What this reveals: Russian early warning satellite constellation has also GNSS jammers they test periodically. They can jam whole continent from single satellite. They have six satellites in Molniya orbits.
6,899 karma · joined November 18, 2014
What this reveals: Russian early warning satellite constellation has also GNSS jammers they test periodically. They can jam whole continent from single satellite. They have six satellites in Molniya orbits.
SIMD-accelerated integer-to-string conversion https://lemire.me/blog/2026/05/18/simd-accelerated-integer-t...
Other speedy things:
On-Demand JSON: A Better Way to Parse Documents? https://lemire.me/en/publication/arxiv231217149/
Parsing Millions of URLs per Second https://lemire.me/en/publication/arxiv231110533/
Transcoding Unicode Characters with AVX-512 Instructions https://lemire.me/en/publication/arxiv221205098/
I would propose that we change your original statement "Ideally neither C nor C++ should be used when security matters." into:
"Ideally people who don't care about secrurity should not write code when security matters."
Can we agree that this is better than talking about programming languages?
For me, choosing the language is not enough. It's the tooling that goes far beyond the language that is important for safety and quality of compiler and runtime. C has very mature tooling options. So does ADA.
https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm
Abstract Interpretation in a Nutshell https://www.di.ens.fr/~cousot/AI/IntroAbsInt.html
The bleeding edge uses abstract interpretation to verify code.
Free from NASA: IKOS (Inference Kernel for Open Static Analyzers) is a static analyzer for C/C++ based on the theory of Abstract Interpretation. https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos
Commercial: Astrée is a static analyzer for safety-critical software written or generated in C or C++. https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm
abstract interpretation for static analysis and verification:
Good intro Mechanized semantics, fifth lecture Abstract art: static analysis by abstract interpretation https://xavierleroy.org/CdF/2019-2020/5.pdf
Static Analysis and Verification of Aerospace Software by Abstract Interpretation https://mine.perso.lip6.fr/publi/article-bertrane-al-fntpl15...
Everyone working with the latest process node is tightly coupled with the manufacturer: Nvidia, Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm. Microarchitecture design and optimization for a new process is super expensive and hard.
Legacy processes have settled, have standardized design software and tooling, so everything costs less.
ps. Nvidia and Qualcomm are considering Samsungs 2mm because TSMC's 2-nanometer chip production capacity is extremely limited.
If you want free software I recommend IKOS - a is a sound static analyzer for C/C++ developed at NASA. Checks: https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos/blob/master/analyzer/REA... Numerical abstract domains: https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos/blob/master/analyzer/REA...
Commercial tool like Astree https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm if you have money.
APNewsBreak: US suspects cellphone spying devices in DC https://apnews.com/general-news-d716aac4ad744b4cae3c6b13dce1...
Washington, D.C. mobile traffic is probably the most spied in the world. Especially now when it's run by technological cavemen and overly confident techbros. Israeli, Russians, Chinese, French and everyone.
What a naive fantasy.
Organization of people is much more important than guns. You don't even need guns when you organize. You can stop the state just by collective action. See color revolutions.
When it is guns, you need RGP's, detonators and TNT (and drones), a good underground insurgent logistic chains. You also need commit to life in poverty and eventual death.
United States, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Serbia have plenty of independent weapons, yet there is no fear of effective armed resistance. Everybody is a rebel in the Internet. When things go tough it's "I have to go to work and eat. My family needs me."
Even without spoke-and-hub model, hubs grow and there are more hubs. Airports are the bottleneck. 500 passengers per landing adds capacity.
While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
The Neo-reactionary movement seems exactly like what my generation comes up from the right. Dark Psychology of Dark Enlightenment is a cyberpunk sci-fi world as a fantasy. To live with societal collapse, dystopia and decay with low-life and high-tech. Always framing oneself as an independent outsider and a rebel. Sarcasm as a reflex. These guys see themself living in William Gibson's Neuromancer world.
Their idea is to have 44 GB SRAM per chip. SRAM is _very_expensive_ compared to DRAM (about two orders of magnitude).
It's easy to design larger chip. What determines the price/performance ratio are things like
- performance per chip area.
- yield per chip area.
Speedup is realistic. Multicore SMP or NUMA are not good for memory access patterns they optimize.
Their thick control flow model that should work for exclusive matrix-addition and log-prefix style memory access patterns. In comparison to the baseline the speedup is 150% in log-prefix algorithm, over 190% in fft-style butterfly algorithm, 50-100% in matrix addition and threshold filtering. silicon area and power consumption are estimated to be low.
Light reading material:
Optimizing Memory Access in TCF Processors with Compute-Update Operations Optimizing Memory Access in TCF Processors with Compute-Update Operations https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9150423
The REPLICA on-chip network https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7792877/
Preliminary Performance and Memory Access Scalability Study of Thick Control Flow Processors https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10305463/
Realizing multioperations and multiprefixes in Thick Control Flow processors https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S01419331230005...
This is how most semiconductor startups work. Do better and show innovation that is bought buy bigger players.
As long as the bottleneck is the fab capacity as wafers per hous, the number of operations per second per chip area determines who will produce more compute with best price. It's a good measure even between different technology nodes and superchips.
Nvidia is leader for a reason.
If manufacturing capacity increases to match the demand in the future, FLOPS or TOPS per Watt may become relevant, but now it's fab capacity.
Here is some data:
CHIPPING AWAY ASSESSING AND ADDRESSING THE LABOR MARKET GAP FACING THE U.S. SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SI...
>67,000, or 58%, of new jobs across manufacturing and design will risk going unfilled by 2030.
Another nugget from Fig 6: More than half of the MS graduates in semiconductor-related engineering fields are foreign and 80% of foreign Master’s leave the U.S.
People in the US keep asking "Should I go to college?" and "Who needs calculus?"
There is plenty of semiconductor industry in the US but it's differently specialized and they compete for the same pool of engineers. Nvidia, AMD or Broadcom don't have fabs, but they hire engineers from the same pipeline as fab companies.
It's few years since I was hiring EE majors in the US, but it felt that skilled people with EE master's are harder and harder to find every year. I think USC and CMU are the only ones that produce quantity and quality. MIT, Stanford, and Berkley produce quality but not quantity.
Mostly bike-shedding. Designing new architectures for older generation technology nodes adds some capacity, but does not help with the bleeding edge.
The shortage is in fab level. There are multiple bottlenecks. ASML has $36 billion backlog. There is not enough advanced packaging available. Hybrid bonding machines are in short supply. This technology requires lithography-level clean rooms (ISO 1 or ISO 2),and surface smoothness. Die-to-wafer hybrid bonding for large logic is currently very expensive.
Taiwan already has a fab in japan 40 nm, 28 nm, 22 nm, 16 nm, and 12 nm process technologies working with 55k WSPM capacity.
Once the initial fascination wears out, you are not going to use it as replacement for the big screen. VR/AR needs improve technically and find killer apps and must-have games.
Azure Maia is TSMC N5, I think.
Nvidia H200 and H100 are TSMC 4N.
Just few years ago was four companies doing the bleeding edge: Intel, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and TSMC. Intel was the best. First Global Foundries could not keep up. Then Intel fumbled ant TSMC became the best. Samsung is the only one keeping up with TSMC but they come slightly behind. Intel tries to catch up the two. No companies have "exited" they just can't compete.
The bleeding edge semiconductor node design is like doing Apollo moon program every 4-5 years. Only one can be the best.
- button press not always reliable if you use light touch.
- reliable range is < 2m. Works some time for 3 m.
- shuts down automatically after no input in something like 5-10 minutes. (unfortunate for my use)
Does anyone know tiny Bluetooth device with 1-2 buttons. Preferably pen shaped that you can hold in your fist.