7-14-2021

Smithfield Foods stops slaughtering pigs at U.S. hometown plant

Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork processor, has stopped slaughtering pigs in the United States' so-called ham capital, where the company was founded 85 years ago.
The end of slaughtering in Smithfield, Virginia, is the latest reconfiguration for the company's namesake plant and follows a months-long internal review of its East Coast operations, Smithfield Foods said in a statement.

The company, owned by Hong Kong-listed WH Group, is shifting slaughtering to some of its 47 other U.S. facilities


The company retooled the plant in 2019 to ship hog carcasses to China, the world's top pork consumer

Smithfield's facility has the capacity to kill about 10,000 hogs a day but has been slaughtering roughly 7,000 to 7,500 hogs daily

One East Coast hog supplier, Maxwell Foods, said last year it would close and filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Smithfield Foods.

Pentagon Confirms Leaked Photos, Video Of Unidentified Flying Objects



Pentagon Confirms Leaked Photos, Video Of Unidentified Flying Objects

Mary Papenfuss
·Trends Reporter, HuffPost
Fri, April 16, 2021, 7:15 AM·2 min read


Pentagon officials have confirmed that leaked photos and video of “unidentified aerial phenomena” were real, captured in 2019 by a Navy pilot.
The identity of the triangle- or pyramid-shaped aerial objects remains a mystery.


The photos and videos were first published by the Mystery Wire and Extraordinary Beliefs websites. The objects were photographed zipping over the USS Russell off San Diego in July 2019, according to investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell.
Photos of three unidentified flying objects reportedly taken in March that year — one spherical, another “acorn” shaped, and one described as a “metallic blimp” — were also taken by Navy personnel, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told CNN.
Mystery Wire’s George Knapp reported that those objects were photographed off Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia by an F-18 weapons systems officer seated behind the pilot, who used his iPhone.




Pentagon Confirms Leaked Photos, Video Of Unidentified Flying Objects

Mary Papenfuss
·Trends Reporter, HuffPost
Fri, April 16, 2021, 7:15 AM·2 min read


Pentagon officials have confirmed that leaked photos and video of “unidentified aerial phenomena” were real, captured in 2019 by a Navy pilot.
The identity of the triangle- or pyramid-shaped aerial objects remains a mystery. The Defense Department isn’t sharing what it knows.
The photos and videos were first published by the Mystery Wire and Extraordinary Beliefs websites. The objects were photographed zipping over the USS Russell off San Diego in July 2019, according to investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell.
Photos of three unidentified flying objects reportedly taken in March that year — one spherical, another “acorn” shaped, and one described as a “metallic blimp” — were also taken by Navy personnel, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told CNN.
Mystery Wire’s George Knapp reported that those objects were photographed off Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia by an F-18 weapons systems officer seated behind the pilot, who used his iPhone.

Gough offered no details on either of the sightings.
“To maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries, the Department of Defense does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examinations of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace — including those incursions initially designated as UAP,” Gough told CNN, using the abbreviation for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
A new Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, created last August to investigate such sightings by the military, has “included these incidents in their ongoing examinations,” Gough said.
When questioned by reporters last week, Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday couldn’t explain the objects.

4-5-2021

LG officially bids goodbye to the smartphone market


The rumors and speculations will finally come to an end as LG Electronics Inc. has made an official announcement. LG has recently made a statement that it is stepping away for the phone business. This means manufacturing and sales are stopping as the other South Korean tech giant will be focusing more on B2B solution, Internet of Things (IoT), and electric vehicles (EVs). The LG executives have made up their minds and have spoken: the mobile business unit is closing down.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/32...market-too

Quote:According to a new report, cryptocurrency miners aren’t just buying up desktop PC GPUs — they’ve started hoovering up gaming laptops as well. This has kept gaming laptop sales high through Q1 when normally the market would have cooled off by now.

This information comes courtesy of DigiTimes, via THG. The original DigiTimes article is now behind a paywall. According to them, cryptocurrency miners in China, Taiwan, and South Korea buy large stocks of laptops fitted out with RTX 3000 GPUs. Miners have (again, according to DT) even been lobbying manufacturers to create systems with low-budget components and powerful GPUs, since there’s no intent to use them for anything but cryptocurrency mining.

This is a new, infuriating wrinkle. For the third time in less than five years, cryptocurrency mining has pushed GPU prices beyond all sanity. The first cryptocurrency boom only hit AMD cards. The second affected both AMD and Nvidia and broke the retail channel for months. We’re already six months deep in the current shortage.

