Lifeboat Foundation

Hot Chips 31 is underway this week, with presentations from a number of companies. Intel has decided to use the highly technical conference to discuss a variety of products, including major sessions focused on the company’s AI division. AI and machine learning are viewed as critical areas for the future of computing, and while Intel has tackled these fields with features like DL Boost on Xeon, it’s also building dedicated accelerators for the market.

The NNP-I 1000 (Spring Hill) and the NNP-T (Spring Crest) are intended for two different markets, inference and training. “Training” is the work of creating and teaching a neural network how to process data in the first place. Inference refers to the task of actually running the now-trained neural network model. It requires far more computational horsepower to train a neural network than it does to apply the results of that training to real-world categorization or classification tasks.

Intel’s Spring Crest NNP-T is designed to scale out to an unprecedented degree, with a balance between tensor processing capability, on-package HBM, networking capability, and on-die SRAMs to boost processing performance. The underlying chip is built by TSMC — yes, TSMC — on 16nm, with a 680mm die size and a 1200mm interposer. The entire assembly is 27 billion transistors with 4x8GB stacks of HBM2-2400 memory, 24 Tensor Processing Clusters (TPCs) with a core frequency of up to 1.1GHz. Sixty-four lanes of SerDes HSIO provides 3.58Tbps of aggregate bandwidth and the card supports an x16 PCIe 4.0 connection. Power consumption is expected to be between 150-250W. The chip was built using TSMC’s advanced CoWoS packaging (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate), and carries 60MB of cache distributed across its various cores. CoWoS competes with Intel’s EMIB, but Intel has decided to build this hardware at TSMC rather than using its own foundries. Performance is estimated at up to 119 TOPS.

The semi-annual slow-slip event means dozens of tremors under Puget Sound — and a slightly higher risk of a Cascadia megaquake.

Intense effusive activity from numerous vents at Stromboli volcano in Italy has resumed again on August 18, 2019, after several days decreased activity.

Frequent and often strong strombolian eruptions occur from several active vents in the crater terrace. Lava from the southwest rim seems to have increased its activity and feeds a lava flow that reaches about halfway down the slope of the Sciara del Fuoco, Dr. Tom Pfeiffer of the Volcano Discovery reported August 18.

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In what is being called an “unprecedented” discovery, a limestone sarcophagus containing the skeleton of a woman dating to the 7th century has been unearthed by archaeologists in Cahors, in southwestern France.

The discovery of the coffin, believed to be from the mysterious Merovingian era, was made as part of excavations carried out ahead of a redevelopment project by the archaeological unit of the Department of Lot, in cooperation with specialists from France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research.

Smart contact lenses will allow you to zoom in and record what you see!

The question of whether the Animus still belongs in the Assassin’s Creed series comes up with the release of each new game, but Assassin’s Creed Odyssey makes me even more sure that Ubisoft should take a simple, but obvious, step: Remove the Animus from future games completely and pretend it never existed.

People play Assassin’s Creed games to travel through time and kill a bunch of people; the framing device that explains how and why characters in our own time are themselves taking that journey has never felt so archaic and vestigial.

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