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Cloud biz buy-ins prove our Arm processors are ready • The Register

Interview After two years of claiming that its Arm-powered server processors provide better performance and efficiency for cloud applications than Intel or AMD’s, Ampere Computing said real deployments by cloud providers and businesses are proving its chips are the real deal.

The Silicon Valley startup held its Annual Strategy and Product Roadmap Update last week to ostensibly give a product roadmap update. But the only update was the news that Ampere’s 5nm processor due later this year is called Ampere One, it’s sampling that with customers, and it will support PCIe Gen 5 connectivity and DDR5 memory.

A photo of Ampere CEO Renee James showing off the startup's upcoming Ampere One CPU.

Ampere CEO, and former Intel president, Renee James showed off the upcoming Ampere One chip during the roadmap update … Click to enlarge

What the video update really felt like was a message to investors and the industry that Ampere’s high-core-count Altra processors are deployed at several major cloud providers and are already making a big difference for some businesses. After all, Ampere, which has raised a lot of cash from Oracle, confidentially filed for an initial public offering in April.

In an interview with The Register, Ampere chief product officer Jeff Wittich said the startup made customer testimonials the main topic of the presentation to prove that Ampere has executed on its roadmap so far and delivered the goods, literally speaking.

“The real story here is this stuff’s real. We’ve got people using it every day. It’s actually changing their businesses. It’s actually impacting people’s lives. It’s easy to get access to it now. And that became a big part of the story,” said Wittich, who previously worked at Intel for 15 years.

A photo of Ampere Chief Product Officer Jeff Wittich talking about the startup's customers.

Jeff Wittich pitches a strong Arm future

The name drops in Ampere’s video included Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Equinix Metal, Alibaba Cloud, UCloud, and JD Cloud, all of which have now launched instances powered by Ampere’s Altra chips. German cloud provider Hetzner is planning Ampere-based services, and Cloudflare has been using Ampere chips in servers to handle internet requests faster than x86 silicon.

The roadmap update included testimonials from autonomous vehicle startup Cruise, which said Ampere’s processors were the only ones on the market that could serve its high-throughput needs. Another booster in the video was the Oracle Red Bull Formula One racing team, which said it used Oracle’s Ampere A1 Compute instance to increase the number of simulations it runs to test the aerodynamics of F1 cars by around 25 percent. There was also biomedical software firm Project Ronin, which said it turned to Ampere for its “cost-effective” computing.

Other companies that gave lip service to Ampere included server maker Supermicro, storage provider DataDirect Networks, Chinese tech giant Baidu, and cloud hosting service GleSYS. And that still doesn’t cover all the organizations that Ampere said are supporting its chips.

While Ampere is getting loud about momentum with customers and partners, the startup is staying quiet about any financial details for now. The most we could get from Wittich is that Ampere saw “massive growth” in 2021 and that revenue is growing this year.

“We’re not at a million CPUs a year yet, but that’s the trajectory we’re on, to get there as rapidly as possible so that we really do have the scale that you need for this type of an operation. That’s where we’re looking, and it’s not in the distant future,” he said.

Claims of better performance scaling than Intel, AMD

One major selling point of Ampere’s Altra microprocessors is the fact that they can pack more cores than the 64-core maximum of AMD’s Epyc and the 40-core maximum of Intel’s Xeon. Ampere eclipsed both companies with the 2020 release of the 80-core Altra, and then it went even further in 2021 with the release of the 128-core Altra Max.

These higher core counts make the Altra processors well-suited for the high-density needs of cloud computing, but Wittich said what really makes his biz’s processors better than Epyc or Xeon is that they have less performance variability between each core.

A graph from Ampere Computing showing that its Altra Max CPU has far less performance variability than an x86 CPU.

A graph Ampere uses to claim that its chips have far less performance variability than x86 ones. Click to enlarge

Wittich claimed that performance variability is an issue in Xeon and Epyc processors: a software thread running on one CPU core may run slower than if it was on another core, or may run faster, or the same. The result is that users can’t always be sure how fast or slow their software will run on these hosts, though Wittich said cloud providers have developed ways to smooth out these inconsistencies and mitigate the causes of any slowdowns.

“Cloud providers try and move users away from each other. They try and detect this, migrate people. They try and cap the amount of resources that one person can have. It’s not foolproof, and all those things add complexity and overhead,” he opined.

