The Air Force is using HTC Vive virtual reality headsets in a program called "Pilot Training Next" to train pilots to fly in half the time that it normally takes. Pilots can link up with up to 20 other students to train together. But the most revealing statistic is that the price per VR headsets is only $1,000 and each VR simulator setup costs $15,000; so a room of 20 simulators is around $300,000. The old simulator costs ~$4.5 million and each student has to wait in line for their turn to try it out. 12 pilots out of 30 who trained using the VR headsets earned their wings in 4 months, while it typically takes a full year in a simulator to become proficient enough to pass.
The Vive headsets can also be configured to bring the students right into practicing a certain maneuver, or they can be linked up with the other 20 students at the same time so they can train and fly together in virtual reality. The VR sims also use biometrics such as heart monitors and pupil measurement to register whether the students are truly learning -- which traditional simulators cannot do. The Air Force can also capture a real student flight and then bring it into the VR simulator, allowing students to retrace their steps and learn where they can improve.
The latest Global Internet Phenomena Report from Sandvine details how much downstream bandwidth popular video streaming services use in proportion to the entirety of the internet. The first interesting statistic is that Netflix uses 15% of the downstream bandwidth in the world and 19.1% in the USA. Amazon Prime Video actually uses more downstream bandwidth than YouTube, and the worldwide usage to stream video is 57.7% of the overall downstream bandwidth used.
Netflix remains the 800-pound gorilla of the streaming world: Video from the service consumes a significant 15% of all internet bandwidth globally, the most of any single application. That's according to the latest Global Internet Phenomena Report from Sandvine, a vendor of bandwidth-management systems. Netflix was followed by HTTP media streams, representing 13.1% of all downstream traffic; YouTube (11.4%); web browsing (7.8%); and MPEG transport streams (4.4%).
Xilinx is known as the creator of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), but now they want to conquer the artificial intelligence (AI) field. Today they unveiled the Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) which can be used with AI and many other technologies. As the largest player in the FPGA market, Xilinx has been competing against Intel and NVIDIA for awhile, but things will change in 2019. The new 7nm ARM-based Xilinx Versal family will be 2x - 8x times faster and 4x more efficient than Nvidia GPUs today in the inference benchmark. Versal completely destroys the Intel offerings as it is 43x - 72x faster than Intel Xeon processors in the same inference benchmark. The Xilinx Versal family will use a comprehensive sets of tools and software that will be revealed next year.
Xilinx also announced a partnership with AMD to combine two 32C/64T AMD EPYC 7551 server CPUs with eight of the freshly-announced Xilinx Alveo U250 acceleration cards for high-performance, real-time AI inference processing. The result is a world-record* 30,000 images per-second inference throughput on GoogLeNet; a widely used convolutional neural network. The Xilinx ML Suite allows compatibility with such machine learning (ML) technologies such as TensorFlow.
The Scalar Engines are built from the dual-core Arm Cortex-A72, providing a 2X increase in per-core single-threaded performance compared to Xilinx's previous-generation Arm Cortex-A53 core. A combination of advanced architecture and power improvements from the 7nm FinFET process yield a 2X improvement in DMIPs/watt over the earlier 16nm implementation. The ASIL-C certified(1) UltraScale+ Cortex-R5 Scalar Engines migrate forward to 7nm with additional systemlevel safety features based on learning from Xilinx's current automotive volume deployments.
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) server vendor revenues are growing despite a decline in the number of servers shipped according to IDC. Server vendor revenue increased 29% although shipments decreased by 3.7%. Second quarter EMEA server revenues are up 18.7% from a euro standpoint to EUR3.4 billion. The first shipments of AMD EPYC processors have arrived in Western Europe and France is actively building AWS and Microsoft datacenters around Paris and Marseille.
"The second quarter of 2018 saw the first shipments of EPYC processors in Western Europe. Expectations are that these processors will align more closely to Moore's Law, a factor that will only drive faster adoption in the future," said Eckhardt Fischer, senior research analyst, IDC Western Europe.
Apple has remained a hardware-centric company but supply chain makers in Taiwan have begun questioning the company's business model. Competitors of Apple are branching off into emerging tech such as IoT, cloud service and AI to shore up their portfolios. This is in stark contrast to Apple which has focused on expensive hardware releases and a closed ecosystem. Taiwan supply chain makers are watching the sales of Apple iPhone products to see if Apple can continue the trend of expanding its market share.
