Tag: hardware

NVIDIA Moore’s Law

For the past 7 years, it has not been Intel but NVIDIA that has pushed the frontier of Moore’s processor performance/price curve. For a 2016 data point, consider the NVIDIA Titan GTX. It offers 10^13 FLOPS per $1K (11 trillion calculations per second for $1200 list price), and is the workhorse for deep learning and scientific supercomputing today. And they are sampling much more powerful systems that should be shipping soon. The fine-grained parallel compute architecture of a GPU maps better to the needs of deep learning than a CPU. There is a poetic beauty to the computational similarity of a processor optimized for graphics processing and the computational needs of a sensory cortex, as commonly seen in neural networks today.

Bit-Flipping Attacks

An app containing the researchers’ rooting exploit requires no user permissions and doesn’t rely on any vulnerability in Android to work. Instead, their attack exploits a hardware vulnerability, using a Rowhammer exploit that alters crucial bits of data in a way that completely roots name brand Android devices from LG, Motorola, Samsung, OnePlus, and possibly other manufacturers.

1D transistor

With silicon transistors, the entire device is either turned on or off. With 2-D transistors, by contrast, Lai and the team found that electric currents move in a more phased (or wave-like) way, beginning first at the edges before appearing in the interior. This suggests the same current could be sent with less power and in an even tinier space — using a 1-dimensional edge instead of the 2-dimensional plane.

CPU Neuroscience

But then the biologists tried it out. This paper details an attempt to study the 6502 chip using the tools we have available to study nematode brains and the like, and it’s titled “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor”. I’ll let the abstract speak for itself: There is a popular belief in neuroscience that we are primarily data limited, that producing large, multimodal, and complex datasets will, enabled by data analysis algorithms, lead to fundamental insights into the way the brain processes information. Microprocessors are among those artificial information processing systems that are both complex and that we understand at all levels, from the overall logical flow, via logical gates, to the dynamics of transistors. Here we take a simulated classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes information. We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the processor. This suggests that current approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful models of the brain.

Computing could have started 100 years earlier

So, OK: would the Analytical Engine have gotten beyond computing mathematical tables? I suspect so. If Ada had lived as long as Babbage, she would still have been around in the 1890s when Herman Hollerith was doing card-based electromechanical tabulation for the census (and founding what would eventually become IBM). The Analytical Engine could have done much more. But none of this actually happened, and instead Ada died young, the Analytical Engine was never finished, and it took until the 20th century for the power of computation to be discovered.

this is very fascinating. if ada hadn’t died so young, perhaps the age of computing would have started 100 years earlier.

Hoverboard Genesis

Because the Chinese manufacturing industry is so centralized, anything new spreads like crazy through the supply chain. One manufacturer creates a product; another reverse-engineers it and makes it too. And that next company can make it cheaper and faster, because it has no R&D costs.

Photonic states

“We’re learning how to build complex states of light that, in turn, can be built into more complex objects. This is the first time anyone has shown how to bind 2 photons a finite distance apart. Lots of modern technologies are based on light, from communication technology to high-definition imaging. Many of them would be greatly improved if we could engineer interactions between photons.”

The Amiga turns 30

Nice series.

the Amiga 1000 was the first true PC for creatives. The Amiga 1000 was “a radical multimedia machine from a group of thinkers, tinkerers, and visionaries which delivered affordable graphics, animation, music, and multitasking interaction the personal computer world hadn’t even dreamt of.” It pioneered desktop video and introduced PCs to countless new users, rocketing Amiga and Commodore to the top for a brief moment in the sun. History of the Amiga attempts to explain what the device was, what it meant to its designers and users, and why, despite its relative obscurity and early demise, it continues to matter so much to the computer industry and its enthusiasts.