Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: mobile phones – Page 105

LISBON, Nov 2 (Reuters) — Chip designer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) has been able to skirt most of the problems linked with the global chip supply shortage by forecasting demand years in advance, a top executive said on Tuesday.

Demand for electronics gadgets from people stuck in homes due to the pandemic has led to a shortage of semiconductors that are used from anything from mobile phones and cars.

But despite a squeeze in supply, AMD has been able to take market share away from rival Intel (INTC.O) in both PCs and servers with its latest line of processors.

Read more | >

Quantum physicists at the University of Copenhagen are reporting an international achievement for Denmark in the field of quantum technology. By simultaneously operating multiple spin qubits on the same quantum chip, they surmounted a key obstacle on the road to the supercomputer of the future. The result bodes well for the use of semiconductor materials as a platform for solid-state quantum computers.

One of the engineering headaches in the global marathon towards a large functional quantum computer is the control of many basic memory devices – qubits – simultaneously. This is because the control of one qubit is typically negatively affected by simultaneous control pulses applied to another qubit. Now, a pair of young quantum physicists at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute –PhD student, now Postdoc, Federico Fedele, 29 and Asst. Prof. Anasua Chatterjee, 32,– working in the group of Assoc. Prof. Ferdinand Kuemmeth, have managed to overcome this obstacle.

The brain of the quantum computer that scientists are attempting to build will consist of many arrays of qubits, similar to the bits on smartphone microchips. They will make up the machine’s memory.

Read more | >

South Korea has created an intriguing device that allows its citizens to continue staring at their phones while crossing the road safely, but the notion has not received many likes.

On October 11 TikTok footage from a Seoul crossroads showed green and red lights illuminating the curbs, indicating when it’s safe to cross the road, even if you’re staring at your phone screen.

Recently, @naturalkorean has published a TikTok video of the lights eliciting a fairly mixed bag of reactions. Theoretically speaking, it is a great idea to protect people too absorbed in social media to notice their surroundings; however, this type of reckless behaviour should not be encouraged. The video shows a swarm of ‘smombies’ or ‘smart phone-obsessed zombies’ who are glued to their phones as they cross a major downtown street. The scene made me nervous, even as someone who has run into strangers when smombie-ing around.

Read more | >

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes 24% of all the world’s chips, and 92% of the most advanced ones found in today’s iPhones, fighter jets and supercomputers. Now TSMC is building America’s first 5-nanometer fabrication plant, hoping to reverse a decades-long trend of the U.S. losing chip manufacturing to Asia. CNBC got an exclusive tour of the $12 billion fab that will start production in 2024.

» Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC
» Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision.
» Subscribe to CNBC Classic: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCclassic.

About CNBC: From ‘Wall Street’ to ‘Main Street’ to award winning original documentaries and Reality TV series, CNBC has you covered. Experience special sneak peeks of your favorite shows, exclusive video and more.

Connect with CNBC News Online.

Continue reading “Secretive Giant TSMC’s 0 Billion Plan To Fix The Chip Shortage” | >

The tech giant wants to be known for more than social media’s ills.

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

Continue reading “Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name” | >

Facebook has just announced it’s going to hire 10,000 people in Europe to develop the “metaverse”.

This is a concept which is being talked up by some as the future of the internet. But what exactly is it?

**What is the metaverse?
**
To the outsider, it may look like a souped-up version of Virtual Reality (VR) — but some people think the metaverse could be the future of the internet.

In fact, the belief is that it could be to VR what the modern smartphone is to the first clunky mobile phones of the 1980s.

Instead of being on a computer, in the metaverse you might use a headset to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments.

Continue reading “Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?” | >

The truth is these systems aren’t masters of language. They’re nothing more than mindless “stochastic parrots.” They don’t understand a thing about what they say and that makes them dangerous. They tend to “amplify biases and other issues in the training data” and regurgitate what they’ve read before, but that doesn’t stop people from ascribing intentionality to their outputs. GPT-3 should be recognized for what it is; a dumb — even if potent — language generator, and not as a machine so close to us in humanness as to call it “self-aware.”

On the other hand, we should ponder whether OpenAI’s intentions are honest and whether they have too much control over GPT-3. Should any company have the absolute authority over an AI that could be used for so much good — or so much evil? What happens if they decide to shift from their initial promises and put GPT-3 at the service of their shareholders?

Full Story:

Not even our imagination will manage to keep up with technology’s pace.

Continue reading “When Artificial Intelligence Can Revive the Dead” | >

Most of us control light all the time without even thinking about it, usually in mundane ways: we don a pair of sunglasses and put on sunscreen, and close—or open—our window blinds.

But the control of can also come in high-tech forms. The screen of the computer, tablet, or phone on which you are reading this is one example. Another is telecommunications, which controls light to create signals that carry data along .

Scientists also use high-tech methods to control light in the laboratory, and now, thanks to a new breakthrough that uses a specialized material only three atoms thick, they can control light more precisely than ever before.

Read more | >

When’s the last time you chirped, “Hey Google” (or Siri for that matter), and asked your phone for a recommendation for good sushi in the area, or perhaps asked what time sunset would be? Most folks these days perform these tasks on a regular basis on their phones, but you may not have realized there were multiple AI (Artificial Intelligence) engines involved in quickly delivering the results for your request.

In these examples, AI neural network models were used to process natural language recognition, and then also inferred what you were looking for, to deliver relevant search results from internet databases around the globe, but also targeting the most appropriate results based on your location and a number of other factors as well. These are just a couple of examples but, in short, AI or machine learning processing is a big requirement of smartphone experiences these days, from recommendation engines to translation, computational photography and more.

As such, benchmarking tools are now becoming more prevalent, in an effort to measure mobile platform performance. MLPerf is one such tool that nicely covers the gamut of AI workloads, and today Qualcomm is highlighting some fairly impressive results in a recent major update to the MLCommons database. MLCommons is an open consortium comprised of various chip manufacturers and OEMs with founding members like Intel, NVIDIA, Arm, AMD, Google, Qualcomm and many others. The consortium’s MLPerf benchmark measures AI workloads like image classification, natural language processing and object detection. And today Qualcomm has tabulated benchmark results from its Snapdragon 888+ Mobile Platform (a slightly goosed-up version of its Snapdragon 888) versus a myriad of competitive mobile chipsets from Samsung, MediaTek and even and Intel’s 11th Gen Core series laptop chips.

Read more | >