CNET explores the potential of "marine energy," starting with "an ambitious endeavor nearing completion off the coast of Oregon, where 7 miles of conduit were laid under the floor of the Pacific Ocean using pioneering horizontal drilling techniques." Soon, thick cables will be run through that conduit to connect the mainland to PacWave, an offshore experimental testbed built to develop and demonstrate new technology that converts the power of waves into onshore electricity. Once fully operational (as soon as 2025), PacWave could generate up to 20 megawatts, enough to power a few thousand homes.

"I get really excited about wave energy because the resource is so large," Levi Kilcher, a senior scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told me. Kilcher is a lead author on the 2021 National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report that compiled available data on marine energy sources in the US, including waves, tides and ocean currents. The team found that the total energy potential is equal to more than half (57%) of the electricity generated in the U.S. in a single year...

Waves are just one potential source of marine energy that scientists and officials are investigating. Andrea Copping, a senior researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, says there's renewed interest in another form of marine energy: ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, which involves bringing up colder water from deeper parts of the ocean. This chilly flow then goes through a heat exchange process with warmer surface water, similar to the way home heat pumps exchange hot and cold air. That process drives a turbine to generate electricity... A small OTEC plant has been functioning in Hawaii for years. Copping believes new commitments from the U.S. government hold promise for the future of the technology, which has also seen significant interest in Japan and other surrounding nations.

It's possible that concern over climate change could unlock new sources of funding for OTEC... There's also the added bonus that the cold water pipes can double as a form of air conditioning in the tropical locales where OTEC works best.

Engadget writes: Apple is testing an M3 chipset with a 12-core processor and 18-core GPU, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman reports a source sent him App Store developer logs that show the chip running on an unannounced MacBook Pro with macOS 14. He speculates the M3 variant Apple is testing is the base-level M3 Pro the company plans to release sometime next year...

[T]he M3 Pro reportedly features 50 percent more CPU cores than its first-generation predecessor.
From Gurman's original article: I'm sure you're wondering: How can Apple possibly fit that many cores on a chip? The answer is the 3-nanometer manufacturing process, which the company will be switching to with its M3 line. That approach allows for higher-density chips, meaning a designer can fit more cores into an already small processor.

775 million people around the world didn't have electricity last year, according to the International Energy Agency. But the Associated Press points out that's changing in some of the world's most remote places — thanks to off-grid solar systems.

Here's a typical example from the world's fourth most-populous country... Before electricity came to the village a bit less than two years ago, the day ended when the sun went down. Villagers in Laindeha, on the island of Sumba in eastern Indonesia, would set aside the mats they were weaving or coffee they were sorting to sell at the market as the light faded.

A few families who could afford them would start noisy generators that rumbled into the night, emitting plumes of smoke. Some people wired lightbulbs to old car batteries, which would quickly die or burn out appliances, as they had no regulator. Children sometimes studied by makeshift oil lamps, but these occasionally burned down homes when knocked over by the wind. That's changed since grassroots social enterprise projects have brought small, individual solar panel systems to Laindeha and villages like it across the island...

Around the world, hundreds of millions of people live in communities without regular access to power, and off-grid solar systems like these are bringing limited access to electricity to places like these years before power grids reach them... Indonesia has brought electricity to millions of people in recent years, going from 85% to nearly 97% coverage between 2005 and 2020, according to World Bank data. But there are still more than half a million people in Indonesia living in places the grid doesn't reach.

While barriers still remain, experts say off-grid solar programs on the island could be replicated across the vast archipelago nation, bringing renewable energy to remote communities.

As smoke began filling the cabin, an airplane passenger saw sparks and fire bursting from a bag in the seat directly behind her — which turned out to be a "smoky flashing lithium battery, which had begun smoldering in a carry-on bag," according to CBS News.

The flight crew contained the situation, and "Airport fire trucks met the plane on the runway and everyone evacuated safely." But a CBS News Investigation "has discovered similar incidents have been happening much more frequently in the skies over the United States." The FAA verifies the number of lithium-Ion battery fires jumped more 42% in the last five years. A CBS News analysis of the FAA's data found that since 2021 there's been at least one lithium battery incident on a passenger plane somewhere in the U.S., on average, once every week...

Some airlines are taking action to control the growing number of fires. They are using specialized "thermal containment" bags designed for flight crews to use if a lithium battery starts heating up to the point where it's smoking or burning. Mechanical engineers at the University of Texas at Austin say the bags can effectively contain fire and keep it from spreading, but don't extinguish it.
In a video accompanying the article, an engineering professor at the university's Fire Research Group even showed a lithium-ion battery fire that continued burning undewater. "You can't put it out. It's a fire within the cell. So, you've got fuel, oxygen, heat in the cell, all." (The article also notes a startup called Pure Lithium is working on a new kind of non-flammable battery using lithium metal cells instead of lithium ion).

Guidelines from America's Federal Aviation Administration require spare lithium-ion batteries be kept with passengers (and not checked) — and prohibits passengers from bringing onboard damaged or recalled batteries and battery-powered devices.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader khb for sharing the article.

More than a decade ago engineers at AMD "began toying with a radical idea," remembers the New York Times. Instead of designing one big microprocessor, they "conceived of creating one from smaller chips that would be packaged tightly together to work like one electronic brain."

But with "diminishing returns" from Moore's Law, packaging smaller chips suddenly becomes more important. [Alternate URL here.] As much as 80% of microprocessors will be using these designs by 2027, according to an estimate from the market research firm Yole Group cited by the Times: The concept, sometimes called chiplets, caught on in a big way, with AMD, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, IBM and Intel introducing such products. Chiplets rapidly gained traction because smaller chips are cheaper to make, while bundles of them can top the performance of any single slice of silicon. The strategy, based on advanced packaging technology, has since become an essential tool to enabling progress in semiconductors. And it represents one of the biggest shifts in years for an industry that drives innovations in fields like artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and military hardware. "Packaging is where the action is going to be," said Subramanian Iyer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped pioneer the chiplet concept. "It's happening because there is actually no other way."

The catch is that such packaging, like making chips themselves, is overwhelmingly dominated by companies in Asia. Although the United States accounts for around 12 percent of global semiconductor production, American companies provide just 3 percent of chip packaging, according to IPC, a trade association. That issue has now landed chiplets in the middle of U.S. industrial policymaking. The CHIPS Act, a $52 billion subsidy package that passed last summer, was seen as President Biden's move to reinvigorate domestic chip making by providing money to build more sophisticated factories called "fabs." But part of it was also aimed at stoking advanced packaging factories in the United States to capture more of that essential process... The Commerce Department is now accepting applications for manufacturing grants from the CHIPS Act, including for chip packaging factories. It is also allocating funding to a research program specifically on advanced packaging...

Some chip packaging companies are moving quickly for the funding. One is Integra Technologies in Wichita, Kan., which announced plans for a $1.8 billion expansion there but said that was contingent on receiving federal subsidies. Amkor Technology, an Arizona packaging service that has most of its operations in Asia, also said it was talking to customers and government officials about a U.S. production presence... Packaging services still need others to supply the substrates that chiplets require to connect to circuit boards and one another... But the United States has no major makers of those substrates, which are primarily produced in Asia and evolved from technologies used in manufacturing circuit boards. Many U.S. companies have also left that business, another worry that industry groups hope will spur federal funding to help board suppliers start making substrates.

In March, Mr. Biden issued a determination that advanced packaging and domestic circuit board production were essential for national security, and announced $50 million in Defense Production Act funding for American and Canadian companies in those fields. Even with such subsidies, assembling all the elements required to reduce U.S. dependence on Asian companies "is a huge challenge," said Andreas Olofsson, who ran a Defense Department research effort in the field before founding a packaging start-up called Zero ASIC. "You don't have suppliers. You don't have a work force. You don't have equipment. You have to sort of start from scratch."

Hewlett-Packward printers recently got a firmware update that "blocks customers from using cheaper, non-HP ink cartridges," reports the Telegraph: Customers' devices were remotely updated in line with new terms which mean their printers will not work unless they are fitted with approved ink cartridges. It prevents customers from using any cartridges other than those fitted with an HP chip, which are often more expensive. If the customer tries to use a non-HP ink cartridge, the printer will refuse to print.

HP printers used to display a warning when a "third-party" ink cartridge was inserted, but now printers will simply refuse to print altogether.

The printer company said it issued the update to reduce the risk of malware attacks, saying "third-party cartridges that use non-HP chips or circuitry can pose risks to the hardware performance, print quality, and security." It also said it used regular updates to improve its services, such as introducing alerts for some customers telling them when their ink is running low. However, according to HP's website, the company also blocks the use of rival cartridges in order to "maintain the integrity of our printing systems, and protect our intellectual property".