Wittich said these kinds of fixes may hide performance issues of x86 processors from users, but it means that a significant amount of a cloud provider’s capacity is “totally wasted,” which results in extra costs.

Ampere’s Altra processors avoid these variability issues for a few reasons, according to Wittich. For one, all the cores are single-threaded: one hardware thread per CPU core, so performance is guaranteed. Meanwhile, Xeon and Epyc processors typically run two hardware threads through each CPU core as they support simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). If those two hardware threads aren’t in contention, you can get good performance, and if they contend, a slowdown may occur. SMT can be configured by the host server operator.

Wittich said the Altra chips are also more energy efficient, which allows them to sustain the same clock frequency at all times, unlike Xeon or Epyc.

“That’s one of the reasons why we’re able to scale to really high utilization and not drop off. We’ve got the power envelope to do it,” he said.

A graph from Ampere Computing showing that its Altra Max CPU has higher utilization than an x86 CPU.

A graph Ampere uses to claim that its chips have better peformance scaling than x86 chips. Click to enlarge.

Another factor that makes performance consistent between cores, according to Wittich, is that Ampere designed its processors to have larger L1 and L2 caches that are private to each CPU core, which keeps the cores primed with plenty of data and code that can be rapidly accessed, thus avoiding wasting time reaching out to RAM.

“People can keep their data in the cache for longer, which means less variability in performance, because you don’t have to keep going back out to memory because your neighbor wanted the rest of the cache and you evicted all of your cache contents,” he said.

What also helps keep the cores even is the mesh-based interconnect used to connect all the components on Ampere’s chips, Wittich added.

“We’ve done a lot on the mesh front to ensure that we’ve got really consistent performance,” he said. “It’s one reason why today our products are monolithic — not going to say they’re going to be monolithic forever — but what we will do is make sure that when our products move to a disaggregated approach, that our users still have a monolithic experience.”

Ampere’s plan to keep selling old chips alongside new ones

Later this year, Ampere plans to release a 5nm processor, named Ampere One, and the startup is promising it will come with even more cores, higher performance, and better power efficiency than its current Altra chips. Most notably, Ampere One will use a custom, Arm-compatible core designed by the startup, unlike the off-the-shelf core blueprints Ampere licensed from Arm for the Altra family.  

Wittich said it was always the plan for Ampere to design its own CPU. “There are a lot of cool things that we’ve done that allows us to scale out to this many cores, not blow past the power budget, and maintain that really, really consistent performance that our users want,” he said.

Customers have been sampling Ampere One since earlier this year, and while Wittich said the processor won’t enter mass production by the end of this year, it will be available in commercial servers by then.

“Once it’s in people’s production data centers, running real live workloads, and we’ve qualified it, that, to me, is the key milestone. And so that’s what we’re driving to for 2022,” he said. “Obviously, we’ll ramp volume as fast as we can to keep pulling in more customers.”

The interesting twist is that in addition to introducing chips on a yearly cadence, Ampere plans to keep selling its older processors well into the future — maybe even the next 10 years for Altra and Altra Max, Wittich suggested. This differs from Intel, which typically supports products from the last one or two generations before discontinuing them. In other words, imagine if Intel was still selling Haswell-based Xeon processors from 2014, and you get the idea for Ampere’s plan.

Wittich said Ampere is doing this because it’s what customers want and it’s necessary so that customers don’t get left behind if they don’t need to update to the latest chip.

“Our customers want the best of both worlds. So they want us to innovate and have a new processor every single year that has new features, but they don’t necessarily want to use that new processor for everything, not on day one,” Wittich said. It sounds somewhat contrary, telling customers it’s OK to keep buying the old boring chips instead of the new shiny ones. But Wittich said it makes the most sense for how customers run their datacenters.

“With all the innovation we’re doing, there’s going to be some innovations that really matter to some people, and then there’s going to be other people that say, ‘you know, I’ll wait for the wait for the one in year two. That’s the basket of innovations that I cared more about,'” he said.

What Ampere will need to contend with, among other things, is the fact that both Intel and AMD plan to release their own cloud-optimized processors in the near future, with the former’s Sierra Forrest chips expected in 2024 and the latter’s Bergamo chips arriving in 2023. But we do like the idea of a world that isn’t dominated by only two major server CPU providers. ®

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Chemistry Problems & Quantum Computing

The researchers compared the results of a conventional and quantum computer to minimise error calculations, which could eventually be scaled up to solve more complicated problems.

