June 15, 2020

Looks Like There Could Be 35 Other Alien Civilizations in Our Galaxy

A pair of astrophysicists revealed new calculations that suggest we may be one of a just few dozen complex civilizations in the galaxy.

Since the 1960s, scientists have been using the Drake equation to estimate the probability to contacting extraterrestrial life in our galaxy.

According to the team's new calculations, our alien neighbors are likely 17,000 light-years away.

https://www.techpowerup.com/268382/jim-k...from-intel

Quote:Intel today announced that systems designer-extraordinaire Jim Keller has departed the company citing personal reasons. Whether or not this is a blow to Intel likely depends on how far Jim Keller brought their Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group throughout his two-year tenure at the company whilst serving as its Vice President. The semiconductor and chip architecture world isn't being driven by Mr. Keller himself, obviously; there are a number of architects and designers that bring the industry forward through their concerted efforts. However, it's hard to look past Jim Keller's pedigree when it comes to doing his job - if anything, AMD's Zen architecture is a testament to that, and has put Intel in the place we now see it in the CPU world.

To fill in the void, Intel has announced a reshuffling inside their Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group. Jim Keller will still be serving with Intel for the next six months as a consultant, thus easing the transition. Read the full press-release below.

https://www.techpowerup.com/268006/intel...o-benefits

Quote:Intel CEO Bob Swan, in his Virtual Computex YouTube stream, advocated that the industry should focus less on benchmarks, and more on the benefits of technology, a line of thought strongly advocated by rival AMD in its pre-Ryzen era, before the company began getting competitive with Intel again. "We should see this moment as an opportunity to shift our focus as an industry from benchmarks to the benefits and impacts of the technology we create," he said, referring to technology keeping civilization and economies afloat during the COVID-19 global pandemic, which has thrown Computex among practically every other public gathering out of order.

"The pandemic has underscored the need for technology to be purpose-built so it can meet these evolving business and consumer needs. And this requires a customer-obsessed mindset to stay close, anticipate those needs, and develop solutions. In this mindset, the goal is to ensure we are optimizing for a stronger impact that will support and accelerate positive business and societal benefits around the globe," he added. An example of what Swan is trying to say is visible with Intel's 10th generation Core "Cascade Lake XE" and "Ice Lake" processors, which feature AVX-512 and DL-Boost, accelerating deep learning neural nets; but lose to AMD's flagship offerings on the vast majority of benchmarks. Swan also confirmed that the company's "Tiger Lake" processors will launch this Summer.

5-29-2020

George Floyd Protests turn into Riots across America

Protests over the Police Officer that killed unarmed, handcuffed and already on the ground George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for 9 minutes on Monday May 25th 2020 turned into all out Riots across the major cities of the United States.

Governors are now authorizing full force by the National Guard.

5-28-2020

President Trump signs Executive Order against Social Media Censorship.

Twitter has begun to "Fact Check" President Trump's tweets.

Twitter has not been doing the same to Speaker Nancy Pelosi or any other Democrats this has led to the Executive order.

There is sure to be challenges in the Courts leading up to the 2020 Election.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/upset-...-as-gaming

Quote:Back in 2017 when cryptocurrency was all the hype, people were buying every graphics card they could get their hands on, which was quite the party for AMD and Nvidia. Now, it looks like Nvidia is getting sued by some upset investors who claim Nvidia mislead them by reporting crypto revenue as gaming revenue, according to a report at The Register.

The original lawsuit was started in 2017, but it is only this week that the actual complaint has been filed in California.

During the crypto-craze, coin miners would buy up every GPU they were able to obtain, which lead to massive shortages and severely increased the prices of graphics cards to levels at which gamers wouldn't be buying them anymore.

