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TSMC's N5 node should have a 45% logic area reduction compared to N7, and N3 should have a further 42% reduction. Both of those nodes will use FinFETs, and TSMC will scale down at least a couple more times after moving to gate-all-around (GAA) transistors. There are no estimates for N2 with GAA yet.

Increased logic density is great, but SRAM doesn't scale very well anymore. Recently, AMD showed off 3D stacked SRAM on a Zen 3 CPU, allowing a tripling of L3 cache. That does increase the amount of silicon used in the product and will be moderately expensive.

Anyway, if the SRAM on the bottom dies is made smaller, but some stacks are added on top, you could see increases in core counts within a small die area. N3 will have over 3x the logic density of N7, and N2 could be 5-6x as dense as N7. With the expected node shrinks and no further 3D stacking improvements, core counts can at least quadruple.

The Guardian has an article called "The scientists hire by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago."

One of the scientists, a physicist called Dr Martin Hoffert, worked for Exxon from 1981 to 1987. In 1980 they predicted that there would be about a 1C temperature rise due to carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning by 2020, a number since experimentally confirmed.

However, one quote stands out in particular:

Back in 1980, there was a guy working for Exxon and he was one of the inventors of the lithium battery, which electric cars now use. This guy won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on lithium batteries. Just imagine if Exxon management had taken our prediction seriously! They could have easily built huge factories to make lithium batteries to facilitate the transition to electric cars. Instead, they fired this guy. They shut down all their energy work. And they started funding climate deniers.

Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg surrendered to authorities early Thursday after prosecutors secured grand jury indictments against him and the former president's family company, which declared the move an effort to harm Donald Trump.

Charges against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization are expected to be unsealed later in the day in New York's Supreme Court, several people familiar with the developments said. On Wednesday, people familiar with the case said the charges were related to allegations of unpaid taxes on benefits for Trump Organization executives.

Weisselberg is the first individual to be charged in connection with a long-running criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D), who is now collaborating with New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) to investigate Trump's business practices. The Trump Organization also will be arraigned, represented in court by one of its attorneys.

Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg surrenders in criminal case over company’s business dealings

NVIDIA A100 80GB PCIe Accelerator Launched – Flagship Ampere Gets 2 TB/s Bandwidth For New HGX A100 Systems

NVIDIA has announced that its launching today its brand new HGX A100 systems that incorporate the updated A100 PCIe GPU accelerators featuring twice the memory & faster bandwidth for HPC users.

[...] In terms of specifications, the A100 PCIe GPU accelerator doesn't change much in terms of core configuration. The GA100 GPU retains the specifications we got to see on the 250W variant with 6912 CUDA cores arranged in 108 SM units, 432 Tensor Cores, and 80 GB of HBM2e memory that delivers higher bandwidth of 2.0 TB/s compared to 1.55 TB/s on the 40 GB variant.

The A100 SMX variant already comes with 80 GB memory but it doesn't feature the faster HBM2e dies like this upcoming A100 PCIe variant. This is also the most amount of memory ever featured on a PCIe-based graphics card but don't expect consumer graphics cards to feature such high capacities any time soon. What's interesting is that the power rating remains unchanged which means that we are looking at higher density chips binned for high-performance use cases.

Also at Tom's Hardware and Videocardz.

Yo, buy this:

MWC 2021 | TCL launches its first-gen USB type-C smart glasses

TCL has made its new NXTWEAR G smart glasses official. The new wearable has Sony OLED lenses equating to a 140-inch view, which can display content from a USB type-C-enabled mobile device or laptop or 2-in-1. The OEM claims it is compatible with over 100 of these, and will be available later in 2021.

[...] The OEM has yet to announce pricing for its new kind of wearable, although it has announced the new smart glasses will be released to the Australian market before becoming available in other regions later in 2021.

It sounds awkward since it's not wireless, but at the right price it could be great. TCL is known for its very cheap (probably too cheap) TVs.

A New York court has suspended the law license of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, citing in part his work as counsel to former President Donald Trump.

The ruling was made in response to a complaint filed by the New York Bar Association seeking Giuliani's suspension.

The New York Bar Association "has sustained its burden of proving that respondent made knowing false and misleading factual statements to support his claim that the presidential election was stolen from his client," the court's decision said. "There is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump's failed effort at reelection in 2020."

"These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent's narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client," the Appellate Division wrote. "We conclude that respondent's conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law, pending further proceedings before the Attorney Grievance Committee."

Rudy Giuliani suspended from practice of law in New York

[Mykl:] This is actually the exact problem in the US at the moment. Money is trickling to the top and not making its way back down. Those at the top are hoarding it, thus keeping it out of, and slowing, the economy. This in turns damages the businesses that they own, because their customers can't afford to spend money that they don't have.

The problem would be largely solved by handing out a bunch of cash to employees, who will use it to go out and spend, stimulating the economy and generating demand (thus improving the outlook of business). It would actually be a win-win, but the cash hoarders can't see beyond having the biggest number in the bank they can (which they'll never spend).

The big thing missed is that due to inflation, hoarding money means losing money. Rather than wonder why businesses aren't hiring people or building up capital right now, Mykl merely suggests that the business give away that money to create a little short term economic activity and something that will be better than the present state of affairs while ignoring that the business has just thrown away its cheapest means to expand and employ more people. Later on in the same thread, we have this gem:

[deimtee:] I think this is actually becoming one of the major problems, especially on the small end of the investment scale. At some point, the economy is producing enough to feed, house, and entertain everyone without requiring anywhere near enough human work to keep everyone employed.

Investing in a new business requires identifying an under-filled need in order to attract customers. It is getting to the point where starting a new business means competing with a giant company, it is just not viable unless you can come up with something that is both truly new and valuable. Not many people can do that, and every time one does there is one less opportunity left. At the same time, big companies are streamlining and using automation and economies of scale to reduce the number of employees.

The solution, of course, was to shrink the labor market, not fix the problems described above.

[khallow:] Deliberately shrinking the labor market won't identify under-filled needs nor create more small and medium sized businesses.

[deimtee:] The labour market is currently over-supplied. This is evidenced by the difficulty young people have in entering it. Raising the retirement age is like eating your seedcorn. By the time those geriatrics are finally knocked off by COVID 2040 or something society is going to hit a wall where no-one knows how to do the jobs. 30 year-olds on unemployment for 10 years are not ideal trainees and no trainers will be around anyway. Early retirement forces the companies to train the next generation now.

Yes we should be massively investing in life-extension, medical research, space, all that stuff. Now what percentage of people do you think can realistically contribute to that sort of endeavor? I would say less than 1% of people have the capability to undertake research at that level.

Notice the insistence on shrinking the labor market even when presented with clear evidence that we need that labor for hard, open-ended problems and to preserve institutional knowledge. In the recent story, Kill the 5-Day Workweek (which was about some business that does 4 day workweeks), we see more examples of this dysfunctional reasoning in action. There's anecdotes about bad bosses, insistence that economies is less rigorous than physics, and lots of fantasizing about all the amazing things you'd do, if your employer was forced to give you one more day off. Let's start with the "bullshit jobs":

[Thexalon:] Counterpoint: A lot of jobs are completely useless and exist for basically bullshit reasons. If you've ever worked in a larger corporation or non-profit, you will have no difficulty identifying a bunch of Wallys or Peter Gibbonses walking around who are accomplishing absolutely nothing but vaguely looking like they might be working. And no, that's not limited to government, because despite what a lot of libertarians seem to think private corporations are not even close to perfect models of efficiency.

To summarize the above link, some clueless idiot doesn't understand a variety of jobs. So those jobs must not have a reason for being and are thus "bullshit jobs". Notice that once the author has failed to understand the purpose of these jobs, he then has to come up with a conspiracy theory for why they exist.

[author David Graeber:] The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Who here really thinks that Joe Billionaire is going to burn money on that?

Then there's the fantasizing about how shortening the workweek and the amount of work per job won't have any impact on competition from other countries.

[AC1:] A lot of Asian companies still work on Saturday (6 day week ). If going to a 4 day workweek in any way hurts productivity these Asian firms will have an advantage

[AC2:] Ridiculous, and already proven wrong since they are open an extra day already and haven't taken all the business.

"Proven wrong" because those Asian companies haven't eaten entirely our lunch. We still have some left. Funny how half a century of off-shoring can be ignored.

Moving on, it wouldn't be complete without a contribution from the peanut gallery. fustakrakich continues his bid to destroy Western civilization:

[fustakrakich:] Also demand a six hour work day. Make each day a little less tiresome

Here's my take on all this. It's basically a supply and demand problem in the developed world. Due to labor competition from the developing world, developed world labor has lost much of its pricing power. For some reason, most of the above posters think we can get back to higher labor prices by reducing the supply of labor. What's missing from that is that the developing world is still increasing its supply of labor (more from building out trade/transportation infrastructure to populations than from birth rate). Those moves won't actually reduce labor supply as a result.

