Month: May 2019

Enlarge / The Porsche logo is seen during the New York International Auto Show on April 18, 2019 in New York, United States. (credit: Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Germany's Stuttgart Public Prosecutors's Office issued a fine notice of €535 million ($598.99 million) to Porsche for its part in the Volkswagen Group diesel emissions scandal that broke in 2015.

Until recently, German authorities have been reserved in their actions against the VW Group brands—Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche—that installed illegal software on their diesel vehicles to conceal the true amount of nitrogen oxides emissions that were released during real-world driving. Instead, US authorities have been at the forefront of pursuing VW Group and its executives in attempts to make cheated customers and citizens whole.

But in April, German prosecutors filed their first criminal indictment of VW Group executives, including former CEO Martin Winterkorn.

Enlarge / AMD CEO Lisa Su, holding a Rome processor. The large chip in the middle is the 14nm I/O chip; around it are pairs of 7nm chiplets containing the CPU cores. (credit: AMD)

AMD and Cray have announced that they're building "Frontier," a new supercomputer for the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The goal is to deliver a system that can perform 1.5 exaflops: 1.5×10¹⁸ floating point operations per second.

By way of comparison, a single Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU manages about 14 teraflops of compute performance with 32-bit numbers. Frontier will achieve 100,000 times more. The fastest supercomputer in the Top 500 list weighs in at 200 petaflops, or 0.2 exaflops. As things stand, it'd take the top 160 machines on the list to match Frontier's performance.

Frontier will use custom versions of AMD's Epyc processors (likely Zen 3 or Zen 4), matched with 4 GPUs, all connected using AMD's Infinity Fabric. Between nodes, Cray's Slingshot interconnect will be used, which has transfer rates of up to 200Gb/s per port. The GPUs will have their own stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). It'll be housed in 100 cabinets, taking about 7,300 square feet of floor space. Power consumption will be 30-40MW.

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Alphabet's Waymo announced on Tuesday that it was expanding its commercial self-driving car service by adding 10 vehicles to Lyft's network in the Phoenix area "over the next few months." The small scale of the expansion is the latest sign that Waymo is deploying its technology at a more leisurely pace than most people—both inside and outside the company—were expecting a year ago.

Waymo has long been seen as having a significant head start on self-driving technology. In 2018, the company aimed to capitalize on its early lead by launching a commercial self-driving service by year's end. It arguably met that goal last December, but only under generous definitions of "commercial" and "self-driving."

The new Waymo One service was not open to the general public—it was initially limited to a few hundred people who had previously participated in Waymo's closed testing program. And after months of talking up fully driverless technology—including a TV commercial starring late-night host Jimmy Kimmel—every Waymo One vehicle had a driver behind the wheel.