Alder Lake – New CPUs and what this means

               This past week, Intel unveiled their next generation of CPUs (Central Processing Unit). Codenamed Alder Lake, these chips, responsible for much of your computer’s work, are a huge leap for the computing industry. Using both high performance and high-efficiency cores, this is the first x86 processor of its kind and will go a long way towards improving the efficiency and performance of our computing, especially in laptops. One other benefit that this new generation of processors is that it supports DDR5 ram and PCIe gen 5. This standard will help to increase speed and reliability with the new DDR5 standard even supporting a form of error checking.

               For the past few years, AMD has had a leg up on Intel in most segments of the CPU market. If Intel’s claims about it are to be believed though, this is poised to change that, finally putting them back in competition. This competition is great for consumers because it will drive innovation forward and drive down prices. Hopefully, this will not be affected too much by the ongoing chip shortage so that we can actually get our hands on them. In that case, older processors should get cheaper to buy used which is great for anyone interested in purchasing this hardware.

Ray-Ban / Facebook Sunglasses

                Recently, Facebook in collaboration with Ray-Bans released a pair of sunglasses. Unlike many other similar products that came before them, these camera-equipped sunglasses, look shockingly like normal glasses. These could be very useful for capturing moments hands-free or in active situations. While the snap spectacles and google glass looked very obviously different from conventional glasses, most people probably won't even notice if they are being recorded by somebody wearing these Facebook sunglasses.

While this is a natural evolution for the technology to get more seamless and feel less in the way, it is certainly of concern for many individuals. These glasses would make it very easy to record others without them knowing and for under $400. This privacy concern, for both the wearers and those around them, isn’t helped by the not-so-perfect track record that Facebook has with users’ private data. Do you really want one of the most data-hungry companies to have just that much more information about you if they so desired?

Ingenuity

  On February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover landed on Mars with the Ingenuity Helicopter strapped to its underside. This pair separated soon after their landing and since then, they have been operating independently to carry out their assigned missions. However, in the last couple of weeks, ingenuity has been having troubles.

The original plan was for the helicopter to test its ability to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere which is approximately 1% of that on earth. It was originally intended that the helicopter would make five flights to survey the ground and prove its flight worthiness, however, it has already performed 13 separate flights at this point.

The last flight was on September 5 because as of late with the changing seasons on Mars, the air pressure on Mars is lower than the engineers expected the helicopter to have to fly in. The problem with this is that because of the lower air pressure, the helicopter can’t produce enough lift to take off anymore. In mid-September, they attempted to fly the helicopter by spinning the blades at a higher speed, however, the flight servos were found to be slightly off-angle, and as such, the flight was canceled.

Currently, from our perspective on Earth, Mars is just coming out from around the far side of the sun so we can finally start to get a better idea of what is going on. If they are able to get everything working again, we may see Ingenuity fly again, hopefully within the next month. If the people working on the project are not able to get the helicopter flying with the higher rotation speed, the program will probably be simply canceled as it would take about a year for the pressure to rise again.

Facebook, what is going on?

    A lot has been going on at Facebook this week and none of it is good for them, but it could be for the rest of us. Between a data breach, the entire platform including Instagram and WhatsApp being down for 6 hours, and allegations brought by a whistleblower, there is certainly no shortage of interesting things to talk about.

    The most notable of these to most people is the fact that on Monday, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were offline for about six hours. The problem that caused this outage involved something called BGP. Essentially what happened is Facebook’s servers made a mistake so that when someone wanted to go to Facebook and their ISP tries to retrieve its location on the web, it returned an invalid location instead of pointing at the desired location that the user wished to visit. As always, conspiracy theories have abounded, however, it appears the issue was a simple mistake by a Facebook employee.

    The very next day, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen made an appearance before Senate to testify about the things that she learned about the company while working there on the civic-integrity team. Her testimony could be summarized by saying that Facebook’s products harm children and weaken democracy. Facebook has allegedly made numerous decisions that have prioritized money for Facebook over the good of the public. Along with this came a study of teenage girls that found that 1 in 3 teen girls thought that Instagram made them more unhappy about their bodies. Facebook has disputed these findings, but things aren’t looking good for the company. This isn’t the first time that Facebook has had issues with the law and regulation, but it will hopefully push lawmakers to finally do something.

The Global Chip Shortage

    The global chip (microchip) shortage is a huge problem for many industries. Caused by a variety of different issues ranging from a global pandemic to unexpected demand, it is having huge consequences. It is a huge challenge for consumers and manufactures alike as it impacts computing, cars, household appliances, and many other industries.

    As one would expect from such a shortage, the industry that it is having the largest impact on is the semiconductor industry. Building a pc is significantly more difficult right now than it usually is because many parts are often sold out. Making the situation worse, scalpers are buying up graphics cards and trying to resell them at higher prices which is only increasing the issue. It is also having an impact on larger companies as they often are needing to use different components than they would like as they have a hard time getting enough of the components that they need for their electronics.

    Car manufacturers are also having a hard time keeping up with demand simply because of the processor that they need for their vehicles. Just the absence of one small component can completely stop production. This has also caused the price of used cars to rise because people can’t purchase new ones.

    So why is this all happening? There are many factors at play here and unsurprisingly, COVID-19 is one of them. Many companies, especially car companies expected that with a pandemic and people being laid off of work, they would have less money to spend on luxury items, thus hanging onto older things for longer. While for the auto industry this did happen for a couple months, after people started to realize the minimal effect it was having, demand increased again. However, with orders for the processors already canceled and semiconductor fabs working at 100%, they were unable to get the chips they needed. The increase in video conferencing and work-from-home also made sure that computer manufactures were plenty busy as people rushed to upgrade their home setups.

    Overall, the problem breaks down to poor planning and having everything based around a couple of countries instead of diversifying the means of production. This huge shortage will not be solved quickly as fabs take years to build. We will simply have to get pretty comfortable with this for the next while.