Topps Blog

Friday, 27 December 2019

Intel Supposedly Prepping New Thermal Design For Notebooks

CES 2020 is fast approaching, and manufacturers often like to have a few surprises in store. There’s a rumor that Intel will unveil a new laptop cooling method at the show, with cooling performance gains of 25-30 percent — though that may only be in comparison to existing fanless designs.

According to DigiTimes:

Traditionally, thermal modules are placed in the compartment between the keyboard exterior part and the bottom shell as most key components that generate heat are located there. But Intel’s design will replace the traditional thermal modules with a vapor chamber and attach it with a graphite sheet that is placed behind the screen area for stronger heat dissipation.

The hinges will also need to be re-designed to allow the graphite sheet to go through in order to conduct heat.

This is a little hard to unpack. First of all, there absolutely is a type of graphite that can be used for thermal transfer applications, and it’s got far better performance than copper. It’s called annealed pyrolitic graphite and it’s far more thermally conductive than copper or aluminum. APG is already used in high-end electronics manufacturing. At first glance, it sounds like APG has to be what Digitimes is talking about… except APG has a whole lot of properties which make it fundamentally unsuited for a hinge.

DigiTimes specifically states that the graphite sheet in question passes through the laptop hinge. Even assuming that “sheet” is meant to translate into “wires,” annealed pyrolitic graphite has very poor mechanical properties. It’s extremely conductive, but it’s also fragile and will not withstand rough treatment of any kind. In fact, it’s normally encapsulated in a layer of protective aluminum or copper. Instead of putting APG directly in-contact with a heat source, there are vias from the heat source that carry heat downwards, into a layer of APG, as shown below:

Illustration of the k-Core concept. Image by Wikipedia

Boyd Corp, the company that owns the k-Core technology above, has positioned it for use in aerospace, satellites, avionics, and military aircraft, which strongly suggests that a cooler like this would be out of an enthusiast’s price range. On the other hand, Boyd also has an existing business building coolers for Intel.

DigiTimes states that the design “will allow vendors to create fanless notebooks and can further shrink notebooks’ thickness.” It’s also supposed to have applications for both foldable and clamshell notebooks (though foldable notebooks aren’t even a thing yet). The tech is also supposedly limited to a 180-degree folding design.

A lot of these pieces could at least theoretically fit together but I’m wondering if the solution has been described properly. I can absolutely believe that Intel has a new cooling module with a better vapor chamber design. The reference to fanless designs could be a reference to the k-Core cooler Boyd has built. How that cooler would interact with laptop hinges — and why anyone would ever want to seriously try to run a cooling solution through a laptop hinge… I’m willing to be convinced, but I don’t understand it at first glance. Given that hinges are definitionally weak points of failure, the last thing I’d think any company would ever do is put part of the cooling solution in it.

We’ll find out in a few weeks.

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Thursday, 26 December 2019

Intel’s First Discrete GPU Might Be Based on Next-Gen Integrated Graphics

Ever since Intel announced Xe, its next-generation graphics processor, there’s been speculation and discussion about what kind of GPUs the company would bring to market. Ice Lake’s new GPU is an important step along this path, with its substantial performance uplift and Gen 11 graphics. There have been rumors that Intel’s next-generation 10nm CPU, codenamed Tiger Lake, will have 96 EUs — and a new bit of information suggests at least one model of Intel’s upcoming dGPU will feature that many EUs as well.

Hot Hardware spotted this data via Twitter user Komachi. Komachi found the following document on the European Economic Community (EEC) website:

The “96EU” remark implies that this is a Tiger Lake-style configuration, while the “Alpha” points to the hardware still being very early in development. I’m not going to try to speculate too much on how much performance moving from 64 to 96 EUs will get Intel, though we’d expect that kind of shift to boost performance by 1.5x on paper, assuming no other significant bottlenecks in the design prevent scaling out. Since we’d be dealing with a standalone card, we can probably assume clocks equal-to or higher than an Ice Lake laptop part. With 8 threads per EU, we’d consider this a 768-core configuration (though AMD, NV, and Intel GPUs all perform a different amount of work per-core, so GPUs can’t be compared directly on core count).

This might not sound very exciting at first, since laptops aren’t exactly known for high-end performance, but pairing a low-end GPU with its own dedicated memory bandwidth can pay huge dividends compared to using a local iGPU. There are two different spots in the historical record we can consult on this.