But the fact that Amazon and Google have been making headway in the voice interface market against Siri indicates that Apple's traditional strategy of promoting its hardware devices using its brand premium under a closed ecosystem may not be much of an advantage anymore, commented the sources. The shortcoming of such a policy is more evidence in the sale of Apple TV and HomePad products and has also resulted in a slowdown in shipments of MacBook and iMac prior to their product life cycles, pointed the sources.
This is all based on one report from BlueFin Research Partners, but The Street is reacting very favorably for Intel, and not so much for AMD. As of typing this, Intel is up 4% and AMD has dropped a whopping 5.5%. There looks to be little more said than this. "Intel's second-half production levels suggest upside to analyst revenue estimates for the fourth quarter and first quarter of 2019." So let's wait and see what comes out of this and if anything specific about 10nm production actually comes to light. As surely previous news has not been pretty for Big Blue.
On Monday, RBC Capital Markets and Barclays predicted Intel's earnings would be impacted in the coming quarters as it grapples with a processor shortage. RBC lowered its target price to $55 from $57 and maintained its "sector perform" rating while Barclays lowered its rating to "underweight" from "equal weight" and reduced its price target to $38 from $53 — a 20% downside to where shares settled on Monday.
On Friday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that bans internet bots from pretending they're people. Automated accounts are still permitted, but they'll need to be clearly marked as non-human accounts.
This bill would, with certain exceptions, make it unlawful for any person to use a bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity for the purpose of knowingly deceiving the person about the content of the communication in order to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election. The bill would define various terms for these purposes. The bill would make these provisions operative on July 1, 2019.
Red Hydrogen One specifications have leaked courtesy of Android Enterprise via GizmoChina, and they include 6GB of RAM, Snapdragon 835 processor, 5.7-inch screen with a resolution of 2560x1440, and 128GB of internal storage. The fingerprint sensor is side mounted and there is a real 3.5mm headphone jack on the device! Shipments start on October 9th. Photos taken by early users of the Red Hydrogen One are finally showing up on the internet. Some early adopters say that the screen is more 3D than holographic.
Along with starting shipments for the customers on October 9 for the customers who pre-ordered the device, the Red Hydrogen One is also scheduled to launch via AT&T, Verizon, and Mexico's Telcel on November 2. Some lucky folks already have the device. These proud new smartphone owners are wasting no time hitting up social media to show off their Red Hydrogen One photos.
As previously reported, Google is building a cutting edge smart city in Toronto, Canada. Featuring apartments, offices, ships, and schools inside a 12 acre area, the development project will be stuffed with technology like smart sidewalks and networked trash cans. However, in light of recent privacy concerns surrounding Google, Toronto residents are starting to wonder who will control all that data gathered from the tech. The people behind the project seemingly resent the association with Alphabet's data mining tendencies, claiming they don't intend to give up "the privacy and security that everyone deserves." That hasn't stopped prominent Toronto developers, government experts, and even Blackberry's former chief from raising serious red flags.
"How can (Waterfront Toronto), a corporation established by three levels of democratically elected government, have shared values with a limited, for-profit company whose premise is embedded data collection?" Di Lorenzo asked.
The original writer of the Witcher novels, Andrzej Sapkowski, is demanding "at least" sixty million Polish Zlotys (equivalent to about $16.2 million USD) from Witcher game developer and publisher CD Projekt. The author and his lawyers claim Sapkowski's compensation is too low relative to the success of the Witcher franchise, and that the original contract only covered "the first in a series of games." In response, the developer called the claims "groundless." Despite the hostile legal language, the original letter claims that Sapkowski doesn't want to go to court over this, while the Witcher devs say "It is the Company's will to maintain good relations with authors of works which have inspired CD PROJEKT RED's own creations. Consequently, the Board will go to great lengths to ensure amicable resolution of this dispute." Interestingly, in a 2017 interview with Eurogamer, Andrzej Sapkowski criticized himself for accepting a lump payment instead of a percentage of the IP's profits.
"I was stupid enough to sell them rights to the whole bunch," he says. "They offered me a percentage of their profits. I said, 'No, there will be no profit at all - give me all my money right now! The whole amount.' It was stupid. I was stupid enough to leave everything in their hands because I didn't believe in their success. But who could foresee their success? I couldn't."
During a recent survey, Juniper Research has found evidence of increased consumer churn in various video streaming services. It is important to note that most consumers in the US and China are paying for 3 subscription video on demand services (SVOD) because no one service satisfies them. But because these SVOD services are adding more curated content to satiate their customers; the cost of SVOD services is increasing. Thus owning 3 SVOD services suddenly becomes a burden and the consumer has to choose which SVOD services has the most value to keep. Amazon Prime (-2.9%), HBO (-19.2%), and Now TV are facing subscriber retention issues while Netflix (6.3%), which is set to spend 13 billion on content this year, has grown its customer base.