Every time we hit one of these shortages, the retail market warps badly enough to make even a boutique laptop or desktop a comparatively good deal. If cryptocurrency miners start buying laptops in bulk, it could drive prices up in this space as well.
...
This year, seasonality isn’t going to be a thing. Nobody wants to predict what the market may do as vaccines roll out and areas come out from lockdowns. Some customers, like auto manufacturers, are desperate for chips now. TSMC and Samsung can shift some manufacturing capacity to accommodate that demand, but customers pushed to the side in February and March will have to be given capacity at some other time. In short, there’s no short-term solution to these problems.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chip-s...to-persist

Quote:The semiconductor industry is notoriously slow when it comes to reacting to sudden increases in demand. Some analysts believe that demand for chips now exceeds supply by about 30%, and it will take three or four quarters for the supply to catch up with the demand. Essentially, this means that chip shortages will persist well into 2022.
...
"We believe semi companies are shipping 10% to 30% below current demand levels and it will take at least 3-4 quarters for supply to catch up with demand and then another 1-2 quarters for inventories at customers/distribution channels to be replenished back to normal levels," said Harlan Sur, an analyst with J.P. Morgan, in a note to clients, reports MarketWatch.
...
Major foundries, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and GlobalFoundries, have announced expansion plans for this year, and there are indications that packaging companies are going to do the same. However, it will take months for companies like ASML, Applied Materials, KLA, LAM Research, and others to build the fab tools; then, it will take some time to install the equipment. As a result, any capacity-related decision made now will not have an impact until several quarters from now, at best.

Keeping in mind that demand is already outstripping supply by around 30%, and for many products, the backorder is building up, it will take months after semiconductor companies solve their capacity problems before everyone gets the chips they need. Meanwhile, it is unclear what happens to the 'excess' capacity after the demand is met and inventory levels get back to normal.

Furthermore, it obviously remains to be seen whether fabless makers of chips continue to introduce new SKUs if they cannot meet demand for existing products.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gtx-340

Quote:The GTX 340 is perhaps one of the strangest and rarest graphics cards you can find online today. As covered by the Budget-Builds Official YouTube Channel, the GTX 340 is, in fact, an unofficial GeForce 300 series card that Nvidia never actually produced. Instead, enterprising modders created the cards from standard GT units by adding souped-up dual-slot coolers, modifying the BIOS, applying a hefty overclock, and then changing the identifier string to make the card appear as a "GTX" model in the system.
...
So what about the GTX 340? Apparently, someone years and years ago got into the business of upgrading GT 340s, which were then re-sold to system builders. The mods included a dual-slot cooler, a modified BIOS with the GTX nomenclature, and a hefty core overclock. In fact, the card shows up as a GTX 340 in GPU-z.

This strategy does make sense — the GT 340 is already very power efficient, consuming just 51W, so getting a good overclock out of the GT 340 wasn't hard at all with a cooler that's twice the size of the original.

Unfortunately, we don't know why this person (or people) decided to give the GT 340 the GTX 340 badge. Still, it was probably to help differentiate these heavily modified cards from the traditional GT 340.
...
Of course, with how old this card is, performance is very underwhelming; the card can barely manage 30FPS in CSGO at 480P (yeah, it's that bad), and the performance delta between the GT 340 and the "GTX 340" is barely 2%, at most.

That's the story of the GTX 340; it's perhaps one of the most boring GPUs ever to be released, but it's cool that someone made a brand new SKU out of "thin air," and it seemed to have worked for them. At least from a business perspective. But good luck trying to buy one — they are super scarce on eBay and can only be bought overseas.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/3dfx-v...-than-ever

Quote:As spotted by HotHardware, Anthony, a hardware enthusiast from the Mod Labs forums, has recreated 3dfx Interactive's renowned Voodoo 5 6000. The company never released the Voodoo 5 6000 to the public, but the skillful enthusiast managed to revive the fallen graphics card through some exquisite reverse engineering work.
...
Anthony's creation isn't exactly a faithful copy of the original Voodoo 5 6000, but some may argue that it looks even better. Instead of the old-school green PCB, he created his own black PCB, which adds a bit of a modern look to the graphics card. He equipped it with four VSA-100 dies, which cost $18.95 apiece, with their corresponding heatsinks and cooling fans.

The Voodoo 5 6000 was certified for a TDP of 60W, which is more than the AGP slot can provide. Therefore, it drew its power through an external 250W power brick. Anthony artfully added a standard 4-pin Molex power connector to his rendition of the Voodoo 5 6000 to run the graphics card with a common computer power supply. Putting aside these small changes, Anthony assures that his Voodoo 5 6000 performs the same as the original because he replicated the same BIOS, drivers, and even the same bugs.

Aside from the high production cost, 3dfx didn't launch the Voodoo 5 6000 due to several bugs with the AGP x4 slot on some motherboards. As a result, the graphics card was forced to run at x2. Some of the reported issues included color distortion and artifacts in games, translucent stripes on the screen, and other miscellaneous bugs.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/32...first-time

Quote:PC sales boomed throughout 2020, sending semiconductor earnings soaring. One company without much to cheer about, at least as far as its conventional Windows business is concerned, is Microsoft. For decades, we’ve talked about the “PC industry” and the “Windows PC” industry as if they were synonymous. New data on 2020 PC shipments suggests we shouldn’t be.

