Serhat Gumrukcu faces trial in a purported plot to kill an associate who could have exposed him and derailed a drug-development deal worth millions. From a report: Even as a teenager back in Turkey, Serhat Gumrukcu dazzled audiences. In a 2002 video, he opened one of his magic shows dancing with a cane that appeared to be levitating. He was introduced as a medical student and went by the stage name “Dr. No.” A little more than a decade later, not long after Mr. Gumrukcu arrived in the U.S., he had his hand in multimillion-dollar oil and real-estate deals. Yet his best-known venture was in medicine. For a time, he thrilled investors with ideas for groundbreaking treatments and drew special notice from the government’s top infectious-disease official, Anthony Fauci. In America, the magician had found a new, more lucrative audience.

Enochian Biosciences co-founded by Mr. Gumrukcu in 2018, paid more than $21 million to companies controlled by Mr. Gumrukcu and his husband for consulting, research and the licensing of potential drugs to treat influenza, hepatitis B, HIV and Covid-19, company financial filings show. “Dr. Gumrukcu is one of those rare geniuses that is not bound by scientific discipline or dogma. He sees connections and opportunities often missed,” Enochian Vice Chairman Mark Dybul, now chief executive, said in a 2019 news release about Enochian’s licensing of a hepatitis B drug from a company controlled by Mr. Gumrukcu. Mr. Gumrukcu’s success as a biotech entrepreneur afforded the purchase last year of an $18.4 million office complex in North Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and, earlier, a $5.5 million house in the Hollywood Hills.

Yet much of what people saw in Mr. Gumrukcu was an illusion he cast, misrepresenting himself and his credentials, according to state and federal authorities, court records, former colleagues and those who have sued and won judgments against him over fraudulent medical and financial dealings. Prosecutors now allege that Mr. Gumrukcu arranged the murder of a business associate, Gregory Davis, who threatened to expose him as a fraud. Such a revelation would have put at risk the 39-year-old entrepreneur’s deal with Enochian, they said. Mr. Gumrukcu has been in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles since his arrest on May 24. A federal grand jury indicted him on murder conspiracy charges, an offense punishable by death.

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Source: Slashdot – Biotech Wizard Left a Trail of Fraud — Prosecutors Allege It Ended in Murder

Arm is announcing its new flagship Immortalis GPU today, its first to include hardware-based ray tracing on mobile. As PCs and the latest Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles are all gradually moving toward impressive ray-traced visuals, Immortalis-G715 is designed to be the Arm’s first GPU to deliver the same on Android phones and tablets. From a report: Built on top of Mali, a GPU that’s used by the likes of MediaTek and Samsung, Immortalis is designed with 10-16 cores in mind and promises a boost of 15 percent over the previous generation premium Mali GPUs. Arm sees Immortalis as the start of a transition to ray tracing on mobile following its success with the 8 billion Mali GPUs that have shipped to date.

“The challenge is that Ray Tracing techniques can use significant power, energy, and area across the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC),” explains Andy Craigen, director of product management at Arm. “However, Ray Tracing on Immortalis-G715 only uses 4 percent of the shader core area, while delivering more than 300 percent performance improvements through the hardware acceleration.”

It’s not clear if a 3x speedup over software-based ray tracing will be enough to tempt game developers, but when Nvidia introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in its RTX 2080, it advertised a 2x-3x boost at the time. “It’s the right performance point for now to get this technology into the market,” says Arm’s Paul Williamson, adding that it may also come in handy in augmented reality applications where RT could be used to match virtual lighting to the real-world environment around you. Arm is already delivering software-based ray tracing in last year’s Mali-G710, but the promise of hardware support means we will start to see flagship smartphones with this chip at the beginning of 2023. Samsung also announced its Exynos 2200 chip with hardware-based ray tracing earlier this year, so manufacturers are getting ready for the games to arrive.

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Source: Slashdot – Arm’s Immortalis GPU is Its First With Hardware Ray Tracing for Android Gaming