text:
Nick Clegg will be making a mistake if he appoints Danny Alexander as our economic spokesman for 2015
Andrew Grice makes a worrying claim in the Independent:
Nick Clegg is expected to appoint Danny Alexander rather than Vince Cable as the Liberal Democrats' main economic spokesman at next year's general election.
His evidence for this is that Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander have jointly written (or rather, I suspect, put their name to) an article for the Indy setting out the Lib Dems' stance on tax and spending in the 2015-20 parliament.
I do hope that Nick will not appoint Danny as our economic spokesman at the next election. I have not seen a single media or parliamentary performance from Danny that has involved him doing more than shuffle a limited number of prefabricated sentences. It is hard to imagine him doing well in the televised chancellors' debate, for instance.
By contrast, Vince (who performed so capably in that debate in 2010) has the respect of the public and has the priceless ability to take credit for the good things the government has done and give the impression that the bad things are nothing to do with us.
He is also able to command the House of Commons in a way that Danny can only dream of.
This decision would also display a distressing amount of strategic confusion among Team Clegg. We are told - though you would have to work hard to glean this from the Indy article or from Nick's speech on Monday - that the Liberal Democrats are going to fight the next election on a radically different economic from the one George Osborne will put forward.
So why choose the Lib Dem politician who is so closely linked to Osborne in the public mind to put it forward?
At the 2010 election we used to boast that the Lib Dem front bench had four considerable economists, which made a more powerful team than either of the other parties could boast.
Chris Huhne has fallen by the wayside, and David Laws has to an extent too. But if Nick thinks Vince Cable is too old, or he does not trust him or lacks the magnanimity to put the Oakeshott plotting behind him, then let him choose Steve Webb for this role.
Labels: Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander, Economics, Liberal Democrats, Matthew Oakeshott, Nick Clegg, Steve Webb, Television, Vince Cable
Oh dear...Clegg will do this especially as it would show him as out of touch, making the wrong call ....and damage the Lib Dems...does he have a death wish for himself & the Lib Dem party.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


China's Xiaomi (小米), one of the fastest-growing smartphone brands in the world, saw its shares plummet last week. The Chinese smartphone maker's stock had dropped 3.6% when the market closed on January 9, taking its three-day tumble to 17%, losing USD 6.2 billion in market value, reported Bloomberg.
The plunge is partly sparked by the half-year lockup period that followed Xiaomi's Hong Kong debut, during which a large number of investors were prohibited from selling their shares.
Despite the big drop-off, Xiaomi has turned out to be a competitive brand with annual smartphone shipments exceeding 100 million last year. Right in the beginning of 2019, Xiaomi has begun to boost sales and popularity through a series of financial gestures intended as a threat to longtime rival Huawei (华为).
Xiaomi launched the flagship Redmi Note 7 at a starting price of USD 150 on 10 January, featuring a 48-megapixel camera, a 6.3-inch FHD LCD waterdrop screen, Snapdragon 660 processor and a 3900-mAh battery. Redmi Note 7 posed a big challenge to Huawei what with the eye dropping features and competitive pricing.
That's not all. Last week, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun announced that Redmi would start operating as an independent entity.
Additionally, turning Redmi into an independent brand can also help ease Xiaomi's burden, allowing it to compete with Huawei in the mid-end and high-end market.
Xiaomi didn't directly respond whether it intends to dismantle the monopoly of Huawei, but Lei Jun wrote in his Weibo post that the firm "had no fear of any opponent". The idea is Redmi would get better by providing more cost-effective mobile phones to its fans. The brand would also speed up the pace of internationalization to take on its global counterparts.
After tasting success in the mobile phone sector, Xiaomi turned to the smart home and internet of things (IoT) businesses for a bargaining chip in competition with Huawei.
Chinese home appliance maker TCL announced in a statement that Xiaomi has acquired a total of 65.168 million shares for CNY 167 million (USD 24.4 million), which deepened an existing alliance between the duo. The tie-up would enable TCL devices to be incorporated into Xiaomi's supply chain and provide tremendous support to Xiaomi's IoT business.
Xiaomi's IoT business hit the ground running even before investing in TCL, fueled by solid partnerships with smart device manufacturers. According to the company's financial reports, revenue from IoT soared 89.9% year-on-year to CNY 10.8 billion (USD 1.6 billion) during the first three quarters of 2018.
"It is bad news for Huawei because the thriving IoT business has proved Xiaomi's exceptional competence to boost its ecosystem by leveraging resources and integrating supply chain," commented Jiemian.com.
Few days before launching Redmi Note 7, the Xiaomi sub-brand Redmi declared on Weibo that it was entering into a strategic partnership with TikTok, a Chinese "musical" social app that has conquered young users from every part of the globe. Both were scheduled to support the launch of Redmi Note 7's first model.
Redmi did not officially reveal the rationale behind the tie-up. However, TikTok said it signaled Xiaomi's exploration into the online content market, which could increase its monetization opportunities and further improve its odds of winning the Xiaomi-Huawei duel.
It seems that Huawei isn't afraid of Xiaomi's invasion. Unlike Xiaomi, Huawei boasts natural strengths in internal resources, like telecommunication, chips and tech patents. On 7 January, the tech mammoth showed off Kunpeng 920, a new processor chip for data centres and cloud computing, stepping up efforts to expand into growing markets.
Additionally, Huawei was an absolute leader by sales and YoY growth rate in the third quarter of fiscal 2018. The best-selling brand has claimed a 23% market share, with shipments in China surging 33% YoY to 52 million.
The competition between Xiaomi and Huawei is one to watch out for. Smartphones, new retail and the IoT sector are going to be the new battlefields in 2019, predicted Jiemian.com.


Strangers on the Internet are starting to say the same. With teammates backing down, Ertz regularly logs onto soccer video game servers and requests games against faraway challengers. His team of choice: lightly regarded Benfica from Portugal's Primeira Liga. His opponents typically choose powerhouse clubs like Real Madrid or Manchester United.
Not the fairest of matches, but Ertz never wavers. He wins anyway.
That killer instinct is one of the main reasons Ertz has emerged as K-State's presumptive starter at quarterback despite a complete lack of on-field accomplishments.
Since enrolling in 2013, Ertz hasn't attempted a single pass. He sat out his first year with a redshirt, played at the end of blowouts as a freshman and lasted one play as a sophomore, tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee on an awkward tackle in his first start.
Still, those closest to him talk as if he has already proven himself.
Teammates voted him captain and now compare him to former stars Collin Klein and Jake Waters.
There's an easy way to tell if K-State is on the cusp of a big season.
Just look at the team's quarterback. He tends to be the best barometer.
Historically, K-State coach Bill Snyder wins big with a proven passer. Give him a quarterback he trusts, and you can count on the Wildcats to make a prestigious bowl.
The last six times Snyder has returned his leading passer from the previous season, K-State has won at least nine games. The Wildcats piled up 11 victories in 1998 with Michael Bishop, in 2000 with Jonathan Beasley, in 2002 and 2003 with Ell Roberson and again in 2012 with Klein. In 2014, they won nine games with Waters.
Other teams, with question marks at quarterback, weren't as successful.
Here's the question: Which category does Ertz belong to?
On paper, the answer is simple. He lacks experience and it's unfair to expect big things out of him this season.
But K-State players make a compelling argument for him. They have seen Ertz chew up defenses in practice and think he is a future star. He has a strong and accurate arm, they say. He is a deceptively skilled runner, they add. The team would have won more than six games last season had he stayed healthy, they insist.
Ertz has also put in years of work with K-State's offense. By now, teammates and coaches know what to expect.
Yet Joe Hubener is the top returning passer on the roster, not Ertz. Hubener completed 46.7 percent of his throws for 1,837 yards, nine touchdowns and 10 interceptions a year ago. Ertz attempted one run and gained five yards.
Ertz represents an upgrade at quarterback, but it's impossible to say how good he truly is until he makes it through a live game.
For that reason, Snyder is once again holding open auditions at quarterback. Ertz is the frontrunner after winning the job a year ago and starting at the spring game, but nothing has been promised.
Snyder says Ertz, Hubener and Alex Delton are all good enough to start.
Ertz is confident he will shine in preseason practice.
After all, many of his best moments in a K-State uniform have come in an empty stadium. His favorite occurred last summer. Near the end of a grueling day, Snyder told him to lead the offense on a two-minute drill. If he scored a touchdown, practice was over.
That type of highlight was rare for K-State last season. Ertz would like nothing more than to recreate it in front of a packed Snyder Family Stadium.
That brings us to a different and perhaps more important question about Ertz: If he lives up to his preseason billing, can he stay healthy?
Few quarterbacks have been plagued by injuries more than Ertz.
First, he suffered a torn ACL in his right knee as a high school senior, prematurely ending a successful prep career in which he was chosen 2012 Iowa Gatorade Player of the Year at Mediapolis High. He was in the open field on a designed run, but crumbled to the ground when he planted his right foot and tried to cut left.
Two years later, he won the starting quarterback job at K-State and appeared poised for a big season. But that, too, was cut short on his first play from scrimmage when he suffered another torn ACL on the same knee. He took the snap on a quarterback keeper, ran to his left and got tackled awkwardly.
"A freak accident," Ertz said.
A sellout crowd gasped and then looked on in frustration during the season as Delton, Hubener and eventually Cook, a converted receiver, struggle to take Ertz's place, combining to complete less than half their passes.
K-State limped to a 6-7 finish, leaving many to wonder what could have been with a healthy Ertz.
Fans may soon get their answer. Ertz is healthy and ready for a second chance.
Will it stay that way? It's sometimes hard for football players to return after one ACL surgery, let alone two … on the same knee.
That kind of injury history will earn anyone a fragile label.
Mediapolis football coach Brian Borrison understands why some question Ertz's knee, but he doesn't think anyone should question his toughness.
There is a common misconception about Ertz's first major knee injury, and Borrison is here to clear things up. When Ertz went down in the quarterfinals of the Class 2A playoffs, his season wasn't over. He finished out the game "on one leg" and returned to the field a week later to lead his team to victory in the semifinals.
Trainers failed to properly diagnose the injury until Ertz underwent a MRI leading up to the state championship game. Only then was his season over.
Ertz had surgery and spent much of the next year rehabbing his knee at K-State while he sat out with a redshirt. He appeared to emerge from the process healthy, but, looking back, there were warning signs his knee was below full strength.
"It just kind of kept bothering him," Borrison said.
Ertz can squat more weight than he could a year ago. He can also run faster. In a strange way, Ertz thinks his second knee injury will end up helping him in the long run.
He's confident his knee will never buckle again.
Dante Barnett thinks Ertz is the most popular player on the team.
"He can hang with anyone," Barnett said.
Perhaps that is why Ertz was named captain without first proving himself in games. Or maybe it was his intensity, you know, the same one that scares away video-game challengers.
Ertz will certainly mean business on the field this season.
There's nothing he hates more than being told he can't play.
Borrison, his former high school coach, illustrates that point with a story from Ertz's sophomore season at Mediapolis. Heavy rain postponed the team's homecoming game until Saturday that year, but the squad still played Friday night. Ertz, eager to play regardless of weather, organized a backyard game that lasted long into the night.
Mediapolis won the following day, but looked sluggish doing so. Ertz wore the team out.
Ertz has spent much of the past year competing against himself. Could he complete rehab faster than he did coming out of high school? Could he be a better teammate from the sideline? Could he record personal bests in the weight room?
He had big expectations for himself last season and didn't get the chance to reach them.
Now he gets the rare opportunity to hit the reset button without playing a video game.


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You are here: Home » Activities and Groups » Libraries, Development and the UN 2030 Agenda » Publications » A Necessary Pre-Condition: Libraries, Information and Access to Justice
A Necessary Pre-Condition: Libraries, Information and Access to Justice
Access to justice is a key pillar of the rule of law, recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals under SDG16.
Information is essential to making this a reality, both for legal professionals who need it in order to be able to work, and for individual people who need it to understand their rights and how to enforce them.
Yet too often, there are barriers in place, linked to cost, complexity, and simply attitudes. To make a reality of access to justice, there is a need for proactive steps to ensure that everyone can access the information they need.
Libraries – both specialised law libraries and public libraries – can deliver this, individually, together, and in partnership with others. In doing so, they help make the bridge between people and law, and so help deliver on the SDGs.
Our new article, drawing on papers presented at past World Library and Information Congresses, draws on examples from around the world to make the case.
Download the article as a pdf.
Briefings, Law Libraries, Access to information, Library services, Access to Justice, access to law, SDG16
Libraries, Development and the UN 2030 Agenda
How do libraries further development?
The International Advocacy Programme (IAP)


Unpacking the history of the Baltic "Forest Brothers"
War is never two dimensional. Edward Lucas considers one chapter of anti-Soviet resistance, on the website of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Russia is fuming about a new NATO video celebrating the "Forest Brothers'" anti-Soviet resistance in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Outsiders mostly find this baffling. The guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation in the Baltics is not even a forgotten conflict; most people never knew about it in the first place.
To get a sense of what the argument is about, try a thought experiment. Imagine that your ancestors were gangsters. Long before you were born, they allied with another gang and attacked some neighbors, enslaving and murdering them. Then the two gangs fell out, and forced the innocent neighbors to take sides. Eventually, your ancestors won and occupied the neighbors' houses—albeit against stiff resistance. When your forebears eventually died, the neighbors regained possession of the houses.
Now the question is how to behave. Should you apologize for the past, ignore it, or celebrate it?
That, crudely, is the problem for modern Russia in its dealings with the Baltic states.
From the Kremlin's point of view, the only important fact is that the Soviet Union (our gang) beat Nazi Germany (their gang). Anyone who fought against the Soviet side in World War Two was ipso facto a Nazi. Anyone who cherishes the memory of such people now is a Nazi too.
That makes perfect sense so long as you ignore the two most important factors: the causes of the war, and the way the Soviet Union fought it.
What the Kremlin does not like to admit is that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they became enemies in 1941. It was the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of spring 1939 between the two totalitarian empires which consigned the countries of eastern and central Europe to the meat grinder. It meant, among other things, that Europe's largest Jewish population fell into the hands of people who wanted to exterminate them.
Nor does the modern Kremlin admit that Nazi Germany nearly won the war because the mustachioed thug in Moscow was paranoid and incompetent. Luckily, the mustachioed thug in Berlin was even more incompetent.
The Soviet Union ultimately triumphed for a number of other reasons. They include geography, climate and Western military aid. The heroism and sacrifice of the Russian people (and Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars and others) played a huge role.
Once you include these factors, the war in the Baltics stops being a two-dimensional Soviet myth and becomes a fascinating and tragic episode of real history. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians did not choose to be in a position where they had to take sides between Stalin and Hitler. They were forced into that dilemma.
Once put in an impossible position, they behaved in many different ways—admirably and abominably—just as other people would.
Some collaborated with the Soviet occupiers (who deported, looted and murdered, with a particular animus against the educated and prosperous). Others collaborated with the Nazi occupiers (who engaged in bestial atrocities against Jews, Russians and other minorities, but treated the rest of the population somewhat better). The blame for that is plentiful.
When the Nazis retreated in 1944, the peoples of the Baltic states mostly did not welcome the Soviets as liberators. That is an uncomfortable fact for modern Russians, reared on the Soviet war myth. But the fact does not become comfortable through abusing its victims.
The West is now, commendably, recognizing the post-war anti-Soviet resistance in the Baltic states as a kind of proto-NATO. The really striking fact, though, is that the Kremlin regards itself as the direct heirs of the Forest Brothers' foes: Stalin's murderous secret police, the NKVD. That is (should be) the real scandal.
This article was originally published by the Center for European Policy Analysis and can be accessed here.


Buying A First Mobile Phone: Best Smartphones For Kids - Which?
If you're buying a mobile phone for your child, it can be tricky to know which is the best to buy. Here, we pick out our top choices, and explore how much you need to spend and how to set up parental controls.
The first thing you need to think about is what your child will be using the mobile phone for. If you just want them to have an emergency phone with mammoth battery life, to keep in the bottom of their school bag, it's worth checking out our simple mobile phone reviews.
But if you want them to have a mobile that gives them fast internet, a decent camera and a few apps, you'll need to invest in a smartphone. This doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune, though – we cover this, below.
We also highlight five smartphones we think offer terrific value for money – and stick a warning flag on three that might make your child understandably unhappy.
Just want to know the best of the best? Head straight to our Best Buy mobile phones.
How much do you need to spend on a smartphone?
The prospect of buying a new smartphone fills many of us with dread as they can be pretty expensive, and going for an iPhone or Samsung can feel like a safe bet - even if they are pricey options.
But the truth is you don't need to spend top dollar for top quality. While some smartphones cost more than £600 to buy outright, we've found several worthy of our Best Buy recommendation that cost less than £300.
You might be wondering about the cheapest way to pay for a smartphone. If you're willing to shop around, it's almost always cheaper over time to buy a phone outright and take a Sim-only deal rather than going down the contract route.
If you do decide to take the bigger initial hit of buying outright, be careful to find the best Sim-only deal. Some providers charge more than their rivals for a smaller offering.
If you'd rather spread out the cost of a smartphone, and don't mind too much that you'll likely spend more over time, you can take out a contract. To get the best one for you, consider how much data you need. Some of the cheapest contracts offer 500MB of data, but that's only useful for those who rarely use the internet.
In many cases, you can reduce the monthly cost of a contract if you spend a little more upfront. This might be a good middle ground for those who don't want to fork out the full cost of the phone to start with, but who want to reduce monthly costs where possible.
Looking for something a little larger? Read our guide to best tablets for kids.
We've selected five mobile phones that offer great value. They're not necessarily the very best we've seen, but they have decent battery life, clear displays and good cameras – plus, they're easy to use.
Only logged-in Which? members can view our recommendations in the table below. If you're not yet a member, join Which? for instant access.
This smartphone is a more than viable option if you're looking for an affordable phone. Its got a premium design, good battery life and is easy to use.
This smartphone is good value for money. It has a stunning display and takes very good photos. Plus it offers respectable battery life, and will speed through most tasks you throw at it.
We have to start with battery on this phone - it provides a mammoth 27 hours of call time, which is more than enough to get through the day. Camera quality was surprisingly impressive as well.
Much like its higher scoring brand-mate, this smartphone is equipped with a marathon battery that will certainly get your child through the day. With price as another draw on this model, it would be a good starter phone.
This is an all-round good phone. Price aside, it performs well. Battery did well, giving a highly respectable 24 hours and 50 minutes of call time and where camera quality is concerned, the 13Mp rear cameras is both consistent and reliable.
Pricing, recommendations and test scores correct as of February 2019.
If you don't do your homework, you could end up buying a smartphone that will leave you, and your child, feeling frustrated – especially if you've spent a fair amount of money on them. To help you avoid making a mistake, we've highlighted three mobile phones that shouldn't be anywhere near your shortlist.
This is an awful mobile phone that you should steer clear of at all costs. It has one of the worst screens that we've ever seen, it's slow and the battery life is abysmal.
This is a smartphone to be avoided at all costs. Even standards tasks like browsing photos proved difficult, so you're better off paying a extra for a better handset.
Terrible battery performance and poor quality screen and battery performance on this model put it in the ranks as one of the worst smartphones we've ever tested.
As smartphones are connected to the internet, they're a window to the whole world. While there's a lot of wonderful and educational content your child has access to, there's other content you may want to protect them from.
The good news is there are steps you can take to restrict certain content, but these work slightly differently for Android and iOS devices.
Android is an operating system made by Google used by many smartphone manufacturers. While it works similarly across most Android phones, many manufacturers like to put their own stamp on how everything is presented. This means the advice below might not exactly match with what you see on your smartphone, but it should be pretty similar.
Go to Menu, then Settings, then Parental controls.
Create a PIN, to stop someone who doesn't know the PIN from changing the parental control settings.
Select the type of content you want to restrict access to.
Go to Settings on the smartphone, then Users.
Click Add user and confirm that you do indeed want to set up a new user.
Click Skip Setup. This will prevent this account from downloading content from the Google Play Store.
Go to Settings, then General, then Restrictions.
Create a passcode. You'll need to remember this if you want to change your settings, or to turn off restrictions.
Choose which types of content you want to impose restrictions on.
You can remove access to apps and features, such as iTunes, Safari and Camera. You can also stop someone from installing or deleting apps.
If you'd rather limit the types of content your child can look at, but don't want to completely remove access, you can do this too. For example, you can prevent access to certain websites.
Plus, you can stop privacy settings, as well as general settings, from being changed.


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AEC declares poll in Cowper
ASSISTANT MINISTER TO THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER
HARTSUYKER, Luke
In Government
media/pressrel/4727987
Luke Hartsuyker MP Federal Member for Cowper Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister
Federal Member for Cowper Luke Hartsuyker has attended the formal declaration of the 2016 Federal Election poll for the electorate of Cowper at the Australian Electoral Commission office in Kempsey.
The event is a formal ceremony for the declaration of the poll, where all candidates who ran in the seat of Cowper are invited to attend and those present are given the opportunity to speak at the ceremony.
"It is a great honour to be re-elected for a sixth time as the Federal Member for Cowper and my role now is to ensure I continue to be an effective voice in Canberra for the constituents of Cowper," Mr Hartsuyker said.
"I will also work hard on delivering Coalition Government commitments made during the campaign across the electorate," Mr Hartsuyker said.
The declaration of the poll is a requirement of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 (Section 284) that the Divisional Returning Officer publicly declare the name of the successful candidate.
The AEC holds the formal declaration ceremony to also declare that the member is duly elected and can commence their official duties as the appointed member for their division.
Media contact: Nikki Voss 0408 070 056


Wunderkind director Damien Chazelle follows up his Oscar-winning "La La Land" with FIRST MAN, a Neil Armstrong biopic that avoids easy mythologizing to tell the story of an obsessive, grieving everyman who made history. This week on the show, Adam and Josh have a review of Chazelle's film and share their Top 5 Movie Flights - scenes that capture the thrill and terror (and chorus girls!) of aviation.
4:19-35:07 - Review: "First Man"


text:
Technology StocksNVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)
From: Frank Sully 4/20/2021 10:16:40 AM
A Red-Hot Reason Why NVIDIA's Blockbuster Growth Is Here to Stay
NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) | Stock Discussion ForumsShare RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read
From: Frank Sully 4/20/2021 1:47:02 PM
Nvidia Steps Up Enterprise And Automotive Efforts With GTC Announcements
seekingalpha.com
Nvidia wants to put an AI in charge of in-game haptics
pcgamer.com
I had to look up the definition of "haptic".
hap·tic
/'haptik/
Learn to pronounce
adjective: haptic
relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception.
"haptic feedback devices create the illusion of substance and force within the virtual world"
plural noun: haptics
1. the use of technology that stimulates the senses of touch and motion, especially to reproduce in remote operation or computer simulation the sensations that would be felt by a user interacting directly with physical objects.