First, let’s look back at some data from 2014, comparing AMD’s Kaveri-based APU (the A10-7850K) graphics against the low-end Radeon R7 250. There’s a specific reason to look back at this configuration: The A10-7850K had a 512:32:8 configuration, while the R7 250 had a 384:24:8 build. Balancing this was the issue of clock — the A10-7850K ran at 720MHz, while the R7 250 ran at 1GHz. In this case, the two GPUs came out nearly identically in terms of overall processing capability, and the A10-7850K had an advantage in texture units. The only advantage the R7 250 had is substantially more memory bandwidth, approximately 74GB/s dedicated versus ~34.1GB/s shared.

TechSpot compared the two solutions at the time. Here’s a couple indicative results: I’ve outlined the two specific results we’re comparing in blue boxes.

Data by Techspot

Performance in Metro: Last Light improved by ~40 percent when moving from integrated to discrete, courtesy of the R7 250’s 128-bit GDDR5 interface, which offered far more bandwidth than the shared DDR3 memory the Kaveri APU had to work with.

The performance impact of additional memory bandwidth is even higher here. At 1280×800, the integrated GPU isn’t too far behind the dGPU, but once you increase resolution, the APU drops off the charts.

This is good comparison information, but it’s also rather old. I can’t find any truly comprehensive written reviews of the RX 550 versus the 3400G or 2400G, and the few game results I’ve found have all tended to imply parity between the two solutions. This YouTuber claims somewhat different results, with a few tests showing a larger gap between the two cards, as shown below:

Video by YesTechCity

Results like this appear to be the exception, however, rather than the rule, and the RX 550 and Ryzen 3400G appear to be much closer in performance than the old R7 250 versus A10-7850K.

The 3400G is a 704:44:16 solution at 1.4GHz and 51.2GB/s of shared memory bandwidth, while the RX 550 is 640:40:16 at 1.18GHz and 112GB/s of dedicated memory bandwidth. In this case, there seems to be less performance difference between the two cards, though the RX 550 still provides more horsepower overall. While the Ryzen iGPU is positioned much more strongly relative to the RX 550 than in our previous comparison, the R7 250 demolished the A10-7850K, despite only leading in memory bandwidth.

There are a lot of reasons for the potential difference. AMD’s entire CPU architecture is different, as is its APU interconnect. Ryzen’s Vega-derived cores are still based on GCN, but it’s a later, more-efficient version. Memory bandwidth on the Ryzen platform is intrinsically higher, boosting overall comparative performance.

The takeaway is this: Even if Intel launches a low-end card with a similar configuration to its iGPU, overall dGPU performance is very likely to be higher — but we can’t really judge by how much. There’s no way to perform this kind of comparison with an Nvidia card, and we have older AMD results that point in one direction and newer results that imply a smaller gap for some configurations. The RX 550 is almost never slower than the 3400G, despite running at lower clocks. If Intel’s goal is to challenge from the low and midrange markets first before it makes a play for the high-end, bringing in a lower-tier part first makes sense. Intel may be looking for a chip that can let it challenge Nvidia’s lower-end parts in laptops and the occasional desktop more than it wants to bring a huge-die product to market for gamers. Every dollar of OEM laptop spend dedicated to a non-Intel GPU is a dollar of profit that Intel isn’t capturing. Intel’s CEO, Bob Swan, has openly stated that he intends to focus on being a company with 30 percent market share in a huge range of markets rather than laser-focusing on 90 percent market share in the CPU space. Taking more space in critical consumer markets is key to doing that.

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Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, Xbox’s Phil Spencer Are Fighting Over Moore’s Law

Gearbox President, CEO, and all-around forgetful person Randy Pitchford got into a fight with the head of Microsoft’s Xbox division over the meaning, nature, and current applicability of Moore’s Law, including whether or not it still exists in the first place.

Merry Christmas. Let’s get to it.

First off, Xbox lead Phil Spencer tweeted about how the slowing down of Moore’s Law meant that software innovations like variable rate shading (VRS) are going to be important in the next generation.

