Luna 2.0, a Frankenstein cryptocurrency resurrected after its predecessor crashed to near-worthlessness, is already looking pretty haggard out of the starting gate. And like Mary Shelley’s monster, there are signs of more misfortune in the near future.
Source: Gizmodo – Luna 2.0 Is Seeing Wild Price Swings Right Out the Starting Gate
With ISC High Performance 2022 taking place this week in Hamburg, Germany, Intel is using the first in-person version of the event in 3 years to offer an update to the state of their high performance/supercomputer silicon plans. The big news out of the show this year is that Intel is naming the successor to the Ponte Vecchio accelerator, which the company is now disclosing as Rialto Bridge.
Previously appearing on Intel’s roadmaps as “Ponte Vecchio Next”, Intel’s GPU teams have been pipelining the development of Ponte’s successor even as the first large installation of Ponte itself (the Aurora Supercomputer) is still being stood up. As part of the company’s 3 year (ish) roadmap that leads to CPUs and accelerators converging with the Falcon Shores XPU, Rialto Bridge is the part that will, if you’ll pardon the pun, bridge the gap between Ponte and Falcon, offering an evolution of Ponte’s design that’s making use of newer technologies and manufacturing processes.
Source: AnandTech – Intel Unveils Rialto Bridge: Second-Gen Xe-HPC Accelerator to Succeed Ponte Vecchio
Alongside today’s disclosure of the Rialto Bridge accelerator, Intel is also using this week’s ISC event to deliver a brief update on Sapphire Rapids, the company’s next-generation Xeon CPU which is shipping later this year. While Intel has been beating the drum for their forthcoming, 4th Generation Xeon Scalable chip for a while, we have yet to hear anything of significance about its expected performance – particularly in the HPC space. So ahead of its formal launch a bit later this year, Intel is finally talking a bit about the expected performance of the HBM-equipped version of the chip, which is aimed in particular at the HPC/supercomputing crowd.
Intel’s first tiled Xeon processor, Sapphire Rapids is also Intel’s first CPU to offer optional on-chip HBM memory, which is being dubbed Sapphire Rapids Plus HBM. The addition of 64GB of HBM2e makes it a fairly complex and expensive chip, but also one with access to far more memory bandwidth than any x86 CPU before it. As a result, the chip is of particular interest to a subset of the high-performance compute community, as it offers an alternative route for workloads that aren’t suitable for GPUs, but still need access to vast amounts of memory bandwidth.
As part of their ISC presentation today, Intel is releasing two slides with performance figures for the HBM version of Sapphire Rapids (Sapphire Rapids Plus HBM). The idea here is to show off the combination of architecture improvements – and in particular, the dedicated accelerator blocks – combined with using 64GB of HBM2e memory to keep those blocks well fed. The pre-production processors are being compared to Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8380 (Ice Lake-SP) chips.
Bearing in mind that these are going to be cherry-picked performance figures, Intel is seeing anywhere between a 2x speed-up in things like the WRF weather forecasting model, to over a 3x improvement for the CloverLeaf Euler equation solver. Both of which are somewhat narrow use cases, but important ones for the HPC market segment.
Sapphire Rapids Plus HBM is due to be released alongside the rest of the Sapphire Rapids family later this year. According to Intel’s current roadmaps, it is due for a successor in the 2023 timeframe, before the entire HBM-equipped Xeon lineup is due to be rolled into the Falcon Shores XPU in 2024.
Source: AnandTech – Intel Showcases Sapphire Rapids Plus HBM Xeon Performance at ISC 2022
In this month’s installment of Extremely Specific Niche Streaming Theater, we have Players, a new mockumentary series on Paramount+ set in the world of esports. If you don’t know what esports are, the best way to describe it is “playing video games and calling it sports.” (I am not mocking esports when I say that; the…
Source: LifeHacker – What’s New on Paramount+ in June 2022
Intel is using ISC 2022 this week in Hamburg, Germany to provide an update on their Super Compute Group road-map and the efforts they are pursuing both in hardware and software for a sustainable, open HPC ecosystem.