"their research is centered on human-computer interaction specifically focusing on wearable computing, haptics, and video games"
2. the perception of objects by touch and proprioception, especially as involved in nonverbal communication.
"haptics is that subsystem of nonlanguage communication which conveys meaning through physical contact"
late 19th century: from Greek haptikos 'able to touch or grasp', from haptein 'fasten'.
Use over time for: haptic
Definitions from Oxford Languages
Cerebras launches new AI supercomputing processor with 2.6 trillion transistors
venturebeat.com
AI Funding Spree: +$300m for Groq, +$676m for SambaNova by Dr. Ian Cutress on April 19, 2021 7:00 AM EST
The growth of AI has seen a resurgence in venture capital funding for silicon start-ups. Designing AI silicon for machine learning, both for training and inference, has become hot property in Silicon Valley, especially as machine learning compute and memory requirements are coalesced into tangible targets for this silicon to go after. A number of these companies are already shipping high performance processors to customers, and are looking for further funding to help support customers, expand the customer base, and develop next generation products until profitability happens, or the company is acquired. The two latest funding rounds for AI silicon were announced in this past week.
Groq (Series C, $300m, Tensor Streaming Processor Q100) When Groq's first product came onto the scene, detailed by the Microprocessor Report back in January 2020, it was described as the first PetaOP processor that eschewed traditional many-core designs and instead implemented a single VLIW-like core with hundreds of functional units. In this method, the data is subject to instruction flow, rather than instructions being reliant on data flow, saving time on synchronicity and decode overhead that many-core processors require.
The end result is a product that implements 400,000 multiply-accumulate units, but the key marketing metric is the deterministic performance. Using this single core methodology, Groq's Q100 TSP will take the same time to inference workload without any quality-of-service requirements. In speaking with CEO Jonathan Ross, Groq's TSP enables workloads that were previously unusable due to long tail quality of service performance degradation (i.e. worst case results take too long). This is especially important in analysis that requires batch size 1, such as video.
The Groq ecosystem also means that distribution across many TSPs simply scales out inferences per second, with multiple Q100 parts under the same algorithm all implementing the same deterministic performance.
Jonathan stated to us, as the company has stated in the past, that Groq as a company was built on a compiler-first approach. Historically this sort of approach puts a lot of pressure on the compiler doing the optimization (such as Itanium and other VLIW processors), and often leads to concerns about the product as a whole. However, we were told that the team never touched any silicon design until six months into the software and compiler work, allowing the company to lock down the key aspects of the major ML frameworks before even designing the silicon.
As part of its funding efforts, Groq reached out to us for a company update. All of Groq's hardware and software work to date has been achieved through two rounds of VC funding, totaling $67.3m, with about $50m being used so far. In that capital they have designed, built, and deployed the Q100 TSP to almost a dozen customers, including the audio/visual industry, datacenter, and government labs. The second generation product is also well underway. This latest Series C funding round of $300m, led by Tiger Global Management and D1 Capital, will allow the company to expand from 120 people to 250 by the end of the year, support current and future customers with bigger teams, and enable a progressive roadmap.
Groq stated in our briefing that its second generation product will build on its unique design points, offering alternatives for customers that were interested in Q100 but have other requirements for their workloads. Each generation of Groq's TSP, according to the company, will have half a dozen unique selling points in the market (some public, some not), with one goal at least to displace as many GPUs as possible with a single TSP in order to give customers the best TCO.
SambaNova (Series D, $676m, Cardinal AI) The second company this week is SambaNova, whose Series D funding is a staggering $676 million, led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, with new investors Temasek and GIC, joining existing backers such as BlackRock, Intel Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and others. To date SambaNova has generated over $1.1 billion in investment, enabling a $5 billion valuation.
SambaNova's entry into the AI silicon space is with its Cardinal AI processor. Rather than focusing on machine learning inference workloads, such as trying to identify animals with a known algorithm, the Cardinal AI processor is one of the few dedicated implementations to provide peak training performance. Training is a substantially harder problem than inference, especially as training algorithms are constantly changing and requirements for the biggest datasets are seemingly ever increasing.