DF does good work. As Moore's law slows and our perf ambitions increase it leads to design innovation. Software innovations like VRS will also be critical – Xbox Series X rewrites the rules of console design – and the power level should be extraordinary https://t.co/1Kddsolxti

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) December 19, 2019

Pretty standard stuff, really. But then Randy Pitchford decided to give a lecture on how Moore’s Law works:

Is Moore’s Law slowing down? How many transistors in the Series X? What if Moore’s Law is like the 4-minute mile? Your ambitious message for the Xbox One X was inspiring, but for Series X, well, this feels more like an excuse. https://t.co/7ihDmwWzO3

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) December 19, 2019

The problem with trying to talk about Moore’s Law, inevitably, is that Moore’s Law is not just one thing. There’s the original law as formulated by Gordon Moore in 1965, which predicted a doubling of transistor density every year. Later, he revised this to every two years. In 2015, Intel’s then-CEO Brian Krzanich acknowledged that the cadence had slowed down to a true density doubling more like every 2.5 years. For decades, Moore’s Law was often conflated with a different, related principle called Dennard scaling, which predicted that smaller transistors would use proportionally less voltage and could therefore be clocked higher using less energy. Because Moore’s Law functionally enabled Dennard scaling, people tended to drop Dennard and just say “Moore’s Law” as a way of referencing the “smaller, faster, cheaper” treadmill.

Unfortunately, Pitchford decided to double-down with a graph that doesn’t really prove his point.

First of all, the rate of transistor density has slowed — you can see it flattening out somewhat over time, compared to the speed of improvement earlier in history. But remember, this is only a graph of transistor count alone. What happens when we include other data points that are often discussed as part of “Moore’s Law?”

Extended image by Karl Rupp

The data says that Moore’s Law is unquestionably slowing down, and that the factors that used to drive higher performance aren’t scaling any more. Furthermore, while density is still improving, clocks aren’t. Single-thread performance is moving upwards only very slowly. Intel has managed to nudge its 14nm all the way up to 5GHz in some high-end SKUs, but its current crop of 10nm chips have much lower clocks. AMD’s 7nm CPUs are far faster than previous parts, but they don’t hit super-high clock speeds, either. The clock speed component of Moore’s Law, which was always borrowed from Dennard anyway, is finished. Density improvements continue, but getting useful gains out of them in terms of overall performance has become vastly more difficult. The entire reason AMD adopted chiplets was because continuing to shrink certain aspects of the CPU now produces more negative effects than positive ones.

Companies are never going to stop talking about Moore’s Law. It’s too convenient a method for summarizing the idea that computers get better over time, and the public is familiar enough with it to have a vague grasp of that concept. AMD and Intel are turning to technologies and ideas they haven’t previously used, like chiplets for AMD and new interconnect technologies for Intel, but we’re pulling in knowledge from domains that didn’t used to be part of the lithographic shrink process. Variable rate shading, the feature Spencer mentions, likely is important for the future of Xbox efficiency, but part of why we need new approaches is because the old ones are running out of gas.

I expect the Xbox Series X to offer a significant performance improvement over the Xbox One X, but I think the biggest gains are going to be on the CPU and storage side of the equation. Using an eight-core Ryzen CPU instead of a Jaguar part will deliver an enormous uplift in CPU performance, while the shift from HDDs to SSDs — and not just any drives, but ultra-high-speed drives, by all reports — should allow for storage improvements so dramatic, it could lead to changes in game design. The gains on the GPU side will also be significant, but I think the CPU and storage uplift will be the bigger drivers.

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How Bullets Work in Video Games

Video gaming is basically a giant bag of tricks designed to simulate the real-life environments around us. As such, developers have had to create methods of simulating ideas like weapons fire and hit effects. There are two main methods for doing this — hitscanning and projectile ballistics.

Over at Gamasutra, Tristan Jung has taken a look at the two methods, comparing and contrasting their implementations and why developers use them. Hitscanning is based on raycasting, which fires a beam from the muzzle of the gun and measures if it strikes anything. If the engine determines that an object was struck, it reports a bullet impact.

Image by Gamasutra

This trick has been used in all sorts of ways. Want the ray to continue straight through the target you hit? Congratulations, you just invented Quake II’s railgun. Allow rays to bounce off walls, and you’ve created reflective shots or even the concept of a shrapnel hit (you can always have a ‘bullet’ do less damage if it has recorded a bounce first).

