Industry news from all over the world, about the conquest of the world of people by artificial intelligence and about new products MediaTek presented at India Mobile Congress 2017.
SSDs are getting smarter.
Fund Chairman (CEO) Phison Pua Kane
Phison Electronics Corp (群 聯 電子), which develops and manufactures controllers for solid-state drives (SSD), plans to introduce AI (artificial intelligence) into its products. Already in 2018 we are promised to enter the market of 'smart' hard drives. Phison Foundation Chairman Pua Khein-seng 潘健成 explains the reasons for the technological breakthrough: 'Currently, people get tons of information from the Internet and social networks like Google or Facebook that need to be sorted and analyzed. sometimes instantly. We hope to incorporate AI technology into our products and use it to solve the complex problem of sorting and analyzing big data. Since data traffic doubles every year, we conclude that the human brain can no longer do this job. Using AI and deep machine learning, the company aims to create smarter controllers that deliver faster read and write speeds than conventional SSD controllers, in addition to eliminating and reducing error rates. '
Old and 'not smart' Phison controller
Unfortunately, in the original material there is absolutely no information about the expected speeds of the new memory, or about the price. But the idea that the SSD will be able to understand itself, without a pointer from the operating system and the person, is very impressed, what to save (or provide read access) in the first place, and what can wait. I hope that this innovation will help solve another problem – the lagging of OS capabilities from those of hardware. I will give an example – not long ago Evgeny Vildyaev and I conducted an experiment on his HTC U11, where the applied standards for receiving and recording information from external sources to an internal storage device make it possible to record information in at least two channels simultaneously. If the OS allowed, then we would see such an effect with a massive update of applications on Google Play. That is, applications would not be updated one at a time and in turn, but in pairs and simultaneously. But alas, the current generation of the OS does not allow this, although the hardware is already ready. If Phison succeeds in doing what they have in mind, then the smartphone owner will have a completely different experience with the speed of the device. Remember your surprise when instead of HDD you put an SSD into your PC, the effect will be the same. We look forward to this technology, but only if the AI in the Phison controller is not recruited by foreign intelligence services.
Moore, hold on, we are with you!
In 1965, in an interview with Electronics magazine, semiconductor design engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit chip would double every two years. Since then, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge and, at the very least, Moore's law has been observed, although it was under the threat of failure.
Gordon Moore, lawmaker
Previously, the implementation of the law was ensured by reducing the size of transistors, but, it seems, problems have arisen with an insurmountable wall when the production of chips is moved from 10 nm to 5 nm. The original material is filled with different kinds of statements, but here's the main thing:
- Some manufacturers are trying to solve the problem of using new materials, among them graphene, silicon and germanium alloys, gallium alloys. But the developers cannot solve various side problems.
- Other manufacturers are trying to increase the number of transistors by placing them (and their constituent parts) in different variations in three-dimensional space, i.e. it is about sealing the layout. But this method also has its limits.
- The doubling of the number of transistors on a silicon substrate has not yet been achieved even in theory, which is what the supporters of both approaches report.
Let's wish the developers good luck, because if they fail in the future, we will lose various interesting things. For example, games in 20k resolution and real 3D reality, when the eye cannot distinguish the drawn world from the real one. All of this requires computing power that 10nm chips can only provide in theory. The dimensions of such a computer cannot remain within the ATX (ordinary PC), the imagination draws a room filled with servers.
AI captures everything it can reach.
This is what you can call the news from the big AI event in Beijing. In particular, the CEO of Nvidia Huang Rensun (Jen-Hsun Huang) spoke about the demand for AI computing accelerators in the global market. So, to quickly deploy neural networks and speed up the work of all its services, Nvidia accelerators settled in Google, Baidu, Tencent, Amazon, Microsoft, JD.com, Alibaba, iFflytek, Hikvision, WeChat and 1200 other largest companies in the world. It's a pity, but Yandex is not in the shortlist.
Huang Rensun, cheerful and cheerful
What will these AIs and neural networks do? They will effectively and without human intervention correct human errors. Why can't you do without them? Huang Rensun cited a few numbers that explain everything – every day 60 billion video frames are uploaded to Youtube (each needs to be processed), Google Translate translates 140 billion words every day. With the processing of such a stream of information and correction of errors in it, humanity cannot cope without AI.
Cloud computing element for AI Nvidia's HGX platform
What can you say here? Long live Skynet?
Mediatek introduced mobile chipsets МТ6739 and Helio P23.
The new chipsets were unveiled at India Mobile Congress 2017. According to representatives MediaTek, MT6739 and P23 are made specifically for the fast growing 4G market in India. You shouldn't pay special attention to these words, I believe that they say so to everyone.
A prototype smartphone on a new chipset MediaTek
The MT6739 SoC includes a CPU cluster of 4 Cortex A-53 cores (1.5 GHz), the GPU is represented by IMG PowerVR GE8100 (dark horse). The video chip is interesting in that it allows you to connect displays with an aspect ratio of 18: 9 and HD + resolution (720×1440 pixels) to the chipset. The news specifically states that this allows the economy class to repeat the 'premium design' of the flagships. The SoC supports LPDDR3 RAM (maximum capacity up to 3 GB), two cameras (main up to 13 MP), and WorldMode LTE Cat.4 modem (including eMBMS, HPUE and 600MHz LTE communication protocols).
The CPU part of Helio P23 is represented by two clusters of 4 Cortex A-53 cores, operating at a frequency of 2.3 GHz. The video chip is also interesting – ARM Mali-G71 MP2, its performance is indicated by the support for displays with a resolution of up to 1080 x 2160 (18: 9) pixels indicated in the specifications. However, it is worth remembering that the old MT6589 also supported a high resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels (for its time), only there was no particular benefit from this, more or less complex 3D games slowed down in this resolution.
National flavor of India in everything)
The presented chipsets are interesting, first of all, by their support for displays with a 'fashionable' aspect ratio of 18: 9. We will learn more about them in late 2017 – early 2018, when smartphones with these SoCs on board begin to conquer the waters of the global smartphone market.
P.S.
Dear friends, thank you all for the great ideas for the heading title. Special thanks to Andrey who suggested the name 'Birch news'.