Outraged customers have flooded social media with complaints, saying they felt "cheated" by the update. HP ink cartridges can cost more than double the price of third-party offerings... Some customers can choose to disable HP's cartridge-blocking feature in the printer's settings, HP said, but it depends on the printer model. Others will be stuck with a printer that only works if they commit to spending more on ink cartridges approved by HP.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power industry, one of the biggest steps so far in its effort to decarbonize the economy to fight climate change. The proposal would limit how much carbon dioxide power plants, which are the source of more than a quarter of U.S. emissions, can chuff into the atmosphere, putting the industry on a years-long course to install billions of dollars of new equipment or shut down. Environmental groups and scientists have long argued that such steps are crucial to curb global warming, but fossil fuel-producing states argue that they represent government overreach and threaten to destabilize the electric grid.

The proposal sets standards that would push power companies to install carbon capture equipment (CCS) that can siphon the CO2 from a plant's smokestack before it reaches the atmosphere, or use super-low-emissions hydrogen as a fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the plan would cut carbon emissions from coal plants and new gas plants by 617 million tons between 2028 and 2042, the equivalent of reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles. "Today we're proposing new technology standards that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power plants, protecting health and protecting our planet," EPA Administrator Michael Regan told students at the University of Maryland on their last day of school on Thursday.

Regan said that the agency has wielded the power of the federal Clean Air Act to craft the new power plant rules, along with a suite of other measures aimed at tackling vehicle emissions, as well as potent greenhouse gases methane and HFCs, that would reduce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions between 2022 and 2055. The proposal, more than 18 months in the making, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but can regulate plants by setting technology-based standards applied on-site.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines. Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: "The ultimate trigger here is power. It's just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity." Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure's DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part. In his view: "Hard drive technology is 67 years old. We need to herald this technology that went from five megabytes the size of this room to where we are today. And even the latest HAMR technology, putting a laser on the top of the head in order to heat up the platters, is pretty remarkable ... But we're at the end of that era."

HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. There's a VAST vs Infinidat angle to it as well, with the former also stating disk drive IO limitations would cripple the use of larger disk drives in petabyte-scale data stores, with Infidat blasting back that it "must be joking." Gartner has had a look in too, claiming that enterprise SSDs will hit 35 percent of HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026 - though that would make Rosemarin's 2028 cutoff unlikely. Pure recently stated SSDs would kill HDDs in a crossover event that would happen "soon." Rosemarin, meanwhile, continued his argument: "Our CEO in many recent events has quoted that 3 percent of the world's power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk.

So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it's all becoming evident that hard drives go away." Are high electricity prices set to continue? "I think the UK's power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here's the thing ... when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down ... I've been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it'll take us several years to get there. We're already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one -- we've already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can't come here, we don't have enough power for you. The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you're a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Milan recently created a fully rechargeable battery using nontoxic edible components. This is probably the world's first battery that is safe to ingest and entirely made of food-grade materials. "Given the level of safety of these batteries, they could be used in children's toys, where there is a high risk of ingestion," said Mario Caironi, a senior researcher at IIT. However, this isn't the only solution the edible battery could provide. Apart from serving as an alternative to conventional toxic toy batteries, the edible battery from IIT could also play a key role in making health care applications safer than ever. For instance, doctors have to be cautious regarding the use of miniature electronic devices (such as drug-delivery robots, biosensors, etc.) inside the human body, as they come equipped with batteries made of toxic substances. An edible battery could solve this problem. There are also more mundane applications, like replacing batteries in pet toys.

