Month: July 2019

Enlarge / This is a picture of Intel’s Nahuku boards, which contain 8 to 32 Intel Loihi neuromorphic chips, interfaced to an Intel Arria 10 FPGA development kit. Intel’s latest neuromorphic system, Pohoiki Beach, is made up of multiple Nahuku boards and contains 64 Loihi chips. (credit: Intel Labs)

Neuromorphic engineering—building machines that mimic the function of organic brains in hardware as well as software—is becoming more and more prominent. The field has progressed rapidly, from conceptual beginnings in the late 1980s to experimental field programmable neural arrays in 2006, early memristor-powered device proposals in 2012, IBM's TrueNorth NPU in 2014, and Intel's Loihi neuromorphic processor in 2017. Yesterday, Intel broke a little more new ground with the debut of a larger-scale neuromorphic system, Pohoiki Beach, which integrates 64 of its Loihi chips.

Where traditional computing works by running numbers through an optimized pipeline, neuromorphic hardware performs calculations using artificial "neurons" that communicate with each other. This is a workflow that's highly specialized for specific applications, much like the natural neurons it mimics in function—so you likely won't replace conventional computers with Pohoiki Beach systems or its descendants, for the same reasons you wouldn't replace a desktop calculator with a human mathematics major.

However, neuromorphic hardware is proving able to handle tasks organic brains excel at much more efficiently than conventional processors or GPUs can. Visual object recognition is perhaps the most widely realized task where neural networks excel, but other examples include playing foosball, adding kinesthetic intelligence to prosthetic limbs, and even understanding skin touch in ways similar to how a human or animal might understand it.

Enlarge / A Tesla Model 3. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Next month, Tesla will begin charging an additional $1,000 for the "full self-driving" upgrade, CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter on Tuesday. The option currently costs $6,000. It's the latest in a series of price changes for a package whose main function—"full self-driving"—is still largely aspirational.

The price hike reflects Musk's view that Tesla is less than 18 months away from delivering full self-driving technology to customers and that this capability will drastically increase the value of Tesla vehicles.

At an April event, Musk predicted that Tesla vehicles would be capable of operating as autonomous taxis by the end of 2020. In a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Musk estimated that a Tesla vehicle could generate as much as $30,000 per year in profits. If that came to pass, it would easily make even the cheapest Model 3 worth more than $100,000.

Enlarge / There's a lot going on near a young star, with at least two planets forming around it.

Up until the last few decades, our picture of what might reside around distant stars was shaped entirely by the planets, moons, asteroids, and other bodies in our own Solar System. But the discovery of thousands of exoplanets has dramatically improved our picture of what's out there in terms of large bodies. Comets and asteroids, by contrast, are well below our ability to image for the indefinite future.

Moons, however, are awkwardly in between. It should be possible to image them indirectly, as their gravitational influence will alter the timing with which their planets orbit the star. And we might get a more direct indication of their presence as they will sometimes add to the shadow cast as transiting planets pass in front of their host star. We've searched for these effects, but they'll be subtle, so it could be that it will take years of observations for them to rise above the noise.

But now scientists are suggesting that we've observed an exomoon in the making. By looking at some planets forming around a young star, they think they've spotted a disk around one of the planets that may ultimately condense into moons. And, as a bonus, they found an odd, diffuse structure around a second planet that they can't explain.

Enlarge (credit: Mojang / Microsoft)

When Microsoft acquired Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, in 2014, we all feared the worst: a zillion cash-in video games. Turns out, Microsoft has been really smart about its Minecraft output in the past five years. Only one Minecraft-related game has launched since then (2015's solid Minecraft Story Mode), and 2020's Minecraft Dungeons felt ridiculously good to play at this year's E3. (Plus, Mojang has been allowed to keep polishing the original game on every console and smartphone in the world, instead of turning into an Xbox-only studio. Whew.)

Thus, it wasn't necessarily inevitable that Minecraft would get a clone to compete with every major gaming genre (no Super Steve Bros., no Minecraft Kart Racers). That got our hopes up for Minecraft Earth, Microsoft's first salvo in the "augmented reality on phones" war, which was unveiled in May of this year. It sure seemed like a clever move: take Minecraft's go-anywhere, punch-any-tree, build-anything philosophy, then dump it into the real world à la Pokemon Go.

After five days with the game's closed beta (which launched seconds ago as a closed, invite-only beta in the Seattle area), I must report that the game's early version is missing the series' magic—and Mojang is going to need to put some more pixelated blocks into place before calling this one a victory.

Enlarge / A Model 3 at a Tesla showroom on March 1, 2019 in California. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Tesla implemented across-the-board price cuts for its vehicles on Monday, making most versions of the Model S, Model X, and Model 3 more affordable. At the same time, Tesla eliminated the most affordable versions of the Model S and Model X, called Standard Range, from its product lineup.

The price of the Long Range Model S (now the cheapest Model S) dropped from $85,000 to $79,990. The Standard Range Model S cost $75,000 before it was discontinued.

The price of the high-end Model S Performance model actually increased from $96,000 to $99,990. However, that reflects the fact that "Ludicrous Mode" is now included as a standard feature for the Performance model. Previously, "Ludicrous Mode" was a $20,000 upgrade on top of the Performance model's $96,000 base price.