Qualcomm Announces World’s First 5G Modem

We have barely even caught up to the rest of the world with 4G and now a company is announcing the first 5G modem already.

Qualcomm one of the most popular smartphone chip makers has revealed the world’s first 5G modem. Known as the Snapdragon X50, it will support speeds of upto 5Gbps. The global average 4G speeds are only 13.5Mbps so you’re not alone in thinking that 5Gbps is unlikely so early in the game. Do keep in mind however, that these are only theoretical speeds and this 5Gbps milestone, can only be achieved under lab conditions,

Heading to South Korea First:

5G is going to launch in South Korea in 2018 and will be slowly rolled out in US and UK by 2020. There is no commercial network currently capable of supporting speeds that high. South Korea is the leader in the internet race with the fastest global average internet speed for 4G. The fixed internet connection speeds in South Korea are also one of the fastest with an average of 98.7Mbps. All things considered it makes sense for South Korea to be the first country to be rolling out 5G.

Google’s ‘DeepMind’ AI platform can now learn without human input

DeepMind is now capable of teaching itself based on information it already possesses.

In a significant step forward for artificial intelligence, Alphabet’s hybrid system — called a Differential Neural Computer (DNC) — uses the existing data storage capacity of conventional computers while pairing it with smart AI and a neural net capable of quickly parsing it.

“These models can learn from examples like neural networks, but they can also store complex data like computers,” wrote DeepMind researchers Alexander Graves and Greg Wayne.

Much like the brain, the neural network uses an interconnected series of nodes to stimulate specific centers needed to complete a task. In this case, the AI is optimizing the nodes to find the quickest solution to deliver the desired outcome. Over time, it’ll use the acquired data to get more efficient at finding the correct answer.

The two examples given by the DeepMind team further clear up the process:

1. After being told about relationships in a family tree, the DNC was able to figure out additional connections on its own all while optimizing its memory to find the information more quickly in future searches.
2. The system was given the basics of the London Underground public transportation system and immediately went to work finding additional routes and the complicated relationship between routes on its own.

Instead of having to learn every possible outcome to find a solution, DeepMind can derive an answer from prior experience, unearthing the answer from its internal memory rather than from outside conditioning and programming. This process is exactly how DeepMind was able to beat a human champion at ‘Go’ — a game with millions of potential moves and an infinite number of combinations.

Depending on the point of view, this could be a serious turn of events for ever-smarter AI that might one day be capable of thinking and learning as humans do.

Or, it might be time to start making plans for survival post-Skynet.

via ScienceAlert

Microsoft Ends Moore's Law, Builds a Supercomputer in the Cloud

A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft’s data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the "The slow but eventual end of Moore’s Law."

"Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man," notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. "What’s more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter."

The team created this system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that will significantly improve the speed of Bing and Azure queries. "This was a moonshot project that succeeded," said Lanka.

What they did was insert an FPGA directly between the network and the servers, which in bypassing the traditional software approach speeds up computation. “What we’ve done now is we’ve made the FPGA the front door,” said Derek Chiou, one of the Microsoft engineers who created the system. "“I think a lot of people don’t know what FPGAs are capable of."

Here is how the team described the technology:

Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability).  In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications.  This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.

We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high speeds).

This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication.  By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network.  Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger.  The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively.   The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft’s production datacenters worldwide.

Qualcomm Reveals Its Latest Snapdragon Chipsets

It seems like the chip maker has a lot to announce today. Qualcomm has announced an upgrade to their existing entry level and midrange system-on- a-chip solutions, i.e. Snapdragon 425, Snapdragon 625 and Snapdragon 652. These chipsets will be succeeded by the Snapdragon 427, Snapdragon, 626 and Snapdragon 653 respectively.

Qualcomm’s upgrade to these chips is largely incremental as far as raw power is concerned however, quite a few features have been integrated here and there for an added incentive.

Common Upgrades:

The common feature/upgrade is that all three are getting is the X9 LTE modem. This will give these chips faster internet connection speeds over LTE in countries which offer speeds of that calibre. In addition to a better modem, all of these will also be getting Qualcomm’ Clear Sight dual camera technology and support for Quick Charge 3.0. The dual camera tech works similar to the way Huawei implemented it in the P9. One of the sensors captures in black and white for added contrast and light while the other captures colors as well.

Quick Charge 3.0 is the upgraded version of Quick Charge 2.0. The newer version charges up your phone upto 4 times faster than an ordinary charger. To use it you need a phone that supports Quick Charge 3.0 and a compatible charger as well.

Differences Between The Chips:

Here’s where the similarities end, at least for the Snapdragon 427. The other two chips, Snapdragon (SD) 626 and Snapdragon 653 are each getting a 10% boost in their overall performance. Both of the chips have the same core configurations as their predecessors (SD 652 = SD 653 and SD 625 = SD 626) but the newer chips feature a higher clock rate.

Snapdragon 653’s setup includes 4xA72 + 4xA53 core combination with the A72 cores now clocked at 1.95GHz. For Snapdragon 626 the chip setup is 8xA53 cores with the clock speed now boosted to 2.2 GHz.

It is interesting to see Qualcomm added the dual camera tech to the low end SD 427 because none of the low end phones feature a dual camera setup, yet. This move may result in OEMs making cheaper dual camera phones in the future, although its just a speculation for now and entry level phones generally come with pretty basic camera sensors.

Via XDA-Developers

Facebook Now Lets You Cast Videos To TV

You can now cast videos from your Facebook Newsfeed directly to your TV. This new feature allows streaming Facebook videos on your TV through AppleTV, Airplay devices, Google Chromecast and other Google Cast devices.

Available on iOS, Coming Soon to Android

For now this feature is available on the iOS version of the Facebook app. It will become available on Android soon. This could further increase video ad revenue for Facebook and also increasing usage time. Being able to view videos on your TV screen is always preferable to watching it on your phone.

How to Use It

To use this feature on the app, you just need to find a video to stream to your TV. Tap or click on the TV icon on the top right (works on the web version as well) and select the device you want to stream to.

While you’re streaming a video you can continue using Facebook as you please in the background. you can watch this video here:

https://www.facebook.com/fbmedia/videos/1216914131683337/

Late to the party?

The social media giant started testing the new streaming feature on Android back in May this year. The iOS version began testing likewise in August. This isn’t the first time Facebook has tested something related to streaming videos before. Back in 2011, they added an option to cast via Airplay from the iPad app.

Competitors like YouTube already have well established ways to stream content to TVs. Facebook is making sure it doesn’t stay behind in the race. Casting on YouTube also lets you queue videos to watch one after the other in a sequence, this could be a useful feature for Facebook’s casting options as well.

The key thing with Facebook is the fact that its everywhere, so allowing more platforms for streaming videos is an obvious thing. Nevertheless this is a welcome feature from Facebook and we would love to see it improve over time.