Source: Phoronix – Intel Announces Rialto Bridge As Ponte Vecchio Successor, Talks Up Falcon Shores & DAOS
There are now a lot of truly excellent handhelds that let you enjoy the retro games of your youth anywhere, but none are as simple and streamlined as the Evercade, which is getting a major upgrade later this year with the Evercade EXP. This new model has Wifi and a better screen, but more notably includes extra…
Source: Gizmodo – The Next Evercade Retro Arcade Handheld Is Getting Wifi and a New Portrait Mode
If you use Amazon’s Kindle app on Android, you may have noticed the software doesn’t offer the option to buy and rent ebooks or subscribe to the company’s Kindle Unlimited service anymore. Amazon announced the change last month and more recently began notifying customers of the move via email.
If you’re curious about what’s going on, the change puts Amazon in compliance with a policy Google will begin enforcing on June 1st. Starting next month, the company will require all developers to process payments involving “digital goods and services” through the Play Store billing system. Previously, Amazon was among a handful of developers Google allowed to use third-party alternatives to collect in-app payments. Rather than give Google a commission for every ebook it sells on Android, Amazon has decided to remove purchases altogether. It has done the same in its Audible and Music apps. In the US, Amazon doesn’t offer Kindle in-app purchasing on iOS either.
It’s worth noting Amazon isn’t the only company that has stopped sales on Android. In April, for instance, Barnes and Noble removed direct purchasing from the Android version of its Nook app. Some companies have legally challenged Google on the matter, with Tinder parent company Match Group filing a suit against the search giant in May.
There’s the possibility that direct purchasing could return to Amazon’s Android Kindle, Audible and Music apps at some point in the future. In March, Google partnered with Spotify to test third-party billing systems. However, how soon that pilot could expand to include other companies is unclear.
Source: Engadget – Amazon no longer offers in-app Audible, Kindle and Music purchases on Android
The mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) has survived decades of innovation in storage and a seismic shift to solid state drives (SSDs), which offer much faster speeds and no moving parts to worry about. No end to the HDD is in sight, either. That’s because HDDs still offer a superior bang-for-buck for raw storage capacity, and they’re about to
Source: Hot Hardware – 30TB And Larger HDDs Will Be Here Soon To Solve Your Digital Pack Rat Problems
What we have are innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application. Technology analyst Benedict Evans writes: Technology is full of narratives, but one of the loudest and most persistent concerns artificial intelligence and something called “data.” AI is the future, we are told, and it’s all about data — and data is the future, and we should own it and maybe be paid for it. And countries need data strategies and data sovereignty, too. Data is the new oil. This is mostly nonsense. There is no such thing as “data,” it isn’t worth anything, and it doesn’t belong to you anyway. Most obviously, data is not one thing, but innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application, that can’t be used for anything else. For instance, Siemens has wind turbine telemetry and Transport for London has ticket swipes, and those aren’t interchangeable. You can’t use the turbine telemetry to plan a new bus route, and if you gave both sets of data to Google or Tencent, that wouldn’t help them build a better image recognition system.
This might seem trivial put so bluntly, but it points to the uselessness of very common assertions on the lines of “China has more data” — more of what data? Meituan delivers 50mn restaurant orders a day, and that lets it build a more efficient routing algorithm, but you can’t use that for a missile guidance system. You can’t even use it to build restaurant delivery in London. “Data” does not exist — there are merely many sets of data. Of course, when people talk about data they mostly mean “your” data — your information and the things that you do on the internet, some of which is sifted, aggregated and deployed by technology companies. We want more privacy controls, but we also think we should have ownership of that data, wherever it is. The trouble is, most of the meaning in “your” data is not in you but in all of the interactions with other people. What you post on Instagram means very little: the signal is in who liked your posts and what else they liked, in what you liked and who else liked it, and in who follows you, who else they follow and who follows them, and so on outwards in a mesh of interactions between millions of people.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ‘There is No Such Thing as Data’
Enlarge / What’s in the box? (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)
Blizzard’s upcoming open beta launch of Diablo Immortal later this week will be skipping the Netherlands and Belgium, thanks to regulations in those countries that consider games with randomized loot boxes to be illegal gambling.
