IBM has announced the official opening of the new IBM X-Force Cyber Range in Washington, DC. The range includes new custom training exercises specifically designed to help U.S. federal agencies, their suppliers and critical infrastructure organizations more effectively respond to persistent and disruptive cyberattacks, and threats posed by AI. The state-of-the-art facