14 OCTOBER2020|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE
Ifyouclose
yourMac
notebookwitha
cameracover
installed,you
mightdamage
yourdisplay
becausethe
clearancebetween
thedisplayand
keyboardis
designedtovery
tighttolerances”
Applewarns its users of the
dangers of using webcam covers
People
thoughtwe
wereavideogame
company. Butwe
areanaccelerated
computing
companywhere
videogameswere
ourfirstkillerapp”
Nvidia CEOJensen Huangsays
the GPU maker is no longerall
about gaming
Correct”
Forthe first time,
US presidentDonald Trump
confirms that the US conducted
acovert cyber attack against
Russia in 2018
Thepotential
isincredible.
Butwe’llonlysee
thefullbenefits–
lowprices,wide
choice,innovative
productsand
services–ifthe
marketsforthese
devicesstayopen
andcompetitive”
European Commission EVP
Margrethe Vestageris
investigating whether Siri
and Alexa are killing
competitioninthe Internet
of Things (IoT)market
Holy cow: Microsoft milks partnership
to spur sustainable farming
MICROSOFTHASJOINEDwith
farminggiantLandO’Lakestospur
sustainablefarmingpracticesand
help farmers become more efficient.
Land O’Lakes, which has 150
million acres of cropland in its
network, will use the partnership to
build aconnected AgTech platform
on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and to let local
rural communities connect to broadband internet.
AgTech will harness Azure FarmBeats to enable
Land O’Lakes to derive insights forintelligent
agriculture solutions and help farmers be more
productive.The two companies will also develop a
Digital Dairy solution that will use edge computing
to capture data from farms with poor
internet coverage,and artificial
intelligence (AI) to provide data-
driven insights fordairy producers.
The solution will use weather,
feed management and animal health
data streams to improve profit
potential, reduce wasteand enhance
traceability through the supply chain.
The firms will also combine theirrural connectivity
initiatives to close the broadband gap and enable
better access to telehealth, educational resources
and digital skilling. As part of this, Microsoftsays
the firmsare working together to turn on free public
Wi-Fi at more than 150 locations across the US.
MICROSOFT-OWNEDGITHUBhas managed to
preserve all active open-source projects hosted on
the service by burying them inside an Arctic vault.
GitHub first revealed its plan to store all of its
open-source software in the Arctic last year,and
now the code-hosting platform has finished, making
sure future generations can access them even if
civilisation collapses within the next 1,000 years.
GitHub’s Director forStrategic Programs, Julia
Metcalf,revealed that the service’s code collection
was deposited intothe vault on 8th July 2020 after
delays caused by thecoronavirus pandemic. The
company’s archive partner Piql wrote21TB of
repository data on to 186 reels of piqlFilm, adigital
photosensitive archival film that can be read by a
computer,orahuman with amagnifying glass.
Piql says archive film is a“purpose-built digital
storage medium that can keep data alive forover
1,000 years with guaranteed future accessibility”.It’s
capable of withstanding “extreme electromagnetic
exposure”and is independent of technology,which
means the data on the film will remain accessible.
The collection now sits inside achamber within a
decommissioned coal mine,under hundreds of
metres of permafrost, on an island in the Norwegian
archipelago of Svalbard. This is also where you’ll find
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is storing seed
samples of many importantcrops in case of disaster.
GitHub says the next phase of the project is to
develop what it calls the Tech Tree.This guide will
also be printed on film, but will be readable by sight,
to help people recover the data in the future.
UK-BASEDAIcomputing startup Graphcore has
unveiled its new 7nm intelligence-processing unit
(IPU), which features 59.4 billion transistors, making
it the ‘most complex’ processor ever made.
The Colossus Mk2 GC200, which snatches the
‘most complex’ title from Nvidia’s A100 GPU –which
itself boasts 54 billion transistors –isalso capable of
integrating 1,472 separateIPU-Cores and executing
8,832 separateparallel computing threads.
Each IPU processor core gets aperformance
boost from aset of Graphcore’s novel
floating-point technologies called AI-Float.
“Bytuning arithmetic implementations
forenergy and performance in Machine
Intelligence computation, we are able
to serve up one petaflops of AI
computeineach IPU-Machine M
1U blade,” said Graphcore co-founder and
CEO Nigel Toon.
“Our Colossus IPUs are unique in having support
forStochastic Rounding on the arithmetic that is
supported in hardware and runs at the full speed of
the processor.This allows the Colossus Mk2 IPU to
keep all arithmetic in 16-bit formats, reducing memory
requirements, saving on read and writeenergy and
reducing energy in the arithmetic logic, while
delivering full accuracy Machine Intelligence results.”
The launch of the new IPUs coincides with the
reveal of Graphcore’s new IPU-M2000 1U blade
tm,designed forhandling large workloads
ue to its 448GB of exchange DRAM and
four Mk2 GC200 chips that offer up to
1petaflops of FP16.16/FP16.SR.
The M2000 delivers “a plug-and-play
petaflops of computeinaunit the size
of apizza box”,according to Graphcore.
The IPU machines can operatestandalone
rbepackaged together in data centre pods.
Code as ice: GitHub buries open-source
archive in an Arctic vault
UK develops ‘most complex’ processor ever
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