MojoKid writes: Though Ryzen 4000 Series laptop processors aren't available just yet, some of AMD's partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks soon. As such, AMD is lifting the veil on additional details and the architectural enhancements that make Ryzen 4000 Series AMD's strongest mobile processor line-up to date. AMD Ryzen 4000 series CPUs are based on the Zen 2 architecture, similar to the current Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors. AMD is touting an approximate 25% IPC increase versus Zen 1-based mobile parts, but there are additional benefits that boost performance and efficiency throughout the chips as well. These are monolithic SoCs, with up to 8-cores / 16-threads, that are manufactured on TSMC's 7nm node. AMD is claiming 20% lower SoC power, 2X the perf-per-watt, 5X faster state switching, and an approximate 3.4X improvement in relative power efficiency, in comparison to its mobile platform from 2015. AMD is claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current-generation Intel mobile processors and significantly better multi-threaded and graphics performance versus Intel, thanks to the increased core / thread counts and integrated Vega-based GPU of its Ryzen 4000 series. Battery life performance is claimed be strong as well, due to architectural enhancements for power optimization throughout the Ryzen 4000 design. AMD Ryzen 4000 Series laptops should be shipping in market sometime in the next month or so.

"Iranian authorities began digging a pair of trenches for victims just days after the government disclosed the initial outbreak," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. "Together, their lengths are that of a football field." The Washington Post reports: Two days after Iran declared its first cases of the novel coronavirus -- in what would become one of the largest outbreaks of the illness outside of China -- evidence of unusual activity appeared at a cemetery near where the infections emerged. At the Behesht-e Masoumeh complex in Qom, about 80 miles south of Tehran, the excavation of a new section of the graveyard began as early as Feb. 21, satellite images show, and then rapidly expanded as the virus spread. By the end of the month, two large trenches -- their lengths totaling 100 yards -- were visible at the site from space (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). According to expert analysis, video testimony and official statements, the graves were dug to accommodate the rising number of virus victims in Qom.

A senior imagery analyst at Maxar Technologies in Colorado said the size of the trenches and the speed with which they were excavated together mark a clear departure from past burial practices involving individual and family plots at the site. In addition to satellite imagery, videos posted on social media from the cemetery show the extended rows of graves at Behesht-e Masoumeh and say they are meant for coronavirus victims. The imagery analyst, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work, also pointed to an image showing what appears to be a large white pile of lime, which can be used to manage decay and odor in mass graves. Iranian health officials have in recent weeks confirmed the use of lime when burying coronavirus victims.

"At its Financial Analyst Day, AMD disclosed additional details regarding its next generation CPU and GPU architectures," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid: - While the company isn't ready to disclose concrete details yet, AMD is promising that Navi 2X will arrive this year and deliver "enthusiast-class" performance, excellent power efficiency, and "top-of-stack" GPUs with "uncompromising 4K gaming".

- While AMD has RDNA for its gaming-centric consumer GPUs, the company is shifting to a new GPU compute architecture, dubbed CDNA, for its High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Machine Learning (ML) accelerators. CDNA has been designed from the ground-up for ML/HPC applications, and will leverage what AMD calls its second-generation Infinity Architecture interconnects.

- AMD also reiterated that its first Zen 3-based products will be rolling out later this year. On the server side, this means EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors, but the company also revealed that Zen 3 client processors would also arrive by the end of 2020.

Twitter user Scott Bell is reporting that his uncle from Venice, California, has tested positive for the coronavirus. According to Bell, "he was skiing in the Italian alps with 6 other guys," 4 of which, including his uncle, now have the coronavirus. One is reportedly in a coma and two others are sick. Bell says his uncle "has not present any symptoms as of yet," but has chosen to self-quarantine himself. From the thread: A few days later they tested him and yesterday he found out he's positive. Meanwhile, they've told my aunt to wear a mask, stay 10 feet away from my uncle, and otherwise she is free to move about the community. And, she has -- to grocery stores, the hair salon, etc. [...] Believe me, I'm upset to hear that she did this. The crazier part is that they have not tested her, and will not, and again - advised her she is free to move at-will. This is how our health dept. is leading this effort. In an updated tweet, Bell says his aunt is now quarantined and the guy in the coma "is starting to improve."

Update: Patch is confirming the report.

Here's a screenshot of the thread:


UPDATE: A nurse from a northern California Kaiser facility issued a statement criticizing the CDC for delays in testing, and reporting that she is "currently sick and in quarantine after caring for a patient who tested positive."