The Cardinal AI processor has already featured on AnandTech, when SambaNova announced its eight-socket solution known as the 'DataScale SN10-8R'. In a quarter rack design, an EPYC Rome x86 system is paired with eight Cardinal processors backed by 12 terabytes of DDR4-3200 memory, and SambaNova can scale this to a half-rack or full-rack solution. Each Cardinal AI processor has 1.5 TB of DDR4, with six memory channels for 153 GB/s bandwidth per processor. Within each eight socket configuration, the chips are connected in an all-to-all fashion with 64x PCIe 4.0 lanes to dedicated switching network silicon (like an NVSwitch) for 128 GB/s in each direction to all other processors. The protocol being used over PCIe is custom to SambaNova. The switches also enable system-to-system connectivity that allows SambaNova to scale as required. SambaNova is quoting that a dual-rack solution will outperform an equivalent DGX-A100 deployment by 40% and will be at a much lower power, or enable companies to coalesce a 16-rack 1024 V100 deployment into a single quarter-rack DataScale system.
SambaNova's customers are looking for a mix of private and public cloud options, and as a result the flagship offering is a Dataflow-as-a-Service product line allowing customers a subscription model for AI initiatives without purchasing the hardware outright. These subscription systems can be deployed internally to the company with the subscription, and be managed remotely by SambaNova. The company cites that TensorFlow or PyTorch workloads can be rebuilt using SambaNova's compiler in less than an hour.
SambaNova has not given many more details on its architecture as yet, however they do state that SambaNova can enable AI training that requires large image datasets (50000x50000 pixel images, for example) for astronomy, oil-and-gas, or medical imaging that often require losing resolution/accuracy for other platforms. The Cardinal AI processor can also perform in-the-loop training allowing for model reclassification and optimization of inference-with-training workloads on the fly by enabling a heterogeneous zerocopy-style solution – GPUs instead have to memory dump and/or kernel switch, which can be a significant part of any utilization analysis.
The company has now been through four rounds of funding:
Series A, $56m, led by Walden International and Google Ventures
Series B, $150m, led by Intel Capital
Series C, $250m, led by BlackRock
Series D, $676m, led by SoftBank
This puts SambaNova almost at the top of AI chip funding with $1132m, just behind Horizon Robotics ($1600m), but ahead of GraphCore ($460m), Groq ($367m), Nuvia ($293m, acquired by Qualcomm), Cambricon ($200m), and Cerebras ($112m).
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From: Frank Sully 4/25/2021 2:36:34 AM
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From: Frank Sully 4/27/2021 10:01:16 PM
Arm Marks Data Center Foray, Intensifying Competition With Intel, AMD: Reuters
Anusuya Lahiri , Benzinga Staff Writer
British chip technology firm, Arm Ltd, which NVIDIA Corporation is acquiring NVDA 0.62% in a $40 billion deal, elaborated on its next generation of data center technology, citing Oracle Corp (NYSE: ORCL) and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE: BABA) as customers, Reuters reports.
Qualcomm Inc (NASDAQ: QCOM) and Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) licensed Arm's underlying intellectual property to create their processor chips.
Arm's entry into the data center processor market will intensify competition with Intel Corp (NASDAQ: INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ: AMD).
Intel competitor NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) targeted the $40 billion Arm acquisition to capitalize on the latter's data center push, stated analysts.
Arm's N2 Neoverse computing cores were estimated to be about 40% faster than the previous generation. The artificial intelligence-focused V1 cores were estimated to be 50% faster than traditional methods.
Marvell Technology Inc (NASDAQ: MRVL) was making a chip using Arm's new technology. Oracle will use Ampere Computing produced Arm-based chips for its cloud computing business. Alibaba was set to offer Arm-based cloud computing services via an unnamed chip vendor.
Price action: NVDA shares traded lower by 0.58% at $615.51 on the last check Tuesday.
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