Month: November 2020

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images/Jonathan Gitlin)

Is one of Tesla's infotainment systems defective by design? That's a question the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hopes to answer. It has started an engineering analysis after hundreds of customer complaints of bricked systems resulted in a preliminary investigation in June.

NHTSA thinks it knows what the problem is: an 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory chip—an SD card in other words—with a finite number of write cycles, fitted to its Media Control Unit. The MCU regularly writes logs to this chip and, within three or four years, reaches the lifetime number of cycles. At this point the touchscreen dies, taking with it functions like the car's backup camera, the ability to defog the windows, and also the audible alerts and chimes for the driver aids and turn signals.

After the regulator's Office of Defects Investigation received 537 complaints, it asked Tesla if it knew of any more problems with the Nvidia Tegra 3-based system, which is fitted to approximately 158,000 Models S (2012-2018) and X (2016-2018). Tesla did, handing over 2,399 complaints and field reports, 7,777 warranty claims, and 4,746 non-warranty claims.

Enlarge / SEM image of a 3D-printed microscopic version of the USS Voyager, a fictional Intrepid class starship from the Star Trek franchise. Studying such objects could lead to tiny robots for targeted drug delivery, among other applications. (credit: R.P. Doherty et al/Soft Matter)

Physicists at Leiden University in the Netherlands have created a 3D-printed microscopic version of the USS Voyager from the Star Trek franchise, according to a recent paper in the journal Soft Matter. These kinds of synthetic "microswimmers" are of great interest to scientists because they could one day lead to tiny swimming robots for autonomous drug delivery through the bloodstream, or for cleaning wastewater, among other potential applications. Such studies could also shed light on how natural "microswimmers" like sperm and bacteria travel through the human body.

Because of their small size, microswimmers face unique challenges when they move through fluids. As we've reported previously in the context of different research, biological microorganisms live in environments with a low so-called Reynolds number—a number that predicts how a fluid will behave based on the variables viscosity, length, and speed. Named after the 19th-century physicist Osborne Reynolds, the concept is especially useful for predicting when a fluid will transition to turbulent flow.

In practical terms, it means that inertial forces (e.g., pushing against the water to propel yourself forward while swimming) are largely irrelevant at very low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces dominate instead. So because bacteria or sperm swim at low Reynolds numbers, they can barely coast any distance at all if you push them to set them in motion. It's akin to a human trying to swim in molasses.

Enlarge / Spoiler: When it comes to performance over the years, Intel is the slow and steady tortoise to AMD's speedy-but-intermittent hare. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The comment wars between Intel and AMD fans have been hot for the last few release cycles, with a lot of digital ink spilled about which company has—or has not—improved significantly over the years. There's been no shortage of opinions about the current raw performance of each company's fastest processors, either. We thought it would be interesting to dive into archived performance benchmarks of the fastest desktop/enthusiast CPUs for each company to get a good overview of how each has really done over the years—and perhaps to even see if there are patterns to be gleaned or to make some bets about the future.

Before we dive into charts, let's start out with some tables—that way, you can see which CPUs we're using as milestones for each year. While we're at it, there are a couple of irregularities in the data; we'll discuss those also and talk about the things that a simple chart won't show you.

Twenty years of enthusiast computing

Although both Intel and AMD obviously launch a wide array of processors for different price points and target markets each year, we're limiting ourselves to the fastest desktop or "enthusiast" processor from each year. That means no server processors and no High-End Desktop (HEDT) processors either—so we won't be looking at either Threadrippers or the late model XE series Intel parts.

Enlarge / In response to a surge in cases, Germany ordered restaurants to switch to delivery/takeout only. (credit: Picture Alliance/Getty Images)

Nobody wants to go back under heavy social restrictions. But the surging case numbers are causing many countries to put in place targeted lockdowns and other limits to try to get the pandemic back under control—a move that has sparked a backlash in a lot of places. So, it seems like it's worth asking what the optimal combination of restrictions might be. How do you get the most pandemic control for the least restrictive social environment?

That's precisely what an international team of researchers attempted to find out, as described in a paper published today. And, while the researchers come up with some potential answers, their paper ends up with an additional message: this is a really hard question to answer. So, to an extent, many countries are going to have to act with imperfect information and hope for the best.

How do you answer that?

In an ideal world, we'd have some sense of the impact of each possible social restriction: closing restaurants, starting contact tracing, shutting schools, and so on. Given that information, we could look at the rate of infections and its trajectory, then figure out the smallest possible set of restriction that could cause the infection rate to drop. But the real world is very far from this idealized situation at the moment, which is what motivated the researchers to try to provide a bit more certainty regarding the effectiveness of different restrictions.