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AI Chip design now surpassing human efforts

AI Chip design now surpassing human efforts

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Artificial intelligence has already been being used for chip design. During it’s first integrations, it generated a lot of acadmic controversy. Despite the early pushback from the entrenched chip design players, new developments are showing that AI silicon development is here to stay by dramatically speeding up design and creating better chips than traditional methods.

Most recently, we see that AI is revolutionizing wireless chip design. It is dramatically reducing costs by cutting design times from weeks to hours, and it’s also generating unconventional designs that are faster and have unexpected circuitry patterns that are significantly outperforming traditional chip designs. Even the researchers aren’t sure how they are so much better.

We are coming up with structures that are complex and look random shaped and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better.

lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta

Circuits are engineered to be more energy-efficient or operable across wider frequencies. Conventional algorithms sometimes take weeks to solve the complex and opposing structures. Some combinations do not have traditional solutions. Yet, new AI methods are solving these structures in minutes – and even solving problems that have previously been impossible.

This work presents a compelling vision of the future. AI powers not just the acceleration of time-consuming electromagnetic simulations, but also enables exploration into a hitherto unexplored design space and delivers stunning high-performance devices that run counter to the usual rules of thumb and human intuition.

Uday Khankhoje – associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras

They also have discovered that AI started generating complex electromagnetic structures that are co-designed with circuits to create broadband amplifiers in a unique discovery. Beyond discovering new patterns, these tools are also improving designer’s lives by removing the more mudane, utilitarian work.

The researchers note that like many AI algorithms – they aren’t perfect. The AI often hallucinates faulty elements that don’t work are very inefficient and require human intervention. But the time saved far outweighs the cost.

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When to make your own tools

When to make your own tools

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Mr-Figs asked a great question on the reddit gamedev forum: how do you handle making your own tools needed to make a game?

It used to be that building a game also meant building all the authoring tools to go along with it. With the advent and spread of game engines like Unity, Unreal, Godot (and literally hundreds of others) along with amazing tools like Photoshop and Blender, the need to make your own tooling has dramatically decreased. Almost to the point that in a majority of cases, you probably don’t need to write tools.

Even if you do find you can’t use an existing tool, others suggest using chatGPT to either extend an existing tool or a tool in the engine you’re using via their SDK. Let AI do the work for you since tools are not shipping code nor need to be overly performant.

Strict_Bench_6264 wrote up a whole blog article to describe what he learned:

Custom Tools and Work Debt
3D CPU rendering with AVX-512

3D CPU rendering with AVX-512

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AVX-512 was created as part of the Intel Larrabee project that I worked on and has made its way into client and high-end desktop systems.

Dannotech demonstrates it for some hard-core CPU graphics rendering – albeit on a 36 core Xeon W9-3475X. He also has other videos that are interesting experiments.

Or how about some AVX-512 ray marching?

More Hacking attacks on Developers

More Hacking attacks on Developers

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A new campaign tracked as “Dev Popper” is a sophisticated, multi-stage infection chain based on social engineering. Attackers target software developers with fake job interviews in an attempt to trick them into installing a Python remote access trojan.

The target developers are asked to perform tasks supposedly related to the interview by downloading and running code for the interview. The code is infected with obfuscated code/packages that downloads additional binaries that complete the infection. The threat actor’s goal is make their targets download malicious software that gathers system information and enables remote access to the host.

According to Securonix analys of Dev Popper, the campaign is likely orchestrated by North Korean threat actors based on the observed tactics. The connections are not strong enough for attribution, though.

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Conway’s law

Conway’s law

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Conway’s Law: Principle, often cited in software development, that states the design of a system will inevitably reflect the communication structures of the organization that created it.

Technical success is not just about having the smartest people/best design. Conway’s law was originally a sociological observation about how teams work. Technical goals can become un-achievable, or velocity will dramatically slow/collapse if the wrong structure, roles, and responsibilities are in place.

Therefore, it’s important to either set up an organization’s structure as well as the team roles and responsibilities (or reorganize the existing one) to achieve the desired design goals.

This law has been interpreted to work both ways. You can affect design through organizational structure, or affect organizational structure by changing design.

Visitors guide to finding Noah’s Ark

Visitors guide to finding Noah’s Ark

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Dr Irving Finkel the world famous philologist and Assyriologist of the British Museum, discussed in a recent video a Babylonian cuneiform tablet which he called “the oldest map in the world”.

What makes it so interesting is that it proports to show exactly where Noah’s ark can be found.