Ivan K. Ilic, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at IIT, told Ars Technica, "Two main ways a battery damages human tissue when it's inside the body is by doing water electrolysis and by the toxicity of its materials. Water electrolysis is a phenomenon where electricity with a voltage higher than 1.2 V (virtually all commercial batteries) breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (an explosive gas), and it is very dangerous if it occurs in the stomach. Our battery is way below this voltage, around 0.65 V, so water electrolysis cannot occur. On the other hand, we used only food materials, so nothing is toxic!" Before the battery is useful, however, the researchers will need to first enhance the battery's power capacity. Currently, the edible battery can supply 48 microamperes of current for a bit over 10 minutes. So it can easily meet the power demand of a miniature medical device or a small LED. "These batteries are no competition to ordinary batteries -- they will not power electric cars -- but they are meant to power edible electronics and maybe some other niche applications, so their main advantage is non-toxicity," said Ilic. Here's a list of what makes these edible batteries work, as mentioned by Ars:

- "Quercetin, a pigment found in almonds and capers, serves as the battery cathode, whereas riboflavin (vitamin B2) makes up the battery anode.
- The researchers used nori (edible seaweed that is used in the wrapping of sushi rolls) as the separator and a water-based solution (aqueous NaHSO4) as the electrolyte.
- Activated charcoal is employed to achieve high electrical conductivity in the battery.
The battery electrodes come covered in beeswax and connect to a gold foil (used to cover pastries) that laminates a supporting structure made of ethyl cellulose."

The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

A Norwegian company named ENRX "wants to inductively charge electric vehicles with 200 kW while driving on a section of highway in Florida," according to the "electric mobility industry" news site electrive.com.

"A one-mile section of a four-lane highway near Orlando is to be electrified." ENRX has teamed up with the Central Florida Expressway Authority and the Aspire Engineering Research Center for an initiative to build a one-mile (1.6-kilometre) section on a four-lane highway near Orlando that will inductively charge the batteries of moving electric vehicles at 200 kW.

The principle is clear: the electric vehicle batteries are fitted with a special receiver pad and charged as they drive over the coils embedded in the road. In the process, the energy is transferred from these coils to the receiver pad mounted on the vehicle floor, which according to ENRX should provide "a safe, wireless power supply" even at motorway speeds. Advantages of the 'Next Generation Electric Roadway system' mentioned include interoperability, different output power levels for different vehicle and battery types, or user-defined distance between the ground and the vehicle. In addition, the system (on the infrastructure side) is supposed to be maintenance-free after installation...

"When you can charge while driving, range anxiety and frequent charging stops will be a thing of the past," says ENRX CEO Bjørn Eldar Petersen... "Dynamic charging can reduce the need for large battery capacities, allowing cars to be equipped with lighter and more affordable battery packs."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader aduxorth for sharing the news.

Friday Bill Gates visited Kemmerer, Wyoming (population: 2,656) — where a coal plant was shutting down after 50 years. But Gates was there "to celebrate the latest step in a project that's been more than 15 years in the making: designing and building a next-generation nuclear power plant..."

The new plant will employ "between 200 and 250 people," Gates writes in a blog post, "and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs — such as operating a turbine and maintaining connections to the power grid — without much retraining." It's called the Natrium plant, and it was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. When it opens (potentially in 2030), it will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors.

All of this matters because the world needs to make a big bet on nuclear. As I wrote in my book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , we need nuclear power if we're going to meet the world's growing need for energy while also eliminating carbon emissions. None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean...

Another thing that sets TerraPower apart is its digital design process. Using supercomputers, they've digitally tested the Natrium design countless times, simulating every imaginable disaster, and it keeps holding up. TerraPower's sophisticated work has drawn interest from around the globe, including an agreement to collaborate on nuclear power technology in Japan and investments from the South Korean conglomerate SK and the multinational steel company ArcelorMittal...

I'm excited about this project because of what it means for the future. It's the kind of effort that will help America maintain its energy independence. And it will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. The people of Kemmerer are at the forefront of the equitable transition to a clean, safe energy future, and it's great to be partnering with them.
Gates writes that for safety the plant uses liquid sodium (instead of water) to absorb excess heat, and it even has an energy storage system "to control how much electricity it produces at any given time..."

"I'm convinced that the facility will be a win for the local economy, America's energy independence, and the fight against climate change.

Phoronix shares some overlooked news from AMD's openSIL presentation at the OCP Regional Summit in April. Specifically, that AMD openSIL — their open-source x86 silicon initialization library — "is planned to eventually replace AMD's well known AGESA [BIOS utility]" around 2026, and "it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack — just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned..." Raj Kapoor, AMD Fellow and AMD's Chief Firmware Architect, in fact began the AMD openSIL presentation by talking about the challenges they've had with AGESA in adapting it to Coreboot for Chromebook purposes with Ryzen SoCs... With AMD openSIL not expected to be production ready until around 2026, this puts it roughly inline for an AMD Zen 6 or Zen 7 introduction. The proof of concept code for AMD Genoa is expected to come soon...

