Slashdot Mirror
Apple, Huawei Both Claim First 7nm Smartphone Chips (ieee.org)
When Apple unveiled the iPhone Xs and Xs Max earlier today, it said they will contain the A12 Bionic chip -- the first smartphone processor to be made using 7nm manufacturing technology. But, as IEEE Spectrum points out, Huawei made the same claim late last month when it unveiled the Kirin 980 system on a chip. From the report: Apple's new A12 Bionic is made up of four CPU cores, six GPU cores, and an 8-core "neural engine" to handle machine learning tasks. According to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- an eight-fold boost -- and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation. Of the GPU cores, two are designed for performance and are 15 percent faster than their predecessors. The other four are built for efficiency, with a 50 percent improvement on that metric. The system can decide which combination of the three types of cores will run a task most efficiently.
Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.
Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.
your AI can now do photoshop AI off line and also helkp you find cats in your photos.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At this point, the measurement of a nanometer in chip manufacturing is so.......flexible.......that it's not really worth paying attention to, other than as an announcement of something new. It's too imprecise of a measurement. Let's look at the benchmarks, what the chip can actually do, that is what matters.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Also, no-one cares.
Born in Jamaica. (true fact, look it up)
I want to point out that you have never, ever seen Donald Trump's birth certificate. Maybe he hates immigrants the way Republican senators hate gays: by being one of them
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Any real world exames of what will be done with that?
Maybe it will finally help Huawei allay their battery fears, so they can stop crippling the OS (killing important background apps and services). The summary mentioned a big efficiency improvement, and that means less heat and less battery consumption.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
At this point, the measurement of a nanometer in chip manufacturing is so.......flexible.......that it's not really worth paying attention to, other than as an announcement of something new. It's too imprecise of a measurement.
The nominal node name still serves to identify the node, even if it no long actually measures the half-pitch. And there is the intel factor: multiply the TSMC/Samsung node name by roughly 1.4 to get the Intel node name. This is pretty much generally understood.
As far as I can see, node names do not correspond to any particular mask dimension, they are just names, but names are useful.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.
And the real loser is Intel, if these 7nm parts actually do come to market in volume without yield issues. Nobody knows that for sure until it actually happens, at least nobody who is talking. We will know the answer in a month or so, and then we will know that Intel really did manage to turn its historical two year process lead into a one year lag.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The complexity of the physics and chemistry, the enormous manufacturing engineering effort and the management coordination required to direct the billions of dollars in capital necessary to achieve that is mind-boggling. Six point nine billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. It's at times like this when it seems we are finally living in the future. Electric cars, re-usable space rockets, 3D printed titanium.
Meanwhile, FEMA finally found the 20,000 pallets of potable water bottles it shipped to Puerto Rico. On the airfield where it left them. After the expiration date.
Without devolving into absolutist Ayn Rand libertarian zealots, maybe we can all agree that there is something to this invisible hand, free market, capitalism stuff.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Not just what it can do but how long it can do it. Molecular drift, apparently can cause real problems, add heat and over time new circuits can form or old ones break. How reliable are they over the long term.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If you have gone from 7nm to 1nm, you will have 49x as much space for the number of CPU, GPU and ML cores.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Here's an example what you could with the camera:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You'll note that Intel's 10nm process yields more improvement than the (14/10)^2 = 1.96x density increase you'd expect. So some of the components are being shrunk more thna a 14:10 ratio with the new process. However, Intel's 10nm process has been delayed repeatedly since 2016, with the latest schedule being no commercial shipments until 2019. So I guess that puts TSMC ahead for now if it can deliver this in volume without problems.
I've started comparing based on transistor density, rather than process size,
Nice approach.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
WRONG. The shortcomings in US health care is due to LACK of free markets ("free" doesn't mean free of regulation), not free markets themselves
I agree from the point of view that the "demand" in the health sector basically isn't free but locked : you don't get to decide when you're sick or not, but private companies (inssurances, private hospitals, etc.) can freely decide how exactly they'll fuck you up.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Pretty cool, looks like a semi-HDR approach based on aperture bracketing (per Google, Depth of Field bracketing) rather than time bracketing (I've done that).
Instead of color matching for highlights (time bracketing) they compare the focus differences (and somehow color correct, maybe a normalized light level based on the input/output images).
What's most interesting to me is that it shows us what "AI" is about at this time. It isn't self aware. It isn't making decisions. It isn't free learning.
AI today is advanced pattern recognition. Better than humans. Good at games, image manipulation, and other certainly useful tasks.
Data analysis is a big one, more variables than humans could ever consider.
Terrifying to consider, and also know, this type of stuff is being used on the financial markets already...
My I have no idea Question:
Have we trained an AI on Chess and Go at the same time, with alternative output scenarios? It would have to identify the games and then process inputs and outputs for that section separately from another game. That's a more generalized approach. Fun to think about.
BlameBillCosby.com
Why on earth would anyone name their product "bionic" if it didn't have something that connected to or operated in cooperation with a living organism?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They are probably both being manufactured at the same TSMC foundry using the same 7nm process.
Really, this is just a pissing contest that nobody actually cares about.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That's not bionic, that sounds more parasitic.
Besides, using an operating system to accept input from a human doesn't make that system bionic, or else every home computer ever made would qualify as bionic.
"Bionic" is a portmanteau of biology and electronic. Anything that doesn't encompass those two, functioning together as if they were a *SINGLE* thing, not merely one accessing the other, is not bionic. The classical example is of course electronic artificial limbs, but there are others. I once read about a guy who implanted an RFID reader in his body, and over time his brain adapted to the signals it was receiving from the reader so that he could actually understand some of it. That would be an example of bionics as well.
I'm betting whoever came up with "Bionic" for the name of the chip probably didn't realize that word had any particular meaning beyond sounding like a cool science fictiony term that might impress people.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Perhaps because it contains a core for handling artificial neural networks?
if it didn't have something that connected to or operated in cooperation with a living organism?
Because they don't find that a fitting definition for bionic?
In german bionic means: mimicked after a living organism, not interacting/cooperating with one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.