The year was 1999, and the Intel Pentium III was the most powerful CPU on the market, screaming along at 500MHz. The University of California Berkeley sought to tap into the power of idling PCs to search for aliens with SETI@home. Now, 21 years later, the SETI@home project is coming to an end. This isn’t the end of community involvement in the search for ET, though.
One of the best ways to search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to listen for their radio signals. However, space is really, mind-bogglingly big. The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia collected more data than the SETI project could process, so researchers turned to the ever-expanding collection of home PCs that sat idle much of the day.
SETI@home launched on May 17th, 1999, based on Berkeley’s BOINC distributed computing platform. Users would install the client, and it downloaded blocks of data to analyze when the system was otherwise unoccupied. You could control when SETI@home ran and how much computing power it used. It also came with a cool screensaver of the live data analysis. After the PC processed a block, it would upload the results to UC Berkeley scientists for review.
In a project update, the team said this “hibernation” is necessary because SETI@home has reached a point of “diminishing returns.” The team has collected so much data over the last 21 years, it’s time to sift through the backlog and turn it into usable research. This will eventually become a scientific paper. As of now, SETI@home is still running. However, the project will distribute the last data blocks to users on March 31st.
Thanks to the many volunteers who have helped crunch data for SETI@home in the last two decades. On March 31, the project will stop sending out new work to users, but this is not the end of public engagement in SETI research. pic.twitter.com/P0t0v8w7n4
It’s unclear when or if SETI@home will relaunch for users. The team notes that other researchers at Berkeley might find a use for the massive network of computers already connected to SETI@home. If someone decides to launch a new project in the same vein as SETI@home, the project might begin sending out data blocks again.
This will no doubt come as a disappointment to people who have been running SETI@home for two decades, but there are other distributed computing projects in need of your CPU. The SETI@home team has directed interested users to its list of other BOINC-based computing projects like Asteroids@home, LHC@home, and more. There’s also the popular Folding@home project, which simulates protein folding and molecular dynamics to search for new drugs.
When Google launched Stadia last year, it tried to put a brave face on a deeply uncertain debut. The Stadia launch was barebones, even for what was a relatively barebones service. Five months after launch, things haven’t improved much, with just 28 games currently available on the platform.
A number of game developers gave their thoughts on Stadia and discussed with Business Insider why so few indie developers have shown any interest in porting their games to the platform. The individuals and studios they spoke to raised issues in three broad categories. First, and the one intrinsic to any new platform or service, is that Google Stadia is a brand-new effort with no built-in audience. But because every new product or service goes through this phase, it’s important to have a good strategy for dealing with it. The typical way companies develop new markets is to offer substantial incentives to software developers to port games to its platform. According to the developers themselves, Google isn’t really doing this.
Stadia-offered incentives are variously described as “non-existent,” or involving an amount of money so low, “it wasn’t even part of the conversation.” It seems noteworthy that this is happening to indie developers, specifically. While Shovel Knight and Untitled Goose Game aren’t going to drive the numbers that Doom Eternal or Cyberpunk 2077 will, indie developers don’t need AAA budgets to make it worth their time to port a title to a new platform.
In and of itself, this isn’t necessarily alarming, either. Google is claiming it will launch 120 games on Stadia this year and it appears to be focusing on AAA titles. It’s possible that the company believes it needs to build its market by emphasizing top-tier launches with same-day or soon-after availability rather than building a back catalog of indie titles. It’s possible this difference in funding is part of a difference in strategy.
But if the low audience figures and near-zero funding is bad, the last piece of the puzzle is worse. According to Business Insider, every single developer they spoke to expressed very little faith that Google would put any effort into building Stadia into a long-term service. When a survey of developers reveals that every single one of them is concerned enough about the longevity of your platform to bring it up unprompted, it tends to mean you’ve got a serious PR disaster on your hands.
Google’s response to this news was remarkably tone-deaf. Here’s BI:
When reached for comment, Stadia representative Patrick Seybold said, “The publishers and developers we speak with regularly are very supportive, and want Stadia to succeed. It is also worth pointing out that not every publisher has announced their games for Stadia so far, and more games will continue to be announced in due course.”
In Which Google Reassures Precisely No One
Stadia has a problem: People don’t trust Google. When told that many developers don’t trust Google, Google’s response is “The publishers and developers we talked to want Stadia to succeed!” Imagine if you told your partner or spouse that you had serious concerns about whether you could trust them to keep their word and they responded with “My mom says she trusts me!”