Instead, let's increase the demand for labor. Rather than rhetorically ruling out the creation of new businesses and such, how about we enable those things to happen. Because plenty of new businesses still happen - indicating the narrative is faulty.

But that would mean acknowledging that protecting labor is less important than nurturing business growth and creation. Who will do that?

AMD Ryzen Embedded V3000 to feature 6nm Zen3 core, RDNA2 GPU and DDR5 memory support

It looks identical to Rembrandt with 8 Zen 3 or Zen 3+ cores and 12 RDNA 2 compute units. But it supports ECC memory.

I want to know what "CVML" and "HSP" are, and if Zen 3+ is real and how much of an improvement it would be. TSMC's "6nm" node should not offer any performance or efficiency advantages, only a transistor density improvement.

Elon Musk is a clever fellow, there's no doubt about it, and he is exceedingly rich. If I were as rich and clever as him, I too would be building space rockets and going to Mars (and then on to Saturn with a nuclear engine, but that's a story for another day).

Cryptocurrency has come along in the last 20 years. I really should have invested in Bitcoin when it was new. If I'd put in £20, I would probably have so much money, I'd have been able to invest it in all sorts of things and I'd also be on my way to being a billionaire. However, at the time I was sufficiently financially challenged that I couldn't contemplate potentially throwing away that amount of money.

Now, when Elon Musk opens his mouth (or pontificates on Witter or other such anti-social media - is he on Farcebook? I'm not) the price of Bitcoin either goes up or down, and by quite a percentage. I spy an opportunity!

A few years ago when the UK was still friends with the EU, I got a fancy on-line bank account that you can use from a mobile phone which lets you convert from Pounds Sterling to Euros with no commission. You can use it to pay in Pounds or Euros electronically, so if and when you go abroad you don't need to convert cash up-front to foreign currency and carry it around with you. Before we left the EU, we took Turgid jr. to France for a weekend and we both got these accounts which were very useful indeed. (It's Revolut, by the way.)

Recently, new features have been added to the account. It can now do trading in commodities, stocks and shares and cryptocurrency. I thought I'd take a punt on crypto after Musk last crashed the market.

As with a lot of these things, when Musk talks down Bitcoin, the whole crypto market drops in sympathy. When he talks it up, they all go up a bit.

So after the last crash, I bought some Bitcoin and some Ethereum. I invested a very small amount of money (a few tens of pounds) using limit orders to catch them on the dips (they vary up and down a few percent over the course of a day apparently) and to sell on the ups. After fees (the bank charges a transaction fee, and by inspection it seems to be about 1%) I have a profit, in cleared funds, of £3.75. That's not bad for five minutes spent prodding at a mobile phone.

Every day it seems that some new cryptocurrencies become available. Occasionally, one rises in value exponentially for no apparent reason. Then there's a crash.

Last weekend I spent a couple of hours doing a spreadsheet of about 30 cryptocurrencies available looking at the low and high for the year, current value and relative percentages, and a brief qualitative description of what their value did over the year.

It seems that since Musk's last pronouncement (I think he said that crypto wasn't too bad for the environment after all) they went up a bit and now they are gradually declining but with daily variation of a few percent. So if you buy at the trough, and sell before the peak, you should do OK if you don't get too greedy. I reckon I could make about £3 a week profit if I'm careful.

Then, when I have earned enough to re-invest, I can withdraw my initial stake and just invest my profit. That way, if it all goes horribly wrong, I've lost nothing.

"This time next year, Rodney, we'll be millionaires!" -- Derek Trotter.

The House voted Thursday to repeal the 2002 legal authorization for the war in Iraq, marking what the bill's backers hope is a first step to curbing the President's expansive war powers enacted after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The House voted 268-161 to repeal the authorization, with 49 Republicans joining Democrats to back the measure authorized by Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat. One Democrat voted against the bill.
The vote occurred after the White House said this week that it supported repealing the 2002 war authorization -- the first time the Executive Branch has explicitly backed the effort -- saying that the legal authority in Iraq was no longer necessary.

The Senate is taking up similar legislation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he planned to put that legislation on the Senate floor this year. It's still not clear whether the measure would be able to gain enough support from Senate Republicans to reach the 60 votes needed to pass, however, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed his opposition on Thursday.

House votes to repeal Iraq War authorization