Lifeboat Foundation

SAN JOSE, Calif. – The U.S. Department of Defense is working with partners on multiple technologies that would make any foundry a trusted source to make classified ASICs for the military. If the government is successful it will be able to tap leading-edge process technologies from multiple fabs by 2019.

The U.S. government currently works with a single fab now operated by Globalfoundries and limited to 32nm and higher design rules. The partnership is a continuation of a longstanding “trusted foundry” deal with IBM, which sold its fabs to GF in 2015.

“We have a very good partner in Globalfoundries, and many people are still there from the [former] IBM…[that help] manage that government ASIC business, and that still works quite well for 32nm and up,” said Bill Chappell, a director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that oversees the trusted foundry programs.

For the last few months, Intel and AMD have been playing a bit of one-sided chicken. With AMD’s Ryzen and Epyc initial launch cycles nearly complete, we’ve seen the smaller CPU company aggressively take the fight to Intel in CPU pricing. And the market has responded — the Ryzen 7 1700 is now the second-best selling CPU on Amazon. Six of the top 15 CPUs on Amazon are made by AMD (with 5 Ryzen SKUs) and eight of the top 20. Now there are rumors that Intel will respond to AMD’s moves in the consumer space as well, possibly with new Core i7 and i5 offerings that add six-core CPUs to Intel’s desktop lines.

There’s already some precedent for this. Intel’s Core X series and the recent Skylake-SP launch are both meant to reposition Santa Clara against its rival, particularly the Core i7-7820X, which has a list price of $589 to $599. Be advised, if you intend to overclock, you need to read about the problems overclockers have encountered with the X299 chipset. But when running at stock speed, you can already buy an eight-core Intel CPU for $600. While that’s $100 more than what you’ll pay for a Ryzen 7 1800X, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the Broadwell-based Core i7-6900K, which was an $1,100 chip.

Intel slashed prices on certain competitive SKUs within the new Core X series to bring them more in line with Ryzen, so it’s not surprising to hear that the company might fight back on the core count front. This news, according to CanardPC, claims Intel will introduce two six-core models with its new Coffee Lake CPUs. The Core i7-8700K will have six cores, 12 threads, 12MB of L3, a 95W TDP, and a base clock of 3.7GHz. Meanwhile, the Core i5 8600K would be a six-core chip at 3.6GHz with no Hyper-Threading, 9MB of L3, and the same 95W TDP.

Continue reading “Intel May Respond to AMD Ryzen With Six-Core i5, i7 CPUs” »

A new nano printing technique using graphene creates integrated circuits that are just atoms thick, and could lead to huge advances in speed and power.

In this video, co-author D. Fox Harrell discusses “Reimagining the Avatar Dream,” a Contributed Article in the July 2017 Communications of the ACM that argues for the need to reconsider the social and cultural impacts of creating social networks based on virtual identities.

http://ow.ly/B8LN30dw7O0

According to the report, the US Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and other special forces are looking to improve troops’ performance by looking at their bodies at a genetic level (stock)

Earlier this year the AirForce successfully tested a helmet that can monitor brain activity and tell if the pilot is feeling stressed or panicked.

Continue reading “Biosensors could give soldiers superhuman fighting abilities” »

US military reveals $65m funding for ‘Matrix’ projects to plug human brains directly into a computer…

The US military has revealed $65 of funding for a programme to develop a ‘brain chip’ allowing humans to simply plug into a computer.

Continue reading “US military reveals ‘Matrix’ projects to plug brains into a computer” »

DARPA’s quest for high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has a new partner in Paradromics, which will be leading one of the agency’s six BCI-development consortia. This is just one of the projects working to develop a breakthrough BCI right now.

The U.S. Department of Defense has created six consortia to develop brain-computer interface (BCIs) technologies and is backing them up with a $65 million investment. On July 10, the Department chose Paradromics Inc., and neural interface company, to lead one of the six groups.

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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It should be possible to build a silicon version of the human cerebral cortex with the transistor technology that was in production in 2013. The resulting machine would take up less than a cubic meter of space and consume less than 100 watts, not too far from the human brain. This article is summarizing the work of Jennifer Hasler and Bo Marr writing in Frontiers of Neuroscience – Finding a roadmap to achieve large neuromorphic hardware systems.

Computational power efficiency for biological systems is 8–9 orders of magnitude higher (better) than the power efficiency wall for digital computation. Analog techniques at a 10 nm node can potentially reach this same level of biological computational efficiency. Figure 1 show huge potential for neuromorphic systems, showing the community has a lot of room left for improvement, as well as potential directions on how to achieve these approaches with technology already being developed; new technologies only improve the probability of this potential being reached.

Continue reading “Roadmap to human cortex scale neuromorphic hardware” »