Nvidia has announced it has shifted its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) to be online-only due to concerns from the coronavirus outbreak. People who had registered for the event, which was originally set to be held in San Jose, California, from March 22nd to March 26th, will get a full refund. The Verge reports: "This decision to move the event online instead of at the San Jose Convention Center reflects our top priority: the health and safety of our employees, our partners and our customers," the company said in a statement. Nvidia says company founder and CEO Jensen Huang will still deliver a keynote, and that it's working with speakers to begin publishing talks online. The online version of the event will still take place from March 22nd to March 26th. Other tech events cancelled due to the coronavirus include Mobile World Congress, Facebook's F8 developer conference, and the Game Developers Conference.

VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build "a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia."

ZDNet reports: The last thirty years in computing, said CEO Rodrigo Liang, have been "focused on instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for. The next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it flows through a system is really what's going to drive performance." It's not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, "we are focused on the complete system," he told ZDNet. "To really provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the entire system, to integrate across several layers of hardware and software...."

[One approach to training neural networks with very little labeled data] is part of the shift of computer programming from hard-coded to differentiable, in which code is learned on the fly, commonly referred to as "software 2.0." Liang's co-founders include Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, who says a programmable logic device similar to a field-programmable gate array could change its shape over and over to align its circuitry [to] that differentiated program, with the help of a smart compiler such as Spatial. [Spatial is "a computing language that can take programs and de-compose them into operations that can be run in parallel, for the purpose of making chips that can be 'reconfigurable,' able to change their circuitry on the fly."]

In an interview in his office last spring, Olukotun laid out a sketch of how all that might come together. In what he refers to as a "data flow," the computing paradigm is turned inside-out. Rather than stuffing a program's instructions into a fixed set of logic gates permanently etched into the processor, the processor re-arranges its circuits, perhaps every clock cycle, to variably manipulate large amounts of data that "flows" through the chip.... Today's chips execute instructions in an instruction "pipeline" that is fixed, he observed, "whereas in this reconfigurable data-flow architecture, it's not instructions that are flowing down the pipeline, it's data that's flowing down the pipeline, and the instructions are the configuration of the hardware that exists in place.

hackertourist shares an update on the status of the "ZX Spectrum Next" Kickstarter campaign: In 2017, a Kickstarter campaign was started to design and build "an updated and enhanced version of the ZX Spectrum totally compatible with the original, featuring the major hardware developments of the past many years packed inside a simple (and beautiful) design by the original designer, Rick Dickinson, inspired by his seminal work at Sinclair Research."

They didn't quite make their original planned delivery date (2018), but they made good on their promise in the end: the first machine was delivered on February 6 of this year. The Spectrum Next contains a Z80 processor on an FPGA, 1MB of RAM expandable to 2MB, hardware sprites, 256 colors, RGB/VGA/HDMI video output, and three AY-3-8912 audio chips. A Raspberry Pi Zero can be added as an expansion board. The computer can emulate any of the original Spectrum variants, but it also supports add-ons that have been designed by the Spectrum community over the years, such as games loaded onto SD cards, better processors and more memory, and improved graphics.

Microsoft revealed new details on its next-generation console, text, on Monday morning, confirming specifications on what the company calls its "superior balance of power and speed" for its new hardware. From a report: The next-gen Xbox, Microsoft said, will be four times as powerful as the original Xbox One. The Xbox Series X "next-generation custom processor" will employ AMD's Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architecture, head of Xbox Phil Spencer wrote on the Xbox website. "Delivering four times the processing power of an Xbox One and enabling developers to leverage 12 [teraflops] of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) performance -- twice that of an Xbox One X and more than eight times the original Xbox One," Spencer said. He called the next-generation Xbox's processing and graphics power "a true generational leap," offering higher frame rates -- with support for up to 120 fps -- and more sophisticated game worlds.

That 12 teraflops claim is twice that of what Microsoft promised with the Xbox One X (then known as Project Scorpio) when it revealed the mid-generation console update back in 2016. Spencer also outlined the Xbox Series X's variable rate shading, saying, "Rather than spending GPU cycles uniformly to every single pixel on the screen, they can prioritize individual effects on specific game characters or important environmental objects. This technique results in more stable frame rates and higher resolution, with no impact on the final image quality." He also promised hardware-accelerated DirectX ray tracing, with "true-to-life lighting, accurate reflections and realistic acoustics in real time." Microsoft also reconfirmed features like SSD storage, which promise faster loading times, as well as new ones, like Quick Resume, for Xbox Series X.

Nvidia's GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that lets you play games stored on dedicated GeForce graphics-enabled PCs across a wide array of devices. While it lets you play PC games you already own, the game publisher must allow it on the service. "Today, Nvidia is revealing that Activision Blizzard is no longer playing ball, pulling down its catalog of games including Overwatch, WoW, and the Call of Duty series," reports The Verge. From the report: That means one of the service's biggest publishers, as well as its Battle.net catalog of games, will no longer be available just a week after the service's formal launch -- a launch that was already missing many games from Capcom, EA, Konami, Remedy, Rockstar and Square Enix, all of which seemed to have pulled out after Nvidia's beta period ended. Nvidia wouldn't tell us why this is happening now, but it's strange, because Nvidia previously told us it was contacting every publisher ahead of launch to make sure they were OK with their games staying available with the service. Did Activision Blizzard reneg on a deal, or did Nvidia fail to get permission? We're waiting to hear back from Nvidia; Activision Blizzard didn't respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Nvidia says it hopes to work with Activision Blizzard to bring the games back, but the company confirmed to us that things are pretty cut-and-dried for now -- you shouldn't expect them to magically reappear after a few days (or even a few weeks) thanks to a deal. Nvidia also declined to tell us whether it'd be open to sharing a slice of its subscription fees with publishers, citing the quiet period before its earnings. It's true that Blizzard, at least, has an EULA that specifically prevents users from playing a game on cloud gaming services, but that doesn't seem to explain this move. Activision's EULA doesn't contain anything of the sort, and again, Activision Blizzard didn't seem to have any problem with it during the GeForce Now beta.

Greg Miller, reporting for Washington Post: For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project. The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company executives entrusted to execute it. It traces the origin of the venture as well as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. It describes how the United States and its allies exploited other nations' gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets. The operation, known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later "Rubicon," ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."

The launch of the iPad ten years ago was a big surprise to everyone in the industry -- including to Microsoft executives. Steven Sinofsky, the former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, shares Microsoft's perspective as well as those of the other industry figures and press on the iPad: The announcement 10 years ago today of the "magical" iPad was clearly a milestone in computing. It was billed to be the "next" computer. For me, managing Windows, just weeks after the launch of Microsoft's "latest creation" Windows 7, it was a as much a challenge as magical. Given that Star Trek had tablets it was inevitable that the form factor would make it to computing (yes, the dynabook...). Microsoft had been working for more than 10 years starting with "WinPad" through Tablet PC. We were fixated on Win32, Pen, and more. The success of iPhone (140K apps & 3B downloads announced that day) blinded us at Microsoft as to where Apple was heading. Endless rumors of Apple's tablet *obviously* meant a pen computer based on Mac. Why not? The industry chased this for 20 years. That was our context. The press, however, was fixated on Apple lacking an "answer" (pundits seem to demand answers) to Netbooks -- those small, cheap, Windows laptops sweeping the world. Over 40 million sold. "What would Apple's response be?" We worried -- a cheap, pen-based, Mac. Sorry Harry!

Jobs said that a new computer needed to be better at some things, better than an iPhone/iPod and better than a laptop. Then he just went right at Netbooks answering what could be better at these things. "Some people have thought that that's a Netbook." (The audience joined in a round of laughter.) Then he said, "The problem is ... Netbooks aren't better at anything ... They're slow. They have low quality displays ... and they run clunky old PC software ... They're just cheap laptops." "Cheap laptops" ... from my perch that was a good thing. I mean inexpensive was a better word. But we knew that Netbooks (and ATOM) were really just a way to make use of the struggling efforts to make low-power, fanless, intel chips for phones. A brutal takedown of 40M units. Sitting in a Le Corbusier chair, he showed the "extraordinary" things his new device did, from browsing to email to photos and videos and more. The real kicker was that it achieved 10 hours of battery life -- unachievable in PCs struggling for 4 hours with their whirring fans.

There was no stylus..no pen. How could one input or be PRODUCTIVE? PC brains were so wedded to a keyboard, mouse, and pen alternative that the idea of being productive without those seemed fanciful. Also instant standby, no viruses, rotate-able, maintained quality over time... As if to emphasize the point, Schiller showed "rewritten" versions of Apple's iWork apps for the iPad. The iPad would have a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics. Rounding out the demonstration, the iPad would also sync settings with iTune -- content too. This was still early in the travails of iCloud but really a game changer Windows completely lacked except in enterprise with crazy server infrastructure or "consumer" Live apps. iPad had a 3G modem BECAUSE it was built on the iPhone. If you could figure out the device drivers and software for a PC, you'd need a multi-hundred dollar USB modem and a $60/month fee at best. The iPad made this a $29.99 option on AT&T and a slight uptick in purchase price. Starting at $499, iPad was a shot right across the consumer laptop. Consumer laptops were selling over 100 million units a year! Pundits were shocked at the price. I ordered mine arriving in 60/90 days.

