Month: October 2023

Enlarge / The first stage for ULA's Vulcan rocket was lifted onto its launch platform at Cape Canaveral in January. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Three days at Christmastime will be the final chance for United Launch Alliance to get its new Vulcan rocket off the ground this year, the company's chief executive announced Tuesday.

Still waiting for delivery of an upper stage and a final round of qualification testing following a test mishap earlier this year, Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, told CNBC on Tuesday that the Vulcan rocket's first demonstration flight is scheduled for launch December 24. There are two backup launch dates available December 25 and 26, or else the launch will have to wait until January.

There are threats to this schedule, but ULA officials were confident enough in the timeline to publicly disclose the launch date Tuesday. They have also told Astrobotic, which is flying its first commercial Moon cargo lander on the inaugural Vulcan rocket, to ship its spacecraft from the company's Pittsburgh headquarters to Florida in anticipation of a December launch.

Enlarge (credit: Scharon Harding)

When I tell people I prefer using mechanical keyboards, I often hear that they're too expensive. Even people in tech circles have told me they can't find a quality mechanical keyboard for a decent price. Is $28 decent enough for you?

That's how much the Keychron C3 Pro is going for on Amazon right now. It's a sale price that could change, but the keyboard was still only $35 when it released in September. Since September 21, I've been using the budget clacker as my primary keyboard, and it has kept up with my busy workload—writing about 17 articles for Ars Technica and more emails than I care to recount. Expensive mechanical keyboards often come with all sorts of perks worth obsessing over, but the C3 Pro proves that sometimes, cheap is good enough. Mechanical keyboards don't have to be a luxury peripheral.

Meet the C3 Pro

• 

  The C3 Pro is Keychron's lowest-priced mechanical keyboard. [credit: Scharon Harding ]

Keychron's C3 Pro is a tenkeyless (TKL) mechanical keyboard, so there's no numpad. If you can get past that, you're left with an affordable keyboard offering a typing experience that's superior to any membrane or mechanical keyboard in this price range.

Enlarge / A press photo of the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU. (credit: Nvidia)

On Tuesday, chip designer Nvidia announced in an SEC filing that new US export restrictions on its high-end AI GPU chips to China are now in effect sooner than expected, according to a report from Reuters. The curbs were initially scheduled to take effect 30 days after their announcement on October 17 and are designed to prevent China, Iran, and Russia from acquiring advanced AI chips.

The banned chips are advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) that are commonly used for training and running deep learning AI applications similar to ChatGPT and AI image generators, among other uses. GPUs are well-suited for neural networks because their massively parallel architecture performs the necessary matrix multiplications involved in running neural networks faster than conventional processors.

The Biden administration initially announced an advanced AI chip export ban in September 2022, and in reaction, Nvidia designed and released new chips, the A800 and H800, to comply with those export rules for the Chinese market. In November 2022, Nvidia told The Verge that the A800 "meets the US Government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it." However, the new curbs enacted Monday specifically halt the exports of these modified Nvidia AI chips. The Nvidia A100, H100, and L40S chips are also included in the export restrictions.