Now, imagine what an actual response that addressed the problem might look like. “We at Google understand that our policy of killing services many people valued has created the fear that we might treat our customers poorly. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to reassure customers and developers that we are in this for the long haul, we are pledging to operate Stadia until at least December 31, 2025.”
That’s not the only option the company might take. Google could alternately pledge to operate the service for at least 12 months after deciding to cancel it, to give people time to play titles they’d previously purchased. It could take a truly radical step and promise that all Stadia customers would receive refunds on every title purchased in the previous 12 months in the event Google decided to cancel the service. It could also make it clear that this guarantee would only apply for the first few years of the service’s life and that it was explicitly being offered as a way to reassure gamers that they could count on Stadia for the long haul.
Google has an unusual product model with Stadia, an unproven distribution system, and severe trust issues. Typically, when companies sincerely want to enter a new, highly competitive market like gaming, they do so with their absolute best foot forward. The original PlayStation pioneered a new approach to third-party game development. Microsoft’s original Xbox was the first console to ship with an integrated ethernet port and Xbox Live revolutionized online play for console gamers. When Valve decided to start requiring its customers to use Steam (and everyone hated Steam at first debut), it tied the requirement to the launch of Half-Life 2, betting that one of the best games in history would be reason enough for people to try its new online service. The Epic Game Store has been highly controversial with gamers, but as far as developers are concerned, it absolutely followed this model. The EGS promise for developers is simple: “Sell your game with us and keep more of the profit.” Valve, meanwhile, has updated the Steam client more in the past year than any recent time I can recall. GOG recently announced its own incredibly generous return policy as a way of building customer loyalty.
My point in recounting all of this history is to illustrate that companies involved in every aspect of gaming commonly try to create customer loyalty by offering good deals or new features. Google could spin a service guarantee to be entirely in the spirit of this kind of outreach, but it doesn’t. Instead, we get the PR equivalent of “My mom thinks I’m cool!” There’s literally zero chance that Google hasn’t noticed the fact that almost every single article about Stadia raises concerns about the platform’s longevity. The company isn’t responding to the issue because it either doesn’t want to commit to supporting its own service or thinks that ignoring the fact that no one trusts it will magically make the problem go away. It won’t. Every month that Google refuses to address the fact that no one trusts Stadia to remain in business only reinforces the perception that the company isn’t serious about its own product.
Then again, it took Microsoft months longer than it should have to realize that the Xbox One unveil was an utter disaster requiring nothing less than a complete and immediate overhaul of the product. But if Google doesn’t figure things out soon, Stadia is going to die — not because it had to be this way, but because Google found it inconvenient to admit nobody trusts it.
This is a solvable problem. The solution is called “Spend the money required to do it right and prioritize good service over immediate profit.” It might require making some guarantees of service or experience that go beyond what Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, or Valve would offer. That’s literally the historical norm for how new companies compete for gaming dollars. When Sega wanted to compete with Nintendo, they designed an entire console game around the idea of an experience different than anything Mario offered. GOG survived for years as the only remote competition for Steam by offering a DRM-free platform. Asking Google to address its own weak points isn’t unreasonable when the company is asking you to pay full price for games with no assurance of long-term access, and the company’s stubborn refusal to perceive that fact is going to prove deadlier to Stadia than any rival ever could.
Ampere has been working on its first ARM CPU architecture intended to challenge Intel and AMD for the data center market, and the company is finally ready to launch the part. The new Altra CPU is a 7nm chip built on an SoC with up to 80 cores. Up until now, Ampere has had the EMAG in-market, but that chip was a single-socket part originally designed by Applied Micro. Altra supports dual-socket cache-coherent operation and the ARMv8.2+ CPU standard (the + is there because Ampere reportedly pulled in future features to get them into silicon more quickly). Each Altra core packs a 64KB L1 I/D cache and 1MB of L2, while the entire CPU is backed by a 32MB L3 cache.
Each CPU core contains two 128-bit SIMD units, which is rather less throughput than an equivalent AMD or Intel CPU would offer. INT8 and FP16 workloads are supported for machine learning support and the Altra is reportedly a 4-wide design with a 3GHz turbo frequency. SMT is not implemented; each core is single-threaded. An 80-core Altra is an 80C/80T system, compared with AMD’s maximum of 64C/128T per socket. TDP is stated to be 210W for the 80-core part according to ServeTheHome.
The Ampere Altra supports 8 channels of DDR4-3200 per chip (4TB of memory support per socket). Like Epyc, Altra offers 128 PCIe lanes per CPU and uses 32 of them for a socket-to-socket connection in a dual-socket configuration, allowing for 192 PCIe lanes in a 2P system. AMD currently uses 48 lanes for socket-to-socket configuration via IF, which means 2P configurations top out at 160 PCIe lanes. AMD can technically use even more lanes for chip-to-chip connectivity but hasn’t fielded any parts in this configuration.