Scientists in Sweden have successfully managed to use a quantum computer to solve simple chemistry problems, as a proof-of-concept for more advanced calculations.

Currently, conventional supercomputers are used in quantum chemistry to help scientists learn more about chemical reactions, which materials can be developed and the characteristics they have.

But these conventional computers have a limit to the calculations they can handle. It is believed quantum computers will eventually be able to handle extremely complicated simulations, which could lead to new pharmaceutical discoveries or the creation of new materials.

However, these quantum machines are so sensitive that their calculations suffer from errors. Imperfect control signals, interference from the environment and unwanted interactions between quantum bits – qubits – can lead to “noise” that disrupts calculations.

The risk of errors grows as more qubits are added to a quantum computer, which complicates attempts to create more powerful machines or solve more complicated problems.

Comparing conventional and quantum results

In the new study by Chalmers University, scientists aimed to resolve this noise issue through a method called reference-state error mitigation.

This method involves finding a “reference state” by describing and solving the same problem on both a conventional and a quantum computer.

The reference state is a simpler description of a molecule that can be solved by a normal computer. By comparing the results from both computers, the scientists were able to estimate the scale of error the quantum computer had in its calculation.

The difference between the two computers’ results for the simpler reference problem was then applied to correct the quantum computer’s solution for the original, more complex problem.

This method allowed the scientists to calculate the intrinsic energy of small example molecules such as hydrogen on the university’s quantum computer.

Associate professor Martin Rahm – who led the study – believes the result is an important step forward that can be used to improve future quantum-chemical calculations.

“We see good possibilities for further development of the method to allow calculations of larger and more complex molecules, when the next generation of quantum computers are ready,” Rahm said.

Research is happening around the world to fix the problems limiting the development of more advanced quantum computers.

Earlier this month, Tyndall’s Prof Peter O’Brien told about his group’s work in addressing a key challenge in quantum technology and how quantum communications will make eavesdropping ‘impossible’.


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12 Outstanding Tech Resources To Improve Your Skills

If you want to improve your tech skills and don’t know where to start, this list introduces you to some of the resources out there.

If you’re familiar with our advice pieces, you’ll know that we regularly mention various resources you can use to upskill in tech.

We’ve steered readers towards courses from the likes of Udemy, Udacity and Coursera for learning tech concepts from machine learning to data literacy skills. And we’ve pointed out Python meet-ups run by Python Ireland among others.

But what if you’re not sure what these platforms are? Or you aren’t sure which one is the best one for you and your learning style? Maybe you like the idea of Python Ireland and you want to find other similar groups.

Here is an introduction to some of the best resources out to hone your tech skills.

Coursera

Founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, Coursera is a global online learning platform for techies of all stripes.

It has partnerships with major companies like IBM and Google, as well as with universities such as Stanford and Imperial College London.

If you need a bit of guidance, scroll to the bottom section of the Coursera homepage and you’ll find articles that provide advice on how you can achieve a career in areas such as data analytics using the site.

In terms of courses, it provides everything from short certificates to longer postgraduate degree programmes.

Codeacademy

This one is for anyone who wants to brush up on their coding skills; the clue is in the name. Codeacademy offers free short courses in a variety of languages such as Python, C++, C, C+, Bash, Go, HTML, R, SQL and Ruby.

Codeacademy is particularly useful for people who like interactive learning, as it has links to cheatsheets, projects, video and coding challenges under Resources at the bottom of its homepage.

It has a pretty active online community, too.

edX

This Coursera rival – its founders are MIT and Harvard scientists – carries thousands of courses. Like Coursera, many are university-level, with edX making use of its partnerships with the likes of Boston University, University of Cambridge and Google.

Scroll to the bottom of the homepage and you’ll find boot camp courses in topics such as fintech and cybersecurity, as well as longer courses.

Data Camp

Like Codeacademy, Data Camp is quite hands-on and has a lot of short, free courses. It’s best for people who are interested in data science and related technologies.

You can select a specific skill you want to brush up on (like data literacy, NLP, machine learning) or you can explore different career paths such as data scientist, data analyst and statistician.

