Always Be Curious #219: Excel world cup, Samsung's updated roadmap, and the chips that took us to the Moon
This week in ABC: The Excel World Championships are a real thing, Samsung unveils its updated chip roadmap, and Fairchild's first chips took us to the Moon and back.
This week, just a short note from me while I’m on the road! But between Excel championships🧮, elephants having first names🐘, nanomachines⚙️, cloud mysteries☁️, Samsung’s chip roadmap🇰🇷 and a great 2-part story about the chips that took mankind to the Moon🚀—I’m pretty sure that your Sunday is also spoken for. 😊 Enjoy! 🥐☕️
Have a good week, stay safe and sound,
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👨💻The round-up in sci-tech💡
🏆 The Excel superstars throw down in Vegas (The Verge)
Microsoft Excel is arguably the world’s most important piece of business software. Can it also be a sport? YES.
📱 Apple Intelligence is the company's new generative AI offering (TechCrunch)
On Monday at WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, its long-awaited, ecosystem-wide push into generative AI.
👨⚕️ This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer (MIT Technology Review)
A new smart monitoring system could help doctors avoid mistakes—but it’s also alarming some surgeons and leading to sabotage.
⬛️ Scientists are building a "black box" to record the end of civilization (Futurism)
Researchers are building a massive, indestructible box that’ll record scientific data to give future civilizations insight on how exactly humanity fell.
⚙️Rise of the nanomachines (The New Yorker) 🔒
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
☁️ No one really understands clouds (The Atlantic)
They’re one of the greatest climate mysteries left.
🐘 Every elephant has its own name, study suggests (The New York Times)🎁
An analysis of elephant calls using an artificial intelligence tool suggests that the animals may use and respond to individualized rumbles.
🙏 Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 86 (The Los Angeles Times)
Lynn Conway, who died Sunday at 86, was a leader in the development of personal computers and microprocessor technology, and a symbol for generations of transgender individuals.
🤓This week in chips⚠
🇰🇷 Samsung Foundry unveils updated roadmap: Backside Power Delivery and 2nm evolution through 2027 (Anandtech)
Samsung this week has unveiled its latest process technologies roadmap at the company's Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) U.S. The new plan covers the evolution of Samsung's 2nm-class production nodes through 2027, including a process technology with a backside power delivery, re-emphasizing plans to bring out a 1.4nm-class node in 2027, and the introduction of a 'high value' 4nm-class manufacturing tech.
💡 Is the future of Moore’s Law in a particle accelerator? (IEEE Spectrum)
Def read this piece but the answer is no. 😅 It’s in further scaling the laser-produced plasma source.
🔥 The Qualcomm Snapdragon X architecture deep dive: getting to know Oryon and Adreno X1 (Anandtech)
“So a great deal of the company’s hardware over the next few years is riding on this CPU architecture – and if all goes according to plan, there will be many more generations of Oryon to follow. One way or another, it’s going to set Qualcomm apart from its competitors in both the PC and mobile spaces, as it means Qualcomm is moving on from Arm’s reference designs, which by their very nature are accessible Qualcomm’s competition as well.”
💰 Giant chips give supercomputers a run for their money (IEEE Spectrum)
This dinner-plate sized chip can cut the energy cost of inference by a factor of three for large language models like ChatGPT. It can also do scientific calculations in the field of molecular dynamics at an unprecedented speed, allowing for simulation of new regimes relevant for fusion energy.
🔥 Cerebras enables faster training of industry’s leading largest AI models (Cerebras)
Cerebras is doing a collab with Dell.
😳 Flow claims it can 100x any CPU's power with its companion chip and some elbow grease (TechCrunch)
A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making one of the wildest claims ever heard in silicon engineering: by adding its proprietary companion chip,
🇺🇸 Chipmaker Intel to halt $25-billion Israel plant, news website says (Reuters)
"Israel continues to be one of our key global manufacturing and R&D sites and we remain fully committed to the region," Intel said in a statement.
🇰🇷 SK hynix: GDDR7 mass production to start in Q4 2024 (Anandtech)
SK hynix was at this year's Computex trade show, showing off their full lineup of memory technologies – including, of course, GDDR7. SK hynix is the last of the major memory vendor's we've seen promoting their memory, and fittingly, they seem to be the last in terms of their mass production schedule. According to company representatives, the firm will kick off mass production of their GDDR7 chips in the last quarter of 2024.
🚀 The first ICs on the Moon – The Apollo Guidance Computer, part 1 (EEjournal)
Just two months before Kennedy’s famous “Landing a man on the Moon” speech in 1961, at a press conference during the March IRE convention in New York City, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercial IC to be manufactured with Jean Hoerni’s planar process. It was an RTL flip-flop, mounted in a round metal can and marketed under the trade name Micrologic. These two events, closely coincident in time but seemingly disconnected, merged into the trigger that started the integrated circuit revolution. Apollo went to the Moon and ICs became the biggest thing in electronics.
🚀 The first ICs on the Moon – The Apollo Guidance Computer, part 2 (EEjournal)
Part 2 of the above!
📈By the numbers📉
‘They also found a more intelligent way to adjust the power budget of each chip’s compute engines, and sped communication among GPUs in a way that Salvator likened to “buttering your toast while it’s still in the toaster.”’
🔥 NVIDIA conquers latest AI tests (IEEE Spectrum)
GPU maker tops new MLPerf benchmarks on graph neural nets and LLM fine-tuning.
❤️For the love of tech❤️
🦾 Chinese doctor performs ‘world’s 1st’ robotic surgery 5,000 miles away (Interesting Engineering)
A Chinese surgeon has performed the world's first transcontinental remote robotic prostate removal. The key? Solid 5G connectivity with low latency.
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.