Research author Lauren Foye noted: "The use of multiple subscriptions suggests that no one provider offers enough to currently satisfy consumers. Juniper finds a growing danger in users reducing, or switching SVOD subscriptions, as monthly fees inevitably rise as a result of ever-increasing content spend; Netflix alone is set to spend $13 billion this year." The research also found that the curation of content is set to become a growing issue, with the need to engage consumers as critical, lest SVOD providers see unsatisfactory services cancelled.
Stacking silicon chips on top of each other and connecting them with micrometer-scale vertical wires was once exotic technology. Nowadays, through silicon vias are found in relatively affordable consumer products, like AMD's Fury and Vega GPUs or in high capacity workstation DDR4. However, researchers in Germany want to take the technology one step farther by building transistors though the vertical layers. The TSVFETS, as Felix Winkler calls them, can be linked up to form larger designs like SRAM memory cells or inverter circuits. However, the researchers also see the new technology being used to protect valuable chip designs.
In addition to adding some control electronics within the interposer, the TSVFET could act as a kind of camouflage to prevent the reverse engineering of a chip or to keep contract manufacturers from producing systems on the sly. Chip designers fear that a foundry contracted to make 1 million chips for a designer might instead make 2 million and secretly sell the other half themselves, explains Winkler. Processors and other complex chips usually have a dozen or more layers of copper interconnects to link the transistors in the silicon together to form circuits. So one solution is to have one foundry build the bottom layers of interconnect and another build the top layers. That way neither manufacturer has the whole design. But a smart interposer, powered by TSVFETs, might be a simpler solution, Winkler argues. One manufacturer could produce all the interconnect layers so long as a different one built the interposer. With its TSVFET-powered logic, the interposer would form a final fail-safe of connections, without which the system wouldn't work.
According to a report by Digitimes Research, OLED displays aren't coming to the market as quickly as expected. The researchers point to Apple's use of an LCD panel in the iPhone XR, and also claim that "the availability of the new production capacity for AMOLED panels has come by rather slowly." While handset AMOLED panels are expected to reach a market penetration rate of 44.5% by 2022, the negative LCD panel growth in the handset industry is much steeper than the "small to medium" LCD industry overall, implying that OLED technology isn't being adopted very quickly outside of handsets.
Global shipments of small- to medium-size TFT LCD panels are expected to decline at a CAGR of 3.5% from 2018 to reach 2.02 billion units in 2023 due to the increasing popularity of AMOLED panels and the retirement of older-generation LCD lines by Japan- and Korea-based flat panel makers, according to Digitimes Research.
Amazon has raised the minimum wage for all US employees to $15 starting on November 1st. This includes all full-time, part-time, temporary, seasonal, and even those associates employed from temp agencies. This will benefit the 250,000 Amazon employees and the 100,000 seasonal employees typically hired for the upcoming holiday season. Amazon has pledged to use its clout to gain Congressional support for a raise to the federal minimum wage.
"We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO. "We're excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us." Amazon's public policy team will also begin advocating for an increase in the federal minimum wage. "We will be working to gain Congressional support for an increase in the federal minimum wage. The current rate of $7.25 was set nearly a decade ago," said Jay Carney, Senior Vice President of Amazon Global Corporate Affairs. "We intend to advocate for a minimum wage increase that will have a profound impact on the lives of tens of millions of people and families across this country."
In response to requests, the Seattle Police Department launched a service aimed at protecting residents from swatting attempts. The service page sums up swatting pretty well, calling it a "deliberate and malicious act that creates an environment of fear and unnecessary risk, and in some cases, has led to loss of life". To protect themselves, Seattle dwellers can create a user profile on the "SMART 911" online registry with their name, address, phone number, and other relevant info. 911 operators then check this database when they receive calls. If swatting concerns have been registered online, first responders are notified on their way to the reported incident. The service is explicitly designed not to interfere with emergency service response times, and the Seattle Police will still respond to any and all calls. The Seattle Police Department also uploaded a swatting PSA, which you can see below:
Swatting is a crime. For those unfamiliar with the term, swatting is the act of creating a hoax 911 call typically involving hostages, gunfire, or other acts of extreme violence, with the goal of diverting emergency public safety resources to an unsuspecting person's residence. Anyone can be the target of swatting, but victims are typically associated with the tech industry, video game industry, and/or the online broadcasting community.