If you just want to get to grips with a particular tech tool (ChatGPT, Tableau) you can do that too.

Irish meet-up groups

Going along to events run by Irish tech community groups can be a fun way to keep on top of new tech trends and meet like-minded people.

You can find lots of different events on Meetup no matter what you’re interested in. Dublin Linux Community meets monthly, as does Python Ireland and Kubernetes Dublin.

If you want something more casual, there is a coffee chat for indie hackers in Dublin in early June. And it isn’t just the in capital: there are online events and conferences, as well as things going on in Cork, Galway and Belfast.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is another one to consider if you want to do an online tech course, even though it’s not as well known as some of the other names on this list.

Its short video lessons are good for beginners and it provides lessons and learning paths for children, too.

It is a non-profit organisation and it aims to educate people all over the world for free.

LinkedIn Learning

The educational offshoot of LinkedIn has business and tech courses galore for anyone who wants to perfect certain skills.

If you already have LinkedIn, LinkedIn Learning is a good bet as you can add your certificates of completion to your profile.

It’s not free, however, but it does offer a one-month free trial.

Pluralsight

Software educational platform Pluralsight provides learning plans for teams as well as individuals. It’s quite skills focused, perhaps more so than some of the other resources that include non-tech courses on their sites.

You can pick up new skills like cloud tech, programming and test your progress using specially designed exercises.

Skillshare

Best for creative techies, Skillshare carries courses in things such as graphic design and photography – but many of these areas are arguably tech focused.

If you’re interested in things like UX and UI design or how tech tools can be used for creative purposes, you may find a short course that takes your fancy.

It’s got a lot of creatives on its books that are willing to, yes, share their skills.

Digital Skillnet

An Irish resource for all things technological, Digital Skillnet is a great site to keep in mind for future educational and upskilling opportunities.

If you prefer the familiarity of an Irish-run organisation, it has plenty of information about the types of careers you can break into.

Whether you’re an employer looking to find resources and courses for employees, or an individual looking to reskill, upskill or find a tech job, Digital Skillnet should definitely be one of your first ports of call.

Udacity

Udacity is pretty good for anyone who wants to try out a tech course as it has a lot of short and beginner courses as well as longer ones.

It also has an AI chatbot running in beta which offers to assist you when you visit its website.

You can pick from courses on topics such as programming and development, AI, data science, business intelligence and cloud computing.

Scroll to the bottom of the homepage for in-depth career-related resources.

Udemy

One for bargain hunters, Udemy constantly runs sales on its courses. It has hundreds of thousands of courses, too, so you won’t have difficulty finding something.

It’s good for beginners as many of the courses are short and delivered through video. What’s cool about Udemy is there is so much on the site that you can quite easily find courses on a certain topic from beginner right through to specialist level.


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How News Helicopters Ushered A Fresh Television Genre In Los Angeles

By Darren Wilson


Fifteen minutes of fame was not enough for Johnny Anchondo. Local television devoted some 100 minutes of live coverage to this repeat offender, following one of the wildest chases Los Angeles has seen in recent years. In that time, the 33-year-old criminal ran a stop sign and caused an immense mobilization of the police as he stole two pickup trucks, rammed into dozens of vehicles at high speed and escaped from at least 15 patrol cars that were hot on his trail for some 12 miles. All of this was recorded by the all-seeing eye in the sky, news helicopters.

“Chases are the best. They are dynamic, they move fast. Things can change in an instant. Sometimes they seem endless from up there,” says Stu Mundel, one of the journalists who have been following events on the city streets from a helicopter for decades. “And I say this from the bottom of my heart, it’s genuine, but I always wish things would end well,” he adds.


News Helicopters Ushered A Fresh Television Genre In Los Angeles


In Los Angeles, chases are now a television genre in their own right. Journalists like Mundel fly for hours over a gigantic urban sprawl of 88 cities with 11 million people. From way up high, they report on traffic, crashes, shootings and fires in the metropolitan area. But few events arouse the audience’s interest as much as the chases through the city’s vast thoroughfares. The police chase starring Anchondo attests to that fact; the video has over 28 million views on YouTube.

The genre was born in this city. The idea came to John Silva, an engineer for a local television station, while he was driving his car on a freeway near Hollywood. “How can we beat the competition?” he wondered. The answer came to him behind the wheel. “If we could build a mobile news unit in a helicopter, we could beat them in arriving to the scene, avoiding traffic and getting all the stories before the competition,” Silva told the Television Academy in a 2002 interview.

