their segment.
82641599
submission
bigwophh writes:
Artificial intelligence has been a divisive topic as of late, and while we may never electronically mimic the human brain or its capabilities in their entirety, many of the world's brightest minds are now capable of creating rather convincing systems that are beginning to learn sophisticated concepts. Some are even capable of learning on their own. IBM, for example, is working hard on its Watson cognitive computing platform. However, the company faces a challenge in keeping Watson’s massive data stores fresh, with the world's devices producing some 2.5 exabytes of data every day – which is expected to increase to a whopping 44 zettabytes by the year 2020. To keep up with the information overload, IBM announced late last year that it was adding NVIDIA's Tesla K80 processing engines to its neural network. Those high performance compute GPUs are playing a key role in Watson's cognitive computing development, especially in terms of natural language processing capabilities. Watson is now more capable and human-like, especially when encapsulated in a robot body. At NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) Rob High, an IBM fellow, vice president, and CTO for Watson, introduced attendees to a robot powered by Watson. During the demonstration, the Watson-infused robot naturally responded to queries just like a human would, using not only speech but subtle movement. A dance routine even made it into the mix. The underlying AI at work can also get a read on people’s emotions and mood through movement and analysis of their speech patterns.
78746789
submission
bigwophh writes:
In Q4 2016, Intel will release a follow up to its Skylake processors named Kaby Lake, which will mark yet another 14nm release that's a bit odd, for a couple of reasons. The big one is the fact that this chip mayn not have appeared had Intel's schedule kept on track. Originally, Cannonlake was set to succeed Skylake, but Cannonlake will instead launch in 2017. That makes Kaby Lake neither a tick nor tock in Intel's release cadence. When released, Kaby Lake will add native USB 3.1 and HDCP 2.2 support. It's uncertain whether these chips will fit into current Z170-based motherboards, but considering the fact that there's also a brand-new chipset on the way, we're not too confident of it. However, the so-called Intel 200 series chipsets will be backwards-compatible with Skylake. It also appears that Intel will be releasing Apollo Lake as early as the late spring, which will replace Braswell, the lowest-powered chips Intel's lineup destined for smartphones.
75132925
submission
bigwophh writes:
Last year, Elon Musk hinted at a new product that Tesla Motors was working on in its research lab. What Musk described seemed creepy at the time, especially considering that he had just recently shown off “The D” at an evening press event. “By the way, we are actually working on a charger that automatically moves out from the wall and connects like a solid metal snake,” said Musk. We didn’t think much else about this intriguing contraption given the precious little details that Musk provided at the time. But fast forward seven months and we now have video of the serpent-like charger in action.
74740027
submission
bigwophh writes:
14nm Broadwell processors weren’t originally destined for the channel, but Intel ultimately changed course and launched a handful of 5th Generation Core processors based on the microarchitecture recently, the most powerful of which is the Core i7-5775C. Unlike all of the mobile Broadwell processors that came before it, the Core i7-5775C is a socketed, LGA processor for desktops, just like 4th Generation Core processors based on Haswell. In fact, it’ll work in the very same 9-Series chipset motherboards currently available (after a BIOS update). The Core i7-5775C, however, features a 128MB eDRAM cache and integrated Iris Pro 6200 series graphics, which can boost graphics performance significantly. Testing shows that the Core i7-5775C's lower CPU core clocks limit its performance versus Haswell, but its Iris Pro graphics engine is clearly more powerful.
74569689
submission
bigwophh writes:
Machine learning has helped a multitude of different technologies become a reality, including emotion-detection. Most examples to date have been rather simple, such as being able to detect a smile or a frown. But with today's super-fast computers, and even mobile devices, we're now able to detect emotion with far greater accuracy and nuance. Facial recognition expert Rana el Kaliouby recently gave a talk at TED to highlight just how accurate emotion-detection has become, and depending on your perspective, the result is either amazing, or downright scary. To accurately detect someone's emotion, Rana's software detects eight different factors, which include frowning, showing disgust, engaged, and raised eyebrows, among other things. Through research with this software, a couple of interesting factoids are revealed. In the United States, women are 40% more likely to smile than men. But the technology is ultimately destined for software that will detect the user's emotion and react accordingly.
73764417
submission
bigwophh writes:
A study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior suggests that watching videos of cats may be good for your health. The study pinged nearly 7,000 people and asked them how viewing cat videos affected their moods. Of those surveyed, over a third (36 percent) described themselves as a "cat person" and nearly two-thirds (60 percent) said they have an affinity for both dogs and cats. Survey subjects noted less tendencies towards feeling anxious, sad, or annoyed after watching cat videos, including times when they viewed the videos while at work or trying to study. They also reported feeling more energetic and more positive afterwards. There may have been some guilt from putting off work or studying to watch Internet videos, but the amusement they got from seeing the antics of cats more than made up for it.
6576595
submission
bigwophh writes:
ARM launched its new Cortex-A5 processor this week (codenamed Sparrow), and while it's not targeted at the top-end of the mobile market, it is a significant launch nonetheless. The Cortex-A5, which will likely battle future iterations of Intel's Atom for market share, is an important step forward for ARM for several reasons. First, it's significantly more efficient to build than the company's older ARM1176JZ(F)-S, while simultaneously outperforming the ARM926EJ-S. The Cortex-A5, however, is more than just a faster ARM processor. Architecturally, it's identical to the more advanced Cortex-A9, and it supports the same features as that part as well. This flexibility is designed to give product developers and manufacturers access to a fully backwards-compatible processor with better thermal and performance characteristics than the previous generation.
