“Earlier this week Apple announced their new, ARM-based ‘Apple Silicon’ machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards,” writes Mike Croucher, technical evangelist at The Numerical Algorithms Group. “Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. At the time of writing…
Tag: Silicon
Apple Silicon M1 Chip In MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro
The first benchmark of Apple’s M1 chip shows that the multi-core performance of the new MacBook Air with 8GB RAM beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. “That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870,” reports MacRumors. The MacBook Air…
What is a supernova?
A supernova is a star’s colossal explosion at the end of its life, potentially outshining its entire galaxy. Read about the causes and types of supernovae here. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-what-is-a-supernova…
Meet the hell planet with a magma ocean and rocky rain
Exoplanet K2-141b is fiery hot world that circles so close to its star that 1 side of the planet features a deep ocean of molten lava. Meanwhile, the other side is freezing cold. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/k2-141b-lava-planet-with-magma-ocean-rocky-rain-supersonic-winds-super-earth…
UK Firm To Turn Moon Rock Into Oxygen and Building Materials
A British firm has won a European Space Agency contract to develop the technology to turn moon dust and rocks into oxygen, leaving behind aluminium, iron and other metal powders for lunar construction workers to build with. The Guardian reports: If the process can be made to work well enough, it will pave the way for extraction facilities on the moon…
Apple’s New M1 Macs Won’t Work With External GPUs
Today, Apple showed off the first Macs powered by its new M1 CPU, delivering impressive performance and excellent battery life, however they won’t come without any compromises. According to Engadget, citing Paul Gerhardt’s tweet, “tech spec pages for the new machines reveal that none of them are compatible with external GPUs that connect via Thunderbolt.” From the report: Only some people…
A One Hundred Thousand-Fold Enhancement In the Nonlinearity of Silicon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers led by Osaka University and National Taiwan University created a system of nanoscale silicon resonators that can act as logic gates for light pulses. … [The scientists] have increased the nonlinearity of silicon 100,000 times by creating a nano-optical resonator, so that all-optical switches can be operated using a…
Hackers Can Now Reverse Engineer Intel Updates Or Write Their Own Custom Firmware
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have extracted the secret key that encrypts updates to an assortment of Intel CPUs, a feat that could have wide-ranging consequences for the way the chips are used and, possibly, the way they’re secured. The key makes it possible to decrypt the microcode updates Intel provides to fix security vulnerabilities and…
Facebook Tells Academics To Stop Monitoring Its Political Ads
couchslug shares a report from The Register: Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform. The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering’s Online Transparency Project’s Ad Observatory violates Facebook’s terms of service…
‘Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet’
The New York Times’ looks at “a deal that controls the internet” — Apple’s agreement to feature Google as the preselected search engine for iPhones, saying America’s Justice Department views it “as a prime example of what prosecutors say are Google’s illegal tactics to protect its monopoly and choke off competition…” The scrutiny of the pact, which was first inked 15…