In July 1958, a Bell 47G-2 helicopter made the first test trip for the KTLA network, becoming the first of its kind anywhere in the world. By September of that year, Silva’s creation, known as the Telecopter, already had a special segment on the channel’s news program. Before long, every major television network had one. Silva died in 2012, but his invention transformed television forever.

The chase genre’s crowning moment came in June 1994, when the Los Angeles police chase of a white Ford Bronco was broadcast live on television. In the back of the vehicle was O.J. Simpson, the former football star, whom the authorities had named the prime suspect in the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. Bob Tur (now known as Zoey Tur after a sex change operation), the pilot of a CBS helicopter, located the van on the 405 freeway being followed by dozens of patrol cars. Within minutes, there were so many helicopters following the convoy that Tur found the scene worthy of Apocalypse Now. The audience was such that TV stations interrupted the broadcast of Game 5 of the NBA Finals to follow the chase, which lasted two hours.

Motorists wave to ex-football star O.J. Simpson as he flees from the police in the back of a white Ford Bronco pickup truck driven by Al Cowlings in Los Angeles, California, in June 1994.

Motorists wave to ex-football star O.J. Simpson as he flees from the police in the back of a white Ford Bronco pickup truck driven by Al Cowlings in Los Angeles, California, in June 1994. Jean-Marc Giboux (Getty Images)

“It’s a very interesting thing. It may sound morbid, but it’s not. People follow [police chases] because they are like a movie, we want to know how it will end and how the story unfolds: will good triumph over evil? Or will this person manage to escape? We journalists are objective, but the adrenaline and excitement is genuine,” says Mundel. In his years of experience, he has seen how technology has evolved. In the 1990s, people used a paper map as a guide. Today, viewers can see a map superimposed on the images Mundel captures with his camera.

Four out of 10 chases are initiated after a vehicle is stolen. The second most common reason for them are hit-and-runs by drivers who are drunk or under the influence of drugs. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, most fugitives are hiding a more serious crime: homicide, rape or violent robbery. In 1998, only four out of the 350-plus drivers arrested after a chase were let off with only a traffic ticket; five hundred chases were recorded that year.

A growing phenomenon

In 2022, 971 chases were recorded. On average, chases last about 5.34 minutes and cover about five miles, although the vast majority (72%) end within five minutes and do not travel more than two miles. 35% of documented chases ended in crashes with injuries or fatalities in 2022. That figure represents a slight decrease from 990 in 2021. In 2019, there were fewer: 651 chases and 260 crashes.

A few decades ago, authorities tried to reassure Angelenos by claiming that a person had a one in four million chance of accidentally being killed in a police chase of a criminal. “There’s a better chance of being struck by lightning,” the police department estimated. But things have changed. An official report presented in April indicates that, over the past five years, 25% of chases have left people dead or injured. That almost always includes the suspect, but the number of innocent people who have been hurt has also increased.


News Helicopters Ushered A Fresh Television Genre In Los Angeles

News Helicopters Ushered A Fresh Television Genre In Los Angeles


Although there is plenty of material on the street, uncertain times for local journalism have limited coverage. Univision and Telemundo have dispensed with their helicopters in Los Angeles. Fox and CBS have joined forces and are using one aircraft instead of two. For the time being, KTLA, which invented the genre, remains committed to having a helicopter in the air.

The days may be numbered for these televised events. Some metro police departments have asked their officers to stop chasing criminals at high speed for the safety of the public. Instead, they have employed technology with high-definition cameras and drones to chase criminals, as has happened in cities like Dallas, Philadelphia and Phoenix.

The Los Angeles police have said that they are studying the implementation of the Star Chase system in some of their vehicles. Star Chase features a launcher that triggers a GPS transmitter, tagging a fleeing vehicle and allowing the authorities to track the position of the person who has escaped in real time. Another measure under consideration is the use of an industrial-strength nylon net that traps the rear axle of the fleeing car. All of this could yield dramatic footage for the eye in the sky.


Thank You For Your Support!

— By Darren Wilson, Team ‘THE VOICE OF EU

— For more information & news submissions: info@VoiceOfEU.com

— Anonymous news submissions: press@VoiceOfEU.com


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