NASA has developed a series of microchips designed to be used on space probes. That’s the family of ASICs, consisting of chips designed to be small and at the same time resistant to the radiation present in the space and in particular in certain regions. They were used in the Juno space probe that on July 4 entered the orbit of Jupiter, a planet with a very powerful electromagnetic field.
After three years, the world of supercomputers has a new king: the Top500 ranking crowned Sundai TaihuLight, Chinese as its predecessor Tianhe-2 and the first to use national processors while the previous Chinese supercomputers were still using American processors, especially Intel ones. The computing power of Sundai TaihuLight is 93 PFlop/s, nearly three times that of Tianhe-2.
Microsoft and the social network LinkedIn announced they reached an agreement under which Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn at a price of $196 per share in cash for a total of $26.2 billion. The agreement provides that LinkedIn will retain its autonomy as a brand and as a company and Jeff Weiner will remain its CEO. The acquisition should be completed by the end of 2016.
Google unveiled the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) tailored for machine learning. The company has been experimenting with this type of solution in its data center for over a year and stated that its performance per watt are an order of magnitude better-optimized.