The translated text on the reverse of the tablet describes the steps in a traveler’s journey to discover the location of the Ark, describing “seven leagues,” which they must pass through to arrive at the remnants of the ‘parsiktu-vessel’. The map leads to ‘Urartu,’ which was named in an ancient Mesopotamian poem as the Ark’s landing place and is the Assyrian equivalent to “Ararat,”, the mountain location named in the Hebrew Old Testament as the resting place of Noah’s Ark. A location close to Ararat’s summit has long been the speculated location of the Ark’s resting place, as researched by Noah’s Ark Scans. In Finkle’s explanation of the tablet, he explained how ancient travelers taking the path to Urartu may have seen the remains of the mammoth vessel on their journey.

In the Babylonian version of this tale, it is a man named Utnapishtim who undertakes this task. Finkel explained that this tablet demonstrated that “the story was the same … that from the Babylonian point of view, this was a matter of fact thing … that if you did go on this journey you would see the remnants of this historic boat”.

A location close to Ararat’s summit has long been the speculated location of the Ark’s resting place, as researched by Noah’s Ark Scans and the biblical measurements given (“300 cubits, 50 cubits, by 30 cubits,” which is equal to around 515 feet long by 86 feet wide and 52 feet high) match up with the measurements of the site in modern-day Turkey.

This is just one more interesting bit of ancient evidence Finkel has uncovered showing multiple matching cultural references to a great flood event.

If you’re curious to read more, he is the author of the 2013 book The Ark Before Noah, which goes over the ancient artifacts about a flood event believed to have occurred around 5,000 years ago.

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Marble water wheel to charge your phone

Marble water wheel to charge your phone

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Engineezy wanted to see if he could create a steel ball water wheel to charge a phone. He spends a surprising amount of time and effort getting the balls to roll smoothly and not jam (he takes inspiration from Wintergatan‘s marble machine). While the finished machine is an impressive feat of engineering, it (obviously) uses tons more electricity than it outputs.

It would have been interesting if he talked to some modern hydro power engineers or old water mill operators since it seems like there is a lot of overlap with hydro power generation and the problems he encountered when it came to extracting power from the balls.

Long term OLED burnin testing results

Long term OLED burnin testing results

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OLED displays are renown for their vibrant colors, popping contrast, perfectly dark blacks, wide viewing angles, and fast response times – making them great for game systems. The cons are that they are dramatically more expensive than LCD, tend to have a shorter lifespan as the organic elements degrade. Most importantly, though, like old plasma TV’s, they are notably susceptible to burn-in. But how much burnin?

Techspot has done a good job stress testing some popular OLED displays over the last 9 months. They have a great breakdown with lots of analysis and pretty good testing scheme.

They also do a good job of explaining things. They note that burn-in with OLEDs is directly related to hours of usage and is cumulative. Mixing in dynamic content between periods of static content usually won’t improve the burn-in results – it’s all related to the cumulative number of hours displaying the same static content on screen. Running at a lower brightness and using dark mode will extend the lifespan because burn-in is correlated to brightness output. The safety features in most OLEDs also seems to really help.

Conclusion: they give a relatively positive update on the burn-in after 9 months of heavy static content usage (around 2,000 to 2,300 hours of total use). They report visible signs of burn-in, but the level of degradation between their 6 month and 9 month reports have been relatively minimal.

The results are that for gaming and content consumption (watching movies/etc) – you should be fine. For those that are using it for work and lots of static work, they do note there are times you can see the burn-in on apps that have large sections of the same color. The task bar at the bottom has also shown to be problematic as are the way they arranged some side-by-side content as many do with large monitors.

But if we’re honest, we were expecting to see more burn-in after 9 months. The levels we’re seeing right now are still very tolerable, and with realistic, sensible usage, we think most people won’t run into proper burn-in problems within the first 12 to 18 months of usage on this sort of QD-OLED panel. Maybe some light burn-in here or there, a few edge cases where you’ll notice it, but nothing that ruins the experience.

I do agree with this statement though:

Getting two good years of usage out of an OLED, though… that’s probably not going to cut it when we’re talking about high-end, $1,000 monitors. 

That said all said, OLED is probably not for me right now. If I was just play games or watching movies it might be ok, but I do too much static productivity content all day and really love the flat, large Asus ROG 38″ 4K HDR 144Hz display I currently have (and was on a smoking sale for $499). I will probably keep the display for multiple years as I waterfall them down to other systems. The cost for a similar OLED is about $900–$1200 right now – making it about 2x more expensive.

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