At CES weeks earlier, there were the earliest tablets -- made with no help from Google a few fringe Chinese ODMs were shopping hacky tablets called "Mobile Internet Devices" or "Media Tablets". Samsung's Galaxy was 9 months away. Android support (for 4:3 screens) aways. The first looks and reviews a bit later were just endless (and now tiresome) commentary on how the iPad was really for "consumption" and not productivity. There were no files. No keyboard. No mouse. No overlapping windows. Can't write code! In a literally classically defined case of disruption, iPad didn't do those things but what it did, it did so much better not only did people prefer it but they changed what they did in order to use it. Besides, email was the most used too and iPad was great for that. In first year 2010-2011 Apple sold 20 million iPads. That same year would turn out to be an historical high water mark for PCs (365M, ~180M laptops). Analysts had forecasted more than 500M PCs were now rapidly increasing tablet forecasts to 100s of million and dropping PC. The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoft's core platform business.

Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was "missing." The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed by Linux and Open Source. The kicker for me, though, was that keyboard stand for the iPad. It was such a hack. Such an obvious "objection handler." But it was critically important because it was a clear reminder that the underlying operating system was "real" ...it was not a "phone OS". Knowing the iPhone and now iPad ran an robust OS under the hood, with a totally different "shell", interface model (touch), and app model (APIs and architecture) had massive implications for being the leading platform provider for computers. That was my Jan 27, 2010. Further reading: The iPad's original software designer and program lead look back on the device's first 10 years.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: NASA will launch a new rover to Mars this July — and 28,000 American schoolchildren wrote essays with suggestions for what NASA should name it.

NASA has now selected the top nine finalists, which they'll let the public vote on through Monday on a special web page where they're also displaying the schoolchildren's essays. "Scientists are tenacious," wrote one student who suggested the name Tenacity. "It is what keeps them thinking and experimenting... When scientists make mistakes they see what they did wrong and then try again.

"If they didn't have tenacity, Mars rovers wouldn't be a thing."
The new rover will also be carrying the names of 10,932,295 earthlings, etched onto a microchip.

Bloomberg points out that because Mars and Earth are unusually close in July and August -- a mere 39 million miles -- another rover will also be launched by the international ExoMars programme (led by the European Space Agency and the Russian Roscosmos State Corporation), while the United Arab Emirates will also try sending an orbiter to Mars, and China will deploy "an orbiter to circle the planet and a rover to land on it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: On January 24, 1984, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, California, debuting the new computer equipped with a 9-inch black and white display, an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 128KB of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a price tag of $2,495. The now iconic machine weighed in at a whopping 17 pounds and was advertised as offering a word processing program, a graphics package, and a mouse. At the time it was introduced, the Macintosh was seen as Apple's last chance to overcome IBM's domination of the personal computer market and remain a major player in the personal computer industry. Despite the high price at the time, which was equivalent to around $6,000 today, the Macintosh sold well, with Apple hitting 70,000 units sold by May 1984. The now iconic "1984" Super Bowl ad that Apple invested in and debuted days before the Macintosh was unveiled may have helped bolster sales.

MojoKid writes: Today AMD launched its latest midrange graphics card based on the company's all new Navi architecture. The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT slots in under $300 ($279 MSRP) and is based on the same Navi 10 GPU as AMD's current high-end Radeon RX 5700 series cards. AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT is outfitted with 36 compute units, with a total of 2,304 stream processors and is essentially a Radeon 5700 spec GPU with 2GB less GDDR 6 memory (6GB total) and a narrower 192-bit interface, versus Radeon RX 5700's 8GB, 256-bit config. HotHardware took a Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT around the benchmark track and this card has a BIOS switch on-board that toggles between performance and silent/quiet modes. In performance mode, the card has a 160W power target, 14Gbps memory data rate, a Boost Clock of 1,750MHz and a Game Clock of 1,615MHz. In silent/quiet mode, things are a bit more tame with a 135W power target, 12Gbps memory, and 1,620 MHz/1,460MHz Boost and Game Clocks, respectively. In the gaming benchmarks, the new Radeon RX 5600 XT is generally faster than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 overall, with the exception of a few titles that are more NVIDIA-optimized and in VR. Though it lacks the capability for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the new AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT weighs in $20-30 less than NVIDIA's closest competitor and offers similar if not better performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Wine 5.0 has been released today and contains over 7,400 bug fixes and numerous audio and graphics improvements that will increase performance in gaming on Linux. With the release of Wine 5.0, WineHQ hopes to resolve many of these issues, with the main improvements being:

-Builtin modules in PE format: To make games think Wine is a real Windows environment, most Wine 5.0 modules have been converted into the PE format rather than ELF binaries. It is hoped that this will allow copy-protection and anti-cheat programs to not flag games running under Wine as being modified.
-Multi-monitor support: Multiple displays adapters and multi-monitor configurations are now supported under Wine.
-XAudio2 reimplementation: XAudio2 libraries have been added back to Wine and will use the FAudio library for better compatibility.
-Vulkan 1.1 support: "The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec." Here are the release notes, download locations for the binary packages (when available) and source.

At its CES 2020 keynote, Intel showed off its upcoming Xe discrete graphics chip and today, we're seeing exactly how that's going to be implemented. From a report: First off, Intel unveiled a standalone DG1 "software development vehicle" card that will allow developers to optimize apps for the new graphics system. It didn't reveal any performance details for the card, but did show it running the Warframe game. It also noted that it's now "sampling to ISVs (independent software vendors) worldwide... enabling developers to optimize for Xe." As far as we know right now, Intel's discrete graphics will be chips (not cards) installed together with the CPUs on a single package. However, it's interesting to see Intel graphics in the form of a standalone PCIe card, even one that will never be sold to consumers.

MojoKid writes: Yesterday, AMD launched its new Ryzen 4000 Series mobile processors for laptops at CES 2020, along with a monstrous 64-core/128-thread third-generation Ryzen Threadripper workstation desktop CPU. In addition to the new processors, on the graphics front the oft-leaked Radeon RX 5600 XT that target's 1080p gamers in the sweet spot of the GPU market was also made official. In CPU news, AMD claims Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors offer 20% lower SOC power, 2X perf-per-watt, 5X faster power state switching, and significantly improved iGPU performance versus its previous-gen mobile Ryzen 3000 products. AMD's U-Series flagship, the Ryzen 7 4800U, is an 8-core/16-thread processor with a max turbo frequency of 4.2GHz and integrated Vega-derived 8-core GPU.

Along with architectural enhancements and the frequency benefits of producing the chips at 7nm, AMD is underscoring up to 59% improved performance per graphics core as well. AMD is also claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current Intel-processors and significantly better multi-threaded performance. The initial Ryzen 4000 U-Series line-up consists of five processors, starting with the 4-core/4-thread Ryzen 5 4300U, and topping off with the aforementioned Ryzen 7 4800U. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD revealed some new information regarding its 64-core/128-thread Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor. The beast chip will have a base clock of 2.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.3GHz with a whopping 288MB of cache. The chip will drop into existing TRX40 motherboards and be available on February 7th for $3990. AMD showcased the chip versus a dual socket Intel Xeon Platinum in the VRAY 3D rendering benchmark beating the Xeon system by almost 30 minutes in a 90-minute workload, though the Intel system retails for around $20K.

Folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new machine learning-based tool that will tell you how fast a code can run on various chips. This will help developers tune their applications for specific processor architectures. From a report: Traditionally, developers used the performance model of compilers through a simulation to run basic blocks -- fundamental computer instruction at the machine level -- of code in order to gauge the performance of a chip. However, these performance models are not often validated through real-life processor performance. MIT researchers developed an AI model called Ithmel by training it to predict how fast a chip can run unknown basic blocks. Later, it was supported by a database called BHive with 300,000 basic blocks from specialized fields such as machine learning, cryptography, and graphics. The team of researchers presented a paper [PDF] at the NeuralIPS conference in December to describe a new technique to measure code performance on various processors. The paper also describes Vemal, a new automatically generating algorithm that can be used to generate compiler optimizations.

Apple will once again license technology from Imagination Technologies, the chip designer that used to provide graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad, the UK-based company announced today. The Verge reports: In a short statement posted on its website, Imagination said that it had entered into a multiyear license agreement with Apple, under which the Cupertino, California-based firm will have access to "a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees." Apple announced its split from Imagination back in April 2017 when it said that it would start designing its own graphics chips, and it would stop licensing the company's technology within two years. After the split was announced, Imagination expressed skepticism that Apple could design its own chips "without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property, and confidential information."