Well, what do we have here? I see ASUS ROG Strix Z390-E Gaming, ASUS Prime X390-P, and some ASUS Prime Z390-A motherboards somewhere on rack that looks ready to be pushed out to the front of a retail store? Now will Intel be able to make enough CPUs to take care of the full rack? Inquiring minds want to know. Thanks to @SixFootDuo for sharing the picture. And yes, in this instance you are forgiven for holding your camera the "wrong way."
Tesla has made progress ramping up their production lines as the electric car manufacturer has produced ~80,000 vehicles in the third quarter according to sources familiar with the company. Electrek says that Tesla made almost as many cars in 3Q as the last two quarters combined. 53,000 Model 3 cars were manufactured in Q3 which is a 187% boost over the last quarter.
Undoubtedly, this is Tesla's most impressive quarter to date in terms of production. There were some ups and downs for Model 3 production and Tesla clearly didn't achieve its goal of 6,000 units per week, but 187% increase quarter-over-quarter is still incredible. Now the delivery results could be even crazier.
NVIDIA has seen its stock reach all time highs as it surged 3% to $289.36 at the close of trading today. The stock was able to eclipse the $292.06 mark briefly during the day. This means that NVIDIA stock is up 50% for the year. Analysts don't believe that AMD will launch a new graphics card in 2018 to challenge NVIDIA and gamers will flock to Turing for real-time ray tracing. NVIDIA will remain unchallenged in the datacenter for the foreseeable future.
For their part, shares of AMD closed up 1.7% at $31.42, below their 12-year closing high of $32.72. AMD currently ranks as the best performing stock on the S&P 500 for the year with a 206% gain.
Phone phishing scams are becoming more sophisticated as scam artists gain access to stolen data. They are now calling victims with spoofed Caller ID numbers that look like their financial institution and are armed with information like the last 4 digits of your credit or debit card, address, Social Security number, etc. They then ask the victim for the CVV 3 digit number on the back of the card and then the victim's pin number. They promise this is just to change the pin number on the new card that they are mailing so that it matches the old card. Some even ask the victim to type the pin number into the phone for security purposes. At that point the victim is penniless and the criminals have disappeared into the dark recesses of the internet to buy more data from security breaches.
Answering a call on his mobile device from a phone number in Missouri, Jon was greeted with the familiar four-note AT&T jingle, followed by a recorded voice saying AT&T was calling to prevent his phone service from being suspended for non-payment. "It then prompted me to enter my security PIN to be connected to a billing department representative," Jon said. "My number was originally an AT&T number (it reports as Cingular Wireless) but I have been on T-Mobile for several years, so clearly a scam if I had any doubt. However, I suspect that the average Joe would fall for it."
Google has kicked off Project Stream. It is a technical test in order to figure out all the ins and outs around interactive game streaming. This will all be done through your Chrome Browser. If you want to sign up for the test, you can hit this link. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will be starting up in October the 5th for testing.
Streaming media has transformed the way we consume music and video, making it easy to instantly access your favorite content. It’s a technically complex process that has come a long way in a few short years, but the next technical frontier for streaming will be much more demanding than video.
We’ve been working on Project Stream, a technical test to solve some of the biggest challenges of streaming. For this test, we’re going to push the limits with one of the most demanding applications for streaming—a blockbuster video game.
Sources are alluding to Amazon releasing a free Fire TV exclusive video service through their subsidiary IMDB. The service is described as similar to Hulu and will use 1st and 3rd party data collected by Amazon and partners to tailor advertising to appeal to individual viewers. This is the first time that Amazon has allowed marketers access to the vast pool of customer data at the eCommerce giant. When Amazon's data is combined with 3rd party data, marketers will be able to tell when exactly to run their ads in the video stream. Amazon is considering an ad-supported version for Prime Video.
On the new service, advertisements can appear between content, and marketers will be able to wrap ads around an embedded video "player," similar to the experience on many web sites. The company has been in discussions with at least three major media companies to bring their programming to the new Fire TV service, according to sources familiar with the talks. Content will include libraries of past shows and movies.
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According to momomo_u gs on Twitter, Amazon listed a "9th gen" Intel i9 processor with 8 cores, 16 threads, and a $582.50 price tag . The screenshot of the Amazon webpage also revealed some interesting, dodecahedron shaped packaging. Another screenshot posted by the same user shows an October 19th release and NDA embargo date. Obviously, all this info has to be taken with a giant grain of salt, but it's certainly not the first 9900k leak we've seen.
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