The presentation also noted that beyond AMD openSIL code being open-source, the openSIL specification will also be open. AMD "invites every silicon vendor" to participate in this open-source system firmware endeavor.

Supported by conversations with nearly a dozen former employees, 9to5Mac details the downfall of Brydge -- "a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions. As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company's most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well. Those former Brydge employees largely attribute the company's failure to mismanagement during growth, misleading statements from its two co-CEOs, and an overall hostile working environment that led to a high turnover rate.

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Engadget: The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024. In a blog post on the White House website, the administration has formally introduced the Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax. It explained that it wants to tax cryptomining firms, because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," which include environmental pollution and high energy prices.

Crypto mining has "negative spillovers on the environment," the White House continued, and the pollution it generates "falls disproportionately on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color." It added that the operations' "often volatile power consumption " can raise electricity prices for the people around them and cause service interruptions. Further, local power companies are taking a risk if they decide to upgrade their equipment to make their service more stable, since miners can easily move away to another location, even abroad. As Yahoo News noted, there are other industries, such as steel manufacturing, that also use large amounts of electricity but aren't taxed for their energy consumption. In its post, the administration said that cryptomining "does not generate the local and national economic benefits typically associated with businesses using similar amounts of electricity."

Critics believe that the government made this proposal to go after and harm an industry it doesn't support. A Forbes report also suggested that DAME may not be the best solution for the issue, and that taxing the industry's greenhouse gas emissions might be a better alternative. That could encourage mining firms not just to minimize energy use, but also to find cleaner sources of power. It might be difficult to convince the administration to go down that route, though: In its blog post, it said that the "environmental impacts of cryptomining exist even when miners use existing clean power." Apparently, mining operations in communities with hydropower have been observed to reduce the amount of clean power available for use by others. That leads to higher prices and to even higher consumption of electricity from non-clean sources. "If the proposal ever becomes a law, the government would impose the excise tax in phases," adds Engadget. "It would start by adding a 10 percent tax on miners' electricity use in the first year, 20 percent in the second and then 30 percent from the third year onwards."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. company Westinghouse unveiled plans on Thursday for a small modular reactor to generate virtually emissions-free electricity that could replace coal plants or power water desalinization and other industries. Rita Baranwal, the Westinghouse Electricity Co's top technology officer, said the reactor, dubbed AP300 for its planned 300 Megawatt capacity, will not use special fuels or liquid metal coolants unlike some other next-generation reactors. It will be a smaller version of its AP1000 reactor, several of which are operating in China, and which are ramping up in Georgia at the Vogtle plant, after years of delay and billions of dollars over budget.

Despite hurdles for new nuclear, Baranwal was confident. "We've kept it simple, designed it on demonstrated and licensed technology, and I think that's one of the advantages that we have with this concept," she told Reuters in an interview. Westinghouse, owned by Brookfield Business Partners, plans to start constructing the reactor by 2030 and have it running by 2033. So far the design for only one SMR, planned by NuScale Power, has been approved by U.S. regulators and it still needs permits.

Westinghouse did not reveal how much the first reactor would cost, but said later units would cost about $1 billion. The company, based in western Pennsylvania, has had informal talks with parties in neighboring states Ohio and West Virginia about the potential building of AP300s at former coal plants. Westinghouse also hopes to sell reactors to countries in eastern Europe, even though nuclear power critics have expressed concerns that developers and governments should think carefully before building new nuclear plants anywhere near the region. They noted that Russia took the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the site of repeated shelling.

New York is expected to be the first state in the U.S. to phase in a ban on fossil fuel equipment in new construction. The ban is included in the $229 billion state budget deal and will likely take effect in 2026 for most new buildings under seven stories and in 2029 for larger buildings. NPR reports: New gas stoves or propane furnaces would be a thing of the past under the proposal, which would require homes and businesses to be fully electric starting in 2026. Existing buildings would be unaffected. Any new construction seven stories and under would not be permitted to install fossil fuel equipment, though large commercial or industrial buildings 100,000 square feet or more would be exempt. By 2029, the ban would apply to all new construction.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), Microsoft is helping finance AMD's expansion into AI chips. Meanwhile, AMD is working with Microsoft to create an in-house chipset, codenamed Athena, for the software giant's data centers. Paul Thurrott reports: Athena is designed as a cost-effective replacement for AI chipsets from Nvidia, which currently dominates this market. And it comes with newfound urgency as Microsoft's ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot workloads are incredibly expensive using third-party chips. With Microsoft planning to expand its use of AI dramatically this year, it needs a cheaper alternative.