"Sales data demonstrated that, throughout 2017, 60% to 70% of NVIDIA's GeForce revenue in China came from sales to crypto-miners, not gamers." reads the complaint. Such figures are similar elsewhere around the world, though likely varied a little depending on the popularity of mining and electricity prices. It's also worth noting that the Chinese market accounted for the majority of Nvidia's sales.
...
According to the report on The Register, Nvidia hasn't responded to the allegations. There are a number of ways this can pan out, but at the end of the day we don't expect much will come from the complaint.

Nvidia's revenues were divided up into five segments: Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter, Auto, and OEM & IP. Given these categories, it's only logical that GPUs that were engineered and built for gaming would be reported as part of the Gaming division, even if a whole lot of people were using them for something else.

Everybody knew that the gaming GPUs were being used for mining, and therefore also that the inflated gaming division numbers weren't going to last. As an investor, you have a responsibility to yourself to research what you're investing in. You shouldn't buy a product simply because the manufacturer says it's the best, so why would that be any different when buying shares?

Aliens making close passes to Military aircraft

5-16-2020

Navy fighter pilots reported close encounters with unidentified aerial vehicles, including several dangerously close, in eight incidents between June 27, 2013, and Feb. 13, 2019, according to documents recently released by the Navy.

Some of the incidents involved fighter squadrons aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. One of the former F/A-18 Super Hornet pilots, Lt. Ryan Graves, last year described a close encounter off Virginia Beach with what looked like a flying sphere encasing a cube, as recounted by a fellow pilot and later reported to the squadron safety officer.

https://www.techpowerup.com/266331/intel...eteor-lake

Quote:Intel's first client-segment processor microarchitecture built on its own 7 nm silicon fabrication process will be codenamed "Meteor Lake." The codename began surfacing in driver files and technical documents, one of which was screengrabbed and leaked to the web by Komachi Ensaka. Not much else is known about it, except that it succeeds the 10 nm++ "Alder Lake," an ambitious attempt by Intel to replicate Arm big.LITTLE heterogenous core technology on the x86 architecture, by combining a number of high-power cores with high-efficiency cores on a single piece of silicon. Intel "Lakefield," headed toward mass-production within this year, is the first such heterogenous core.

Older reports throughout 2019-20 speculate "Meteor Lake" (known at the time only by its name), could come out at a time when Intel monetizes its "Golden Cove" high-performance CPU core. It's quite likely that like "Alder Lake," it could be a heterogenous chip targeting several client form-factors, mobile and desktop. The company could leverage its 7 nm process - claimed to rival TSMC 5 nm-class in transistor density - in turning up core-counts over "Alder Lake." We'll learn more about "Meteor Lake" as we crawl toward its 2022 launch window, if it still holds up.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-2...processors

Quote:At the start of this year we heard that TSMC was investing heavily in 5nm fabrication, and it's no secret that the next step after that is TSMC's 3nm process.The Taiwanese silicon manufacturer is looking beyond that process too, as it just announced to shareholders that it is starting development of its 2nm lithographic process, as spotted by DigiTimes.

Painstakingly few details are available about the 2nm process. All we know is that TSMC is starting development -- though it's safe to assume the end product will be very fast and more efficient than anything on the market today.

https://www.techpowerup.com/266139/sourc...ss-2-leaks

Quote:Source Code of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 got leaked today. It seems like Valve hasn't been careful with control of its output, and a few leaks came out. All of the licensees of the Source Engine, a multi-platform game engine used in all Valve's games like Dota 2, Half-Life, and CS: GO, have been empowered by Valve with access to the source code of 2017/2018 versions of CS: GO and Team Fortress 2. Someone down the line, however, took that opportunity and access to leak the source code. The original news source is the SteamDB Twitter account, so we don't have any link to the actual source code.

This pretty big news since CS: GO can be considered as the most popular game on the Steam platform, and IP that Valve holds on it is very valuable. The 2017/2018 version that is leaked is probably outdated by a mile now, but it still represents an act of theft and should be treated as such. We are yet to see the response from Valve and how they will handle this situation.