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Samsung has begun mass production of 20nm second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), which features up to 256 gigabytes-per-second (GB/sec) of available bandwidth per memory stack—double that of the first generation HBM used in AMD's Fury graphics cards.

HBM2 will also allow for HBM-equipped graphics cards to be packed with more memory—as much as 16GB—surpassing the 4GB limit that AMD ran into with its early adoption of the technology.

Like HBM, HBM2 is a form of stacked memory, where the individual DRAM chips are placed on top of each other, rather than side by side. Those chips are connected together vertically using through-silicon vias (TSVs)—wires that are threaded through the DRAM stack—while an interposer at the bottom of the stack routes the connections from the memory directly to the GPU. Because the chips are closer together and the interconnects are shorter, throughput is increased and power consumption is reduced.

(credit: torrNADO.ru)

Vladimir Putin's special adviser on the Internet, German (Herman) Klimenko appears to be the owner of a Russian torrent website, according to an investigation by TorrentFreak. The site is torrNADO.ru, a pun on the Russian phrase "torrenti nado?"—do you need torrents? It offers the usual range of films, music, games, software, and e-books, all for free, and so presumably pirated.

As TorrentFreak discovered, the domain name is registered to a company called ECO PC Solutions, and the owner of ECO PC Solutions is a certain Alevtina Jacobson. "In December, ECO PC Integrated Solutions (with Jacobson at the helm) was announced as the operator of a brand new TV channel for MediaMetrics.ru, a service which measures Internet traffic to news stories from social media. Completing the circle, MediaMetrics is owned by Herman Klimenko and he admits that Alevtina Jacobson was his employee."

This would seem to confirm information obtained by the Russian-language business newspaper Vedomosti that Klimenko owned the torrNADO.ru site.

We are shocked that anyone would ever use sarcasm in a review of Kim Kardashian's app. (credit: TrueRatr)

A team of students participating in Cornell University's Tech Challenge program has developed a machine learning application that attempts to break the final frontier in language processing—identifying sarcasm. This could change everything… maybe.

TrueRatr, a collaboration between Cornell Tech and Bloomberg, is intended to screen out sarcasm in product reviews. But the technology has been open sourced (and posted to GitHub) so that others can modify it to deal with other types of text-based eye-rolling.

Christopher Hong of Bloomberg acted as mentor to the interdisciplinary student team behind TrueRatr (consisting of MBA candidates, engineering, and design graduate students)—Mengjue Wang, Ming Chen, Hesed Kim, Brendan Ritter, Shreyas Kulkarni, and Karan Bir. Hong had researched sarcasm detection himself while working on his 2014 master's thesis. "Everyone uses sarcasm at some point," Hong told Ars. "Most of the time, there's some intent of harm, but sometimes it's the opposite. It’s kind of part of our nature."

San Francisco's Mission neighborhood. (credit: Street Advisor)

Today we're witnessing the rise of a new urban phenomenon: the segregated affluent neighborhood. These aren't gated communities or condo high rises. They are isolated, rich neighborhoods that arise, seemingly spontaneously, from the shifting real estate in city centers. Armed with new data sets and computer-generated models, two urban planning researchers at UCLA have figured out where these enclaves come from and how they are changing our cities.

Income segregated neighborhoods

Urban planning professors Michael C. Lens and Paavo Monkkonen published the results of their research this month in the Journal of the American Planning Association after an intensive analysis of new data on the 95 biggest cities in the United States. Though it's widely known that income inequality has risen in US cities over the past 40 years, very little research has been done on how this affects neighborhoods. Most researchers assumed that income inequality led to segregated poor neighborhoods, or ghettos. But Lens and Monkkonen found it actually led to the opposite: enclaves of the ultra-rich.

Of course, cities have always had rich and poor neighborhoods. What's shrinking out of existence today are mixed neighborhoods that include people from different class and cultural backgrounds. And that's a problem, say economists who have done longitudinal studies of kids who grow up in income segregated cities. Kids who grow up in neighborhoods where everyone is poor tend to stay poor, while kids in mixed neighborhoods enjoy the kind of class mobility that the US prides itself on fostering. There are some obvious reasons for this. In many cities, wealthy neighborhoods have their own local school systems and community centers with abundant resources to prepare kids for college or skilled jobs. In poor neighborhoods, resources are stretched thin. There are few after-school enrichment programs and little support for kids who need help with learning. We can see the same discrepancies when it comes to hospitals, public parks, and other neighborhood amenities.