Always Be Curious #173: The Sphere, TSMC's N2 node, and the Dutch demo scene

This week in ABC: Las Vegas boasts the biggest LED screen in the world, TSMC shared its advanced node roadmap, and the Dutch demo scene wins UNESCO cultural heritage status.

Buildings can be absolute tech powerhouses. This week, a strange new addition the Las Vegas skyline was “switched on”—it’s a humongous spherical display that instantly transformed the famous Strip. Meet THE SPHERE. I’ve included some images below.👇😎 I’m definitely putting a visit to this venue on my bucket list and here’s why:

🎭 The Sphere is a spherical (duh) entertainment venue with 18,000 seats and a wrap-around LED screen on the inside
🔊 The venue is a fully immersive experience: the seats have haptic feedback, environmental effects, and the venue has installed the world’s largest beamforming audio system (meaning it’s like listening to music with headphones, but without headphones)
👁 On the outside, the Sphere has a fully-programmable LED array dubbed "the Exosphere". This is the biggest LED screen in the world at 54,000 square meters and 16K x 16K resolution
🌈 The Exosphere consists of 1.2 million LEDs. The LED pucks are spaced 20 centimeters apart, each containing 48 individual LED diodes that can display 256 million different colors
🏗 The building is 111 meters high and cost a whopping $2.3 billion. It will open in September 2023.

Have a good week, stay safe and sound,

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👨‍💻The round-up in sci-tech💡

🧬 Developing human embryos imaged at highest-ever resolution (Nature)

Researchers have captured the most-detailed images yet of human embryos developing in real time, using two common laboratory tools — fluorescent dyes and laser microscopes. The technique allows researchers to study crucial events in the first few days of development without genetically altering the embryos, which has previously restricted the use of some imaging techniques in human embryos, owing to ethical concerns.

🔮 AI and the automation of work (Benedict Evans blog)

ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?

“If we had a machine that could do anything people do, without any of these limitations, could it do anything people can do, without these limitations?”

⚫️ Watch this massive LED sphere in Las Vegas light up for the first time (The Verge)

The Sphere has 1.2 million LEDs dotting its display.

🇮🇪 How Amazon taught Alexa to speak in an Irish brogue (The New York Times)

For Alexa to speak like a Dubliner, Amazon researchers had to crack a problem that’s vexed data scientists for years: voice disentanglement.

❤️ How Andrew Huberman got America to care about science (TIME)

His long-form science podcast consistently sits near the top of the charts

🔋 Toyota wakes up to find that it's 2023 and there's an EV revolution going on (CleanTechnica)

Toyota is emerging from its slumber to the reality of electric cars. It announced a bold new plan this week for the future.

⚡️ US weighs $1 billion hydrogen demand program to boost industry (Bloomberg Law)

The U.S. Energy Department would spend $1 billion to boost demand for clean hydrogen under a new plan to provide initial revenue for the first large-scale producers and provide certainty for potential buyers.

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🤓This week in chips⚠

🇹🇼 TSMC details next-gen process nodes, N3P & N2 to bring significant performance uplifts (Wccftech)

TSMC held a meeting in Japan where it provided developments on its N3E and N2 process nodes, along with plans for next-gen products.

🇮🇳 India aims to produce first semiconductors within 18 months (Financial Times) 🔐

India’s IT minister revealed an ambitious timeline as part of push to expand its tech manufacturing supply chain.

💡 GPU architecture deep dive: NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace, AMD’s RDNA 3 and Intel’s Arc Alchemist (TechSpot)

Three vendors. Three architectures. Three approaches to GPU design. TechSpot dives into the semiconductor hearts to see how NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace, AMD’s RDNA 3 and Intel’s Arc Alchemist compare.

💯 Jim Keller’s journey from CPUs to CEO (The Ojo-Yoshida Report)

'Lone wolf’ is the popular image for renowned computer architects. But Keller is no loner, having gone from hands-on engineer to CEO at AI chip startup Tenstorrent.

💰 The cost of compute: billion-dollar chatbots (EE Times)

With ChatGPT costing an estimated $700,000 per day to run, and Inflection AI set to spend hundreds of millions on GPUs, the cost of compute is still dominating generative AI.

🇪🇺 EU and Belgium invest $1.6 billion in chip technology firm imec (Reuters)

The European Union and Belgium's regional Flemish government will together invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in Belgian chip technology firm Imec, the Flemish government said on Friday.

💚 From TSMC to Samsung, Asia's chipmakers struggle to go green (Nikkei)

Dearth of renewable energy at home leaves titans lagging U.S. and European peers.

🇨🇳 China restricts export of chipmaking metals in clash with US (Bloomberg)

China imposed restrictions on exporting two metals that are crucial to parts of the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric-vehicle industries in an escalation of the country’s tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the US and Europe.

🇺🇸 The US may pay a price for escalating its chip war on China (Bloomberg)

The US is escalating a chip war against China. But first..

🇺🇸 One reason the U.S. can’t quit China? Chips. (The New York Times)

Chipmakers are finding it increasingly hard to operate in China but say doing business in the country is still key to their survival.

🇪🇺 EU is pushing China to narrow the scope of metal export controls (Bloomberg)

European Union officials are working to narrow the scope of export controls that China announced this week on two key metals used in semiconductors, solar panels and electric vehicles, according to people familiar with the matter.

📍 Where does Intel stand today? Three key challenges ahead (TechSpot)

We've been receiving many inquiries lately about the current state of Intel. Since this topic seems to be of great fascination for much of the semiconductor world,...

🔮 Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery (NVIDIA)

The past decade has seen incredible advances in artificial intelligence.

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📈By the numbers📉

📉 Samsung flags 96% drop in Q2 profit as chip glut drags on (Reuters)

Samsung reported a likely 96% plunge in second-quarter operating profit on Friday, largely in line with forecasts, as an ongoing chip glut drives large losses in the tech giant's key business despite a supply cut.

3️⃣ Apple makes history as first $3 trillion company amid tech stock surge (Reuters)

Apple became the first company in the world to reach a market value of $3 trillion, buoyed by hopes over its expansion in new markets coupled with expectations of a more moderate approach to interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

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❤️For the love of tech❤️

When I was a kid, I had an Amiga 500. My dad had a colleague who would copy the latest games. Those cracked games usually had an elaborate graphics/music intro (a “demo”) that would play before the game itself. These demos were self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that the crackers included to show off their programming skills. This trend evolved into an international computer art subculture, called the “demo scene”, and guess what? A colleague at ASML (known in the community as “RamonB5^dSr”) informed me that the demo scene has now been accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands. How awesome! 🔥💯

Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands (The Art of Coding)

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Always Be Curious is the personal newsletter of Sander Hofman, Senior Creative Content Strategist at ASML. Opinions expressed in this curated newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.