Intel has talked with TSMC and Samsung about the Asian companies making some of its best chips, but the Silicon Valley pioneer is still holding out hope for last-minute improvements in its own production capabilities. Bloomberg reports: After successive delays in its chip fabrication processes, Santa Clara, California-based Intel has yet to make a final decision less than two weeks ahead…
Tag: Silicon
Are We Experiencing a Great Software Stagnation?
Long-time programmer/researcher/former MIT research fellow Jonathan Edwards writes a blog called “Alarming Development: Dispatches from the User Liberation Front.” He began the new year by arguing that software “is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996.” Slashdot reader tonique summarizes Edwards’ argument:
In 1996 there were “LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++,…
‘Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.’
Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for…
Will America’s Next President Break Up Facebook?
With 25 days until Joe Biden becomes America’s next president, Politico writes that throughout the US government, “From lawmakers on Capitol Hill to antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission, Washington is training its sights on the world’s largest social network like never before.” Biden’s antitrust enforcers will take ownership of a lawsuit the FTC filed this month threatening to dismantle…
Atomic-Scale Nanowires Can Now Be Produced At Scale
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way…
Firefox 84 Claims Speed Boost from Apple Silicon, Vows to End Flash Support
The Verge reports: Firefox’s latest update brings native support for Macs that run on Apple’s Arm-based silicon, Mozilla announced on Tuesday. Mozilla claims that native Apple silicon support brings significant performance improvements: the browser apparently launches 2.5 times faster and web apps are twice as responsive than they were on the previous version of Firefox, which wasn’t native to Apple’s chips……
Google Waives $1.5 Billion DeepMind Loan as AI Costs Mount
Alphabet’s Google waived a 1.1 billion-pound loan ($1.5 billion) to DeepMind in 2019 after the U.K.-based artificial intelligence lab continued to ramp up the scale of its research and development. From a report: Revenue jumped 158% in 2019, DeepMind said in a financial filing this week. Sales were 265.5 million pounds, up from 102.8 million pounds a year earlier. Its losses…
Scientists Just Set a New World Record In Solar Cell Efficiency
According to a paper published in the journal Science, researchers report they they have now hit an efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell category. ScienceAlert reports: For this type of panel, the long-term target of more than 30 percent is now tantalizingly within reach. The latest lab tests edge ahead of the maximum 28 percent efficiency that…
‘Will Remote Work Kill Innovation?’ Ask Silicon Valley Experts
Remote work “is here to stay,” argues a new article in Silicon Valley’s newspaper The Mercury News (also re-published in the East Bay Times). But they’ve also asked industry professionals around Silicon Valley whether this will hurt our ability to innovate. Software engineer/entrepreneur Joyce Park (who’s worked in Silicon Valley over 20 years): “Fast feedback is what we’re all about in…
Oracle Is Moving Its Headquarters From Silicon Valley To Austin, Texas
Oracle said on Friday it’s moving its headquarters from the Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. CNBC reports: “Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas. We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they…