“Diablo Immortal will not be available in Belgium or the Netherlands, and will not appear on Battle.net or the Belgian and Netherlands App or Google Play Stores,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Eurogamer over the weekend. “This is related to the current operating environment for games in those countries. Accordingly, pre-registrations for the game are not accessible in those markets.”
Activision Blizzard had reportedly let Belgian and Dutch players preregister for the game’s public beta test and listed the game briefly on mobile app stores in both countries. But the company quietly changed course in recent months, as Dutch gaming news site Tweakers noticed over the weekend.
Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Two European countries won’t get Diablo Immortal because of loot box laws
In a filesystem session at the
2022 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), Amir Goldstein
led a discussion about the stable kernel trees. Those trees, and
especially the long-term support (LTS) versions, are used as a basis for a
variety of Linux-based products, but the kind of testing that is being done
on them for filesystems is lacking. Part of the problem is that the tests
target filesystem developers so they are not easily used by downstream
consumers of the stable kernel trees.
Source: LWN.net – [$] Filesystems, testing, and stable trees
Following the NVIDIA R515 Linux driver beta from earlier this month that was published alongside NVIDIA’s open kernel driver announcement, today the NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux driver has been released as the first R515 stable release…
Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux Driver Released As Stable With Open Kernel Driver Option
French officials are saying “adieu” to popular English video game vocabulary in an effort to preserve their rarified language.
Source: Gizmodo – France is Banning Video Game Words Because They Aren’t French Enough
Having the police show up at your door with a search warrant isn’t something most law-abiding citizens prepare for. The general assumption is that if you don’t engage in crimes, you won’t ever have to stand by while a bunch of officers tear through your house. But just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean…
Source: LifeHacker – What to Do (and Not Do) If the Police Hand You a Search Warrant
Hardware enthusiasts of a certain vintage will become misty-eyed and nostalgic when they hear the word “Mendocino.” That might be exactly why AMD picked that codename for its own cut-down, low-cost Ryzen processors. Officially announced at Computex and intended for applications where cost is the most important factor, Mendocino is the codename
Source: Hot Hardware – Leaked AMD Mendocino Block Diagram Reveals Its Unique Chip Architecture
Parlez-vous anglais? Not among French government workers. France has banned certain English gaming terms such as “esports” and “streaming” among government officials. The changes have been published in the French government journal and therefore apply to all government workers.
Why has the French government banned these seemingly harmless
Source: Hot Hardware – Why France Just Banned Esports, Streaming And Other Popular English Gaming Terms
Diablo: Immortal is set to release in just a few short days. However, fans of the series in certain countries will be unable to play the game. Specifically, Diablo Immortal will not be available in the Netherlands or Belgium due to laws that prohibit loot boxes.
An Activision Blizzard spokesperson confirmed earlier today, “Diablo: Immortal
Source: Hot Hardware – Diablo Immortal Launch Blocked In Belgium And Netherlands Over Loot Box Laws
Stranger things have happened at Netflix, but its new policy to prevent password sharing is confusing users during its pilot program in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru according to Rest of World.
Source: Gizmodo – New Netflix Password Sharing Policy is Already a Confusing Mess in Test Markets
If you spent any time on the internet this weekend, you might’ve seen some news about Bloodborne Remastered coming to PC and PS5 this August. The announcement came from what appeared to be a widely known entertainment and gaming news account by someone named Nibellion, who has been on Twitter since at least May 2012.…
Source: Kotaku – False Bloodborne Remastered Rumor Spreads Like Wildfire On Twitter
We’ve got the dinosaurs of Jurassic World: Dominion in theaters soon, the dragons of House of the Dragon arriving on HBO Max this fall, and as everyone knows, every day is Godzilla Day. But with this list, we’re celebrating the reptilian subgenre of “crocodile horror,” in honor of scaly twin terrors Alligator and …
Source: Gizmodo – 14 Crocodile Horror Movies Worth Chomping Into
