Posts by Vikingforties

Ampere heads off Intel, AMD's cloud-optimized CPUs with a 192-core Arm chip

The trouble is AMD didn't enable FP16 in their own ZenDNN library so it isn't possible to use FP16 on AMD Genoa.

Smuggler busted heading for China with dodgy GPUs … and live lobsters

Probably just a Deliveroo order for Scampi and Chips gone wrong.

Chinese defence boffins ponder microwaving Starlink satellites to stop surveillance

Maybe the Chinese could occupy the altitude band left by PARiS & LOHAN after The Reg failed to capitalise on your early successes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Aircraft_Released_Into_Space

Behold Big Tech's mightiest new innovations: Minecraft Crocs, recycled cubicles

OY!

I quite like my Crocs. I'm currently sporting a pair in a hue I like to call "Offensive Beige".

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

How much? How many?

Plus the way it reads "some 2.8 million UK influencers and content creators earned on average $146.86 and $113.19 per hour respectively" - That's a lot of money and people!

It prompted me to scratch my head and do some Radio4 More of Less style sleuthing.

The report actually says the base of people that Adobe surveyed who averaged $146 and $113 were (maybe) 259, not 2.8 million, which seems way more realistic.

"Base: Creators who monetize via social media US (n=196), UK (n=172)

Base: Influencers US (n=79), UK (n=87),"

Jellyfish watches for the sting of developer bottlenecks

Reaches for stock photo Jellyfish....

Oh dear, that appears to be mislabelled. Still, I'm sure the company won't mind being likened to a deadly poisonous siphonophore.

NASA, DARPA to go nuclear in hopes of putting boots on Mars

Make reality more like Kerbal Space Program. Brilliant.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

The cake is a lie!

Cave Johnson here.

When Aperture Science bakes we don't leave things to chance. We pack 23% more calories per calorie into our baked goods.

Try getting around that, humans! We're done.

Heata offers free hot water by mounting servers on people's water tanks

Close, but no cigar.

This kind of works but also doesn't when you get into the weeds.

I can get that Qarnot have a long term business case. Their 4kW units are often doubled up at commercial sites and concentrate a lot of compute sleds together. Almost like a mini data centre. They're going to be easy to renegotiate access to and much, much quicker to update hardware or maintain.

Heata have more of a one shot strategy. Those units are going to come to the end of their life in terms of the compute you can sell in a few years, maybe seven at a stretch. Then there's thousands of site visits to sort out with not a huge amount of financial benefit for each visit. Hopefully just the board & SoC inside changes not the whole chassis and heat transfer adapter. New owners house owners being confused could be an issue too.

I'm all for this kind of heat recovery, I just think that GleSYS community heat supply and Qarnot's commercial building heaters make more sense.

After long delays, Sapphire Rapids arrives, full of accelerators and superlatives

Re: Finland

This is what GleSYS actually do. Not in Finland but in Sweden.....

https://glesys.com/company/sustainability

Very commendable and not easy to do. They need to match workload scheduling, pumping rates and heat demand.

China's Mars rover hibernates for a scarily long time

"Zhurongs don't make a right..."

Surely a pun worthy of the great Andy Zaltzman?

Citizen Coder? Happiness Concierge? Here come 2023's business cards

Qudos for mentioning 3D Monster Maze. Always the scariest game.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Nadine Dorries? Time on her hands these days and she really appeared to be in command of her brief at the UK department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sports.

Graphcore makes China push with Mk2 AI chip amid financial woes

Whilst we have a government that appears not to know it's caboose from it's elbow when it comes to silicon tech strategy (e.g. Nexperia & Imagination before that), I wonder if Graphcore has popped up on their radar?

AWS intros homebrew Graviton CPU tuned for HPC, network stack tuned to updated Nitro system

AWS: Hey! We got a shiny! :-)

Readers: Go on then, tell us...

AWS: Shan't.

Readers mutter to themselves "What was the point of that?"

Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?

Re: It's the only way to be sure

Wa wait wait, hold on!

That installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.....

What are they smoking!

We've got countless useful things to be doing down here with the heat from DCs, all of which are a much smaller engineering challenge than lofting racks onto space.

Even low grade heat has it's used if the right planning, zoning and incentives can be put in place.

Plus when one of these renters the atmosphere what's happening to all the random element plasma that gets dumped in the upper atmosphere?

Intel plans to cut products — we guess where they’ll happen

Some gone already

As far as I can tell, one of Intel's more random ventures has gone already. Their Geospatial group appears to have joined the choir invisible.

Maybe it's just resting.

Government IT provider UKCloud goes into liquidation

Fall-E

Sad to hear.

I always treated Buy 'n Large as a warning of the future, not a goal.

Public cloud prices to surge in US and Europe next year

Re: On prem hosting

Bumping GleSYS onto this who've been pumping heat into Stockholm and Falkenstein water grids for years now.

https://glesys.com/company/sustainability

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

Headline to come...

Will the last person that leaves the UK please turn off the Diamond Light Source.

Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test

Ah but Solar Roadways(TM) could supply the power for the coils. Genius idea, because the cars float, they don't mash the solar panels in the roadways. Someone fetch me the back of an envelope!

How this Mars rover used its MOXIE to convert CO2 into precious oxygen

Re: Er, don't plants get their nitrogen

Lightning is an important generator of nitrogen that plants can consume too.

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

Cap'n Pugwash

pr0n served from the high seas. It brings a whole new depth of meaning to the Captain Pugwash of urban legend.

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

Re: Wow

Summary of Qualcomm's response; "Yeah, you and who's Arm..y?"

Intel's Gelsinger talks up 'systems foundry' era of trillion-transistor chips

Re: Heating

That was Intel's question too. It's probably why they're putting $700 squagillion into finding out the answer.

I see a future where Data Centres send out their heavy workloads to Fish and Chip shops so that servers can heat the frying oil. Everyone's a winner in that scenario.

Ampere: Cloud biz buy-ins prove our Arm server CPUs are the real deal

Re: Real benchmarks please

Performance bit was done by Anandtech a while ago. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16979/the-ampere-altra-max-review-pushing-it-to-128-cores-per-socket/4

The price part is variable given that these are generally for large volume purchase. What isn't as flexible are the power costs so performance efficiency is important.

Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips

District heat already being done

I always seem to read reports of DC heat recovery being planned. GleSYS have been feeding heat into the local town grids now for several years.

The new generation of CentOS replacements – plus the daddy of them all: RHEL 8.6

Re: It was sad to see Centos go

Ralmacky? Ralmocky? Ralmoacky!

UK's state-owned bank launches hunt for core systems worth close to $1b

Surely Crapita? They can then get their full house or royal flush of IT cockups.

Arm's $66bn sale to Nvidia is off: Deal collapses after world's competition regulators raise concerns

It won't be too bad, they've got fingers in many PIs.

Err, Mostly Armless.

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Tim for a Douglas Adams quote I think.

Matt Hancock "The plans were on dislay"

Us - "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'".

Pat Gelsinger’s Intel will evolve from lone wolf to touting modular systems-on-packages with third-party foundry collaboration

Re: I guess he needs more time

Probably less crazy than the sixty or so golf courses in the Phoenix area.

Intel do an appreciable amount of water recovery.

Expect €5m cloud, says European Centre for Midrange Weather Forecasts

Re: Cloudy with a chance of forecast

Great to see this. We need more blue sky thinking in cloud strategy.

DeepMind's latest protein-solving AI AlphaFold a step closer to cracking biology's 50-year conundrum

Re: Nice, but the problem still stands

Good point, it's a good step on in emulating reality but doesn't tell us much more about reality itself.

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

It's a point worth expanding. The number of people who are then able to observe and check elections is vastly reduced to those with a grasp of the security involved and ways of circumventing it. This would apply to local party workers or international election observers.

A quick exercise: Let's assume 90% of people are capable of understanding paper based voting and 0.1% of them are actually interested in having a look. My finger in the air indicates that less than 1% of people are capable of understanding electronic voting and the same proportion, 0.1%, are actually interested. That's a large difference in the pool of people you have that can bring some trust to the election result.

Nvidia signs up for an Italian Job: Building for Europe the 'world's fastest AI supercomputer' by 2022

Re: Good old blighty

Nah, it'll cost an Arm and a leg.

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

Re: Can't get the work (units)

Check out Rosetta@Home on the BOINC distributed computing client. They're working on Covid-19 too. If there's no Folding@Home work units you can switch over to Rosetta. The projects are complimentary - Rosetta calculates protein shape and Folding, well, folds them.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Sat..nav gone wrong?

What's all this talk of Jupiter? Saturn surely?

To members of Pizza Hut's loyalty scheme: You really knead to stop reusing your passwords

They're going to get fined so much dough by the ICO.

NASA's asteroid orbit calculator spots a hot rock zipping past

Planet killer's the wrong name. We've survived from the late heavy bombardment onwards.

More like "puny human killer".

US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies

Re: Some Department of Commerce weather alert systems use Fortran

Spot on, indeed you can get hold of your own Fortran weather prediction software at Dr Jack's site http://www.drjack.info/RASP/

And here's the model run for the UK soaring community:

http://rasp.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/

Better than the Met Office (your mileage may vary).