As Emil Protalinski writes for GeekWire, “This is a big win for Google and a warning for both Apple and Microsoft. It also signals to app and game developers that Chrome OS can no longer be ignored.” Data points quoted in the paragraph below are by IDC.
...
Analysts don’t think the Chromebook trend is going to slow down. This is part of why ARM may be emerging as a genuine threat to Intel and AMD in what has traditionally been thought of as the heart of the x86 market. The M1 has demonstrated that custom ARM silicon can beat x86 at its own game, but the x86 legacy software market is still the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room. Trying to best x86 on Windows means building a high-performance ARM chip and a top-notch emulator. It’s an additional barrier that helps keep the PC market and the mobile phone markets technologically separate. This specific barrier, however, is only as strong as Windows’ market share.

Chromebooks don’t carry the same expectations around legacy software support that a Windows laptop does. That allows ARM and x86 to fight on more even terms. To be clear, all of this presumes that a company such as Qualcomm, Samsung, or Nvidia will build an ARM CPU core that can compete with x86. Any such CPU is still a few years away, best-case. x86 CPUs are currently the preferred Chromebook solution for anyone who wants a higher-performing system, and that’s not likely to change in just the next year or two. But if ARM CPUs show a sustained ability to beat past x86 chips, we’re going to see more chip designers interested in entering that market. When they do, they won’t necessarily focus on Windows, where the entrenched software market makes beating x86 as hard as it could possibly be. They’ll focus on Chromebooks, where x86 enjoys a performance advantage but lacks a four-decade software library to anchor it.

Windows, of course, will remain its own titanic force — nobody expects the OS to just collapse — but it’s clear that Intel and AMD would be fighting over a shrinking pie if the two companies can’t maintain Chromebook market share. Today, of course, all of this is theoretical, but that’s how the semiconductor market works. It’s the CPUs on drawing boards today that’ll be defining the performance market 3-4 years from now. Today, AMD and Intel have no problem. Four years from now, it could be a very different story. Microsoft’s own decision to transition away from defining itself in terms of Windows and towards a cloud-centric future makes a lot of sense in the face of numbers like these. Microsoft wants to have other business segments to talk about by the time Chromebooks are truly carving into its market share.

It’s clear now that the long period of tranquility in the PC market through the 2010s, where nothing much interesting happened, was less a terminal decline and more of a pause. There’s a (relatively) new OS eating market share and a new CPU architecture. AMD has emerged as a competitor for Intel across the entire x86 space at the same time that AI and ML accelerators are redefining the CPU’s role in the larger system architecture.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/kioxia...ash-memory

Quote:Flash partners Kioxia and Western Digital revealed this week a brand new generation of 3D NAND flash memory that promises to be much faster and far denser than anything they have produced before.

BiCS6 features 162 layers and 70% more bits per wafer than the preceding BiCS5 from a few years ago. That 70% allows for a 40% reduction in NAND chip size, helping to cut manufacturing costs.
...
There is also reportedly a significant uptick in I/O performance with BiCS6 operating at 1600MT/s, compared to BiCS5's 1066 MT/s. This helps keep the tech on par with competing vendors like Micron and SK Hynix, which use 1600 MT/s speeds as well.

This is just an announcement of BiCS6's capabilities, so don't yet know when it'll be produced. But if it's anything like BiCS5, it'll take another year before we see the best SSDs featuring the new technology.

https://www.techpowerup.com/278555/333-m...of-storage

Quote:Today we have one interesting research in our hands. According to Trendfocus inc. we have come to know that as much as 333 million Solid State Drives were shipped last year, in 2020. The SSDs have finally overcome HDDs in the number of shipped units, with HDDs shipping 260 million units. In terms of total capacity shipped, HDDs are still winning. The average SSD has less storage capacity compared to the average HDD, thus making the total shipped capacity of all 333 million SSDs "just" 207 Exabytes (EB), while the total shipped capacity of HDDs is a bit over one Zettabyte (ZB).

The average capacity of SSD was as much as 0.67 Terabytes (TB), while the average capacity of HDD was around 4.0 TBs. This is exactly why HDDs are still present as much - simply because they can store much more storage and offer better value as the price per Gigabyte ratio is much lower than the one of an SSD. The SSDs are experiencing Year-over-Year growth of 20.8% in unit shipments, while HDDs are declining at the rate of 18%. When it comes to the total storage capacity shipped on yearly basis, SSDs are growing at the rate of 50%, with HDDs growing at a 13% rate. You can also check out the SSD share of different vendors below.