One way to tell if a game is using hitscan or not is to check the latency between pulling the trigger and hitting a target. Hitscan weapons hit instantly. They don’t tend to model factors like bullet drop or wind velocity. Developers can simulate these effects by using curved rays, but the ray won’t change direction once ‘fired.’

The other method of calculating bullet trajectories is to actually have projectile ballistics. In this system, bullets have mass, velocity, and a hitbox. This allows for a much more realistic modeling of real-world effects like gravity, wind, and friction. Games like Max Payne use this method, it’s what allows for the game’s ‘bullet time.’ While hitscanning is the technique used for games like Wolf3D, projectile ballistics is actually the older method of simulating an object. If you think about how the shotgun and chaingun work in Doom, you can tell they use hitscanning (with some pseudo auto-aim in some cases when firing at a target higher or lower than you).

With hitscan weapons, visible bullets or tracers may well be ‘ghosts,’ and where they impact on the player model may not actually correspond to where the hit was registered. Some game engines use hybrid effects, where projectile ballistics are used to calculate the visual path, but hit-checks are performed with hitscan.

This is why I described video gaming as a bag of tricks earlier in this story. We start off with two simple concepts — one for projectile ballistics and one for hitscans. Once you start unpacking the way these systems are actually implemented, you find an entirely new set of tricks for implementing effects like shrapnel, overpenetration, wind, and gravity. If a game simulates the impact of wind and gravity on projectile ballistics, it means there’s another series of methods for approximating those effects.

In some cases, diving down to this level of detail in a game engine means you’ve essentially arrived at a nuance that’s perfectly valid to explore for its own sake, but that most people don’t really care about. That’s not true when it comes to weapon ballistics. How guns handle in-game is part and parcel of the overall experience, and the method for checking hits can matter a great deal.

Jung goes into more detail on how projectile ballistics is implemented in engines, so check the article for the full details there. Some games implement both methods, which is a feature I’ve always liked. Hitscan tends to work very well for laser or various sci-fi weapons with near-instant hits. Projectile ballistics works well for objects that would take a slower amount of time to reach the target — and allows for the effective modeling of things like overpenetration or shrapnel from a frag grenade.

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Start A Cybersecurity Career In 2020 For Under $50 Today

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Tuesday, 24 December 2019

Boeing Fires CEO Dennis Muilenburg

Boeing has had a very bad year, and now heads are starting to roll. The company’s board of directors has fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg, whose tenure at the firm has covered the years leading up to a pair of fatal crashes involving the 737 MAX aircraft. Aviation authorities around the world have grounded the plane, and ongoing investigations suggest Boeing may have cut corners in testing and regulatory oversight. At the same time, the company has seen numerous delays in the development of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.

Muilenburg became CEO of Boeing in 2015 after previously being president of the company. That’s the same year when the company’s engineers began wondering if a single angle of attack (AOA) sensor failure in the company’s new 737 MAX aircraft could cause problems with the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). This system is supposed to lower the nose of the plane when it detects a high AOA. However, MCAS can malfunction and essentially force a plane into an unintended dive.

Boeing has failed to properly address the 737 MAX issue ever since the first fatal crash in October 2018. A second crash in March of this year led to the grounding of all 737 Max aircraft. Between the first Indonesian and second Ethiopian crash, a total of 346 people have died. MCAS has been implicated in both crashes, and regulators haven’t signed off on proposed software changes aimed at getting the planes in the air again. In fact, the FAA took the unusual step of publicly chastising for pushing to get the planes recertified so quickly. The agency may have been looking to distance itself from the company after accusations that it allowed Boeing to do too much safety testing on its own terms.

A stall can occur when the nose of the plane is elevated, so a system that pushes the nose down could make sense — but pilots weren’t trained on how to recover the Boeing 737 MAX from this event. Previous 737’s lacked this feature.

The writing was probably on the wall for Muilenburg several months ago. The board voted to separate the roles of Chairman and CEO in October, but it allowed Muilenburg to continue on as CEO at the time. With the latest board action, Muilenburg has been removed from his post effective immediately. He’ll be replaced as CEO by Chairman David Calhoun on January 13th. Current board member Lawrence Kellner will take over as chairman of the board, again, keeping those two roles separate.

Boeing hasn’t made any statements about Muilenburg’s compensation as he leaves the company, but he did wave his 2019 bonus in November as the 737 scandal dragged on. He continues to serve on the boards of several companies and foundations.

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