China has implemented an unprecedented pollution crackdown in recent months as the country shuts down tens of thousands of factories. The effort is part of a national effort to address China’s infamous pollution and has affected wide swaths of China’s manufacturing sector. In total, it is estimated that 40 percent of all China’s factories have been shut down at some point in order to be inspected by environmental bureau officials.



As a result of these inspections over 80,000 factories have been hit with fines and criminal offenses as a result of their emissions. Safety officials have been moving from province to province (30 in total so far) shutting down factories as well as electricity and gas as they inspect the factories for meeting emissions requirements. This has resulted in late and missed orders, increased costs, and could ultimately result in higher prices on US shelves.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – 40% of China’s Factories Shuttered in Pollution Crackdown

Steam Digital Gift Cards are now available, making it even easier to send the perfect gift to your friends. Steam Digital Gift Cards make it fast and easy to send your friends Steam Wallet funds toward the purchase of anything on Steam, from software to hardware, including games and in-game items.



This expands on Steam’s single-game digital gift service and retail gift cards, which are available from hundreds of retailers around the world. To purchase a Digital Gift Card, sign into your Steam account, select an amount and a friend, and Steam will deliver your gift with a personalized message directly to their Steam account.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Steam Introduces Digital Gift Cards

AMD is launching two Ryzen laptop CPUs that it claims are the “world’s fastest” processors for Ultrabooks: the Ryzen 7 2700U, featuring four cores with symmetrical multi-threading and 10 compute units based on the Vega graphics architecture, offers a base clock speed of 2.2GHz and boost speed of 3.8GHz. The Ryzen 5 2500U also has four cores with SMT and can hit 2GHz with a boost clock of 3.6GHz.



The AMD Ryzen mobile processor combines the award-winning technology powering AMD Ryzen CPUs with the revolutionary graphics of the Radeon “Vega” architecture to deliver exceptional mobile performance for every task. AMD SenseMI processor intelligence technologies enable AMD Ryzenâ„¢ mobile processors to adapt to your needs, delivering the performance you want with astonishing efficiency enabling amazing battery life.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – AMD Announces Ryzen Mobile Processors with Radeon Vega Graphics

A new machine learning group at ARM will create accelerator cores, blocks for its CPU and GPU cores, and software to tie it all together. Exactly what the group will deliver and when remains under covers. Analysts suggest ARM could be as much as three years behind products from rivals such as Cadence, Ceva, and Synopsys.



ARM declined to share the number of people or budget for the group, run by ARM fellow Jem Davies, best known for a decade working on ARM’s media blocks. Rene Haas, president of ARM’s intellectual property group, defined it simply as “a big team in hardware and software.” “It’s clear we will do [machine learning] in CPUs, GPUs and special purpose cores, but we are not announcing anything yet,” Davies said in a brief one-on-one after a press event at the ARM Tech Con here.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – ARM Unveils New AI Group