Performance Expectations
Altra is making some significant estimated performance claims, arguing that its 80-core chip will outperform an Epyc 7742 and heavily outperform the Xeon Platinum 8280. The new Intel Xeon Gold 6258R would be expected to replace the Platinum 8280 in this comparison, given that it’s vastly cheaper and offers identical performance. However, Ampere chose to de-rate the Epyc and Intel platforms to account for compiler differences. Essentially, this means Ampere lowered the expected performance of the AMD and Intel platforms by 16.5 percent and 24 percent, respectively.
One other thing to note, however, is that the Ampere Altra estimated on this slide has a 3.3GHz top clock speed, 10 percent higher than the part the company is actually shipping. Given that they claim only a 4 percent advantage over AMD, it’s obvious why they chose to model a higher clock speed. The question of whether we see that clock on a shipping part hasn’t been answered yet. STH has more details on the performance and power comparisons, but there are concerns about the validity of the TDP comparisons, so I’m not going to bother writing them up. Basically, Ampere used rated TDP not measured real-world usage, which raises serious questions about how effective the comparison actually is.
Still, there’s no arguing with the larger point. We’re finally starting to see some ARM companies challenging for data center positions. So far, these efforts are fairly characterized as fledgling, but more firms are tackling the space. Nuvia recently launched its own efforts around future server parts and Amazon has launched its own Graviton parts for cloud instances. Whether they can take meaningful market share from x86 is unclear, but they obviously intend to try.
According to remarks Intel CFO George Davis made at a Morgan Stanley conference this week, the company still believes it has a ways to go before it matches the pace of its foundry competitors and retakes overall process leadership. Reports of his remarks at the conference suggest Intel won’t regain parity with TSMC and possibly Samsung until it launches 7nm parts in 2021, with the firm retaking leadership at the 5nm node. Intel has previously said it would launch a GPU on 7nm in 2021, and Intel CEO Bob Swann has stated that 7nm CPUs will ship in Q4 2021.
A report on the conference from Tom’s Hardware quotes Davis as saying:
So we bring a lot of capability to the table for our customers, in addition to the CPU, and we feel like we’re starting to see the acceleration on the process side that we have been talking about to get back to parity in the 7nm generation and regain leadership in the 5nm generation.
It’s not clear to me if Intel ever specifically stated it would regain leadership at 7nm or if it merely implied this would be the case. Remarks made by Murthy in late 2018 suggested Intel might be targeting 7nm for a return to its previous manufacturing cadence, but didn’t specifically state Intel would overtake its competitors at that node. Here’s the relevant quote: “One thing I will say is that as you look at 7-nanometer, for us this is really now a point in time where we will get EUV back into the manufacturing matrix, and therefore, I think, that will give us a degree of back to the traditional Moore’s Law cadence that we were really talking about.”
Intel hasn’t given a date for when it might introduce 5nm, but a two-year cadence would put the launch in 2023. TSMC expects to be building 3nm chips by 2022, but companies like AMD and Nvidia are node followers now, not the node leaders they used to be. If TSMC ships 3nm in 2022 for Apple, a 2023 launch date for AMD or Nvidia products would actually make good sense — though this assumes that Intel is actually aiming for a 5nm launch in 2023 in the first place.
Frank Words on 10nm
Davis’ comments are noteworthy for their overall assessment of Intel’s 10nm node and the company’s willingness to be honest about that situation.
As we said back at our analyst day in May of 19: Look, this isn’t just going to be the best node that Intel has ever had. It’s going to be less productive than 14nm, less productive than 22nm… the fact is that I wanted to be clear what was happening during the 10nm generation. The fact is, it isn’t going to be as strong a node as people would expect from 14nm or what they’ll see in 7nm.
There seem to be some parallels between the troubles Intel is having on 10nm and the knock-on effects on its products and some of the issues AMD had with fab production and node progression back over a decade ago, when it still owned its own fabs. Intel can’t just flip a switch to change a line from 14nm to 10nm or vice-versa, and managing demand for existing products while transitioning capacity over to building new hardware is a difficult balance to strike. Unlike AMD in the mid-to-late 2000s, Intel is making record quarterly profits — but new nodes often suffer from yield issues.
Image by Intel
There’s a quote that I like to refer back to about the difficulty of microprocessor design. Supposedly by Robert Palmer, former CEO of Digital, it goes like this: “Designing microprocessors is like playing Russian roulette. You put a gun to your head, pull the trigger, and find out four years later if you blew your brains out.”
Intel’s difficulties at 10nm are a perfect illustration of the problem. Six years ago, Intel delayed finishing Fab 42. Had Fab 42 come online on its original schedule, Intel would be facing fewer capacity constraints right now. Intel also made the decision to move its smartphone modem manufacturing business in-house, which ate up some degree of additional capacity. In the past, Intel had decided to link its node transitions and new architecture development efforts in a sequence it called tick-tock. Tick-tock worked brilliantly for nearly a decade, before coming apart on the shoals of 10nm.
At some point, Intel made the decision to move on from 10nm more quickly than it would have if this had been a typical node. Frankly, that’s probably the right thing to do. 10nm simply hasn’t been a typical node, and it may be that EUV is capable of resolving some of the issues that have made it more difficult to put 10nm in production.
As for the question of where this will leave Intel versus AMD, that’s rather more complicated than it might seem. AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 APUs will launch soon. We already know that Intel has a 10nm mobile refresh coming later this year and mobile has been the toughest place for AMD to gain market share against its rival. If Intel continues to improve CPU IPC and can win back some of the clock speed it gave up in the Coffee Lake – Ice Lake transition, we could see highly competitive scenarios even if TSMC has a process node advantage. We haven’t heard anything about 10nm desktop CPUs, but capabilities like AVX-512 support may also prove to be an effective bulwark for Intel in certain contexts.
Overall, Intel is warning investors to expect gross margin pressure from multiple fast product ramps and for the company to lose some market share to AMD as it ramps up its efforts in mobile and server. The guidance it gave at Morgan Stanley doesn’t fundamentally change that stance, but Intel did appear to be warning a bit more strongly than before that it might be facing headwinds.
How I wish my smartphone had a microSDXC slot. With less than 6GB out of 128GB of storage space free on my Xiaomi Mi6 smartphone, I will soon have to start carefully combing through my files to make extra space. If you are fortunate to have a microSDXC slot on your phone, however, you can avoid this fate by picking up one of SanDisk’s Ultra 256GB microSDXC cards, which should provide ample storage space for years to come.
If you are lucky enough to have a microSDXC slot on your smartphone, this tiny chip can give you more storage space on your mobile device than you will know what to do with. In addition to its large 256GB capacity, this microSDXC can also transfer data fairly quickly at a rate of up to 100MB/s. It’s currently marked down from $34.50 to just $29.00 at Amazon.
This external drive can store up to 5TB of data with password protection and 256-bit AES hardware encryption. The drive also has a durable metal enclosure, and you can get it from Amazon marked down from $159.99 to $99.99.
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Google started rolling out its latest Pixel “feature drop” yesterday, which includes new capabilities exclusive to Google’s Pixel phones. The headlining additions include scheduled dark them and new emoji, but Google also slipped an interesting machine learning accomplishment into the new update. Pixel phones now have Apple-style 3D Touch capabilities, but they do it via software instead of hardware.
Apple launched 3D Touch (initially called Force Touch) back in 2014 on the iPhone 6S. 3D Touch allows Apple (and developers) to trigger different actions based on how hard the user presses the screen. Apple accomplishes this with a network of actuators on the back of the touchscreen. The piezoelectric effect from pressing on the screen tells the system when someone is tapping versus pressing harder, and Apple’s software turns that into different inputs.
Clearly, an OTA update can’t add actuators to Google’s Pixel screens, but Google managed to do something similar with machine learning. Capacitive touchscreens don’t detect force — they just understand a touch versus no touch. However, the signal from a tap can vary based on how much of your finger comes in contact with the screen, and that’s how Google simulated the “firm touch” feature of the latest Pixel update.
If you tap on the screen normally, nothing changes. If you press harder, more of your finger will come in contact with the screen. Google used machine learning to characterize how the touch input changes when people press harder on the screen. This involved modeling thousands of finger sizes to accurately determine when someone is attempting a firm touch.
3D Touch on the iPhone requires a network of actuators under the display.
Currently, firm touch is an alternative to a long-press, which is common across Android to accessing context menus and other features. A firm touch is simply a faster way to do the same thing. It’s possible Google could make this a feature with specific functionality, but not all device makers even use the same touchscreen interaction APIs. So, this may remain a Pixel-only feature, and that means few developers would be interested in creating custom features.
The March Pixel update is still rolling out to users. Google says it should be available for everyone in the next several weeks. It’s taking this update a bit slower than most monthly patches because there are so many functional alterations. If you don’t want to wait, you can sideload the update with files from Google’s developer site.
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