Microsoft's secretive hardware efforts also come amid a period of Big Tech layoffs. But the firm's new Microsoft Silicon business, led by former Intel executive Rani Borkar, is growing and now has almost 1,000 employees, several hundred of which are working on Athena. The software giant has invested about $2 billion on this effort so far, Bloomberg says. (And that's above the $11 billion it's invested in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.) Bloomberg also says that Microsoft intends to keep partnering with Nvidia too, and that it will continue buying Nvidia chipsets as needed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months. Backblaze said its results thus far "are consistent" with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months.

Export controls imposed by the U.S. on microchips, aiming to hinder China's technological advancements, have had minimal effects on the country's tech sector. While the restrictions have slowed down variants of Nvidia's chips for the Chinese market, it has not halted China's progress in areas like AI, as the reduced performance is still an improvement for Chinese firms, and researchers are finding ways to overcome the limitations. Reuters reports: Nvidia has created variants of its chips for the Chinese market that are slowed down to meet U.S. rules. Industry experts told Reuters the newest one - the Nvidia H800, announced in March - will likely take 10% to 30% longer to carry out some AI tasks and could double some costs compared with Nvidia's fastest U.S. chips. Even the slowed Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. Tencent Holdings, one of China's largest tech companies, in April estimated that systems using Nvidia's H800 will cut the time it takes to train its largest AI system by more than half, from 11 days to four days. "The AI companies that we talk to seem to see the handicap as relatively small and manageable," said Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst with 86Research.

Part of the U.S. strategy in setting the rules was to avoid such a shock that the Chinese would ditch U.S. chips altogether and redouble their own chip-development efforts. "They had to draw the line somewhere, and wherever they drew it, they were going to run into the challenge of how to not be immediately disruptive, but how to also over time degrade China's capability," said one chip industry executive who requested anonymity to talk about private discussions with regulators. The export restrictions have two parts. The first puts a ceiling on a chip's ability to calculate extremely precise numbers, a measure designed to limit supercomputers that can be used in military research. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. But calculating extremely precise numbers is less relevant in AI work like large language models where the amount of data the chip can chew through is more important. [...] The second U.S. limit is on chip-to-chip transfer speeds, which does affect AI. The models behind technologies such as ChatGPT are too large to fit onto a single chip. Instead, they must be spread over many chips - often thousands at a time -- which all need to communicate with one another.

Nvidia has not disclosed the China-only H800 chip's performance details, but a specification sheet seen by Reuters shows a chip-to-chip speed of 400 gigabytes per second, less than half the peak speed of 900 gigabytes per second for Nvidia's flagship H100 chip available outside China. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed. Naveen Rao, chief executive of a startup called MosaicML that specializes in helping AI models to run better on limited hardware, estimated a 10-30% system slowdown. "There are ways to get around all this algorithmically," he said. "I don't see this being a boundary for a very long time -- like 10 years." Moreover, AI researchers are trying to slim down the massive systems they have built to cut the cost of training products similar to ChatGPT and other processes. Those will require fewer chips, reducing chip-to-chip communications and lessening the impact of the U.S. speed limits.

According to DigiTimes, TSMC will charge an extra 30% more for chips made in American than for chips made in Taiwan. Tom's Hardware reports: TSMC has started discussions with customers about orders and pricing for both overseas plants, which are set to begin commercial production in late 2024. Industry insiders believe that prices of chips produced on TSMC's N4 and N5 process technologies in the U.S. will be 20% -- 30% higher than those in Taiwan, while older process chips produced in Japan's Kumamoto facility on N28/N22 as well as N16/N12 nodes may cost 10% - 15% more than similar chips fabbed in Taiwan.

While American chip designers certainly won't appreciate higher costs on chip production in the U.S., it is likely that they will make chips aimed at government and less price-sensitive applications in Arizona. Therefore, they should be able to pass those extra costs on to their customers without risking their competitive positions. Given the high construction and operational costs of fabs in Japan and the U.S., TSMC is going to pass those extra expenses on to customers to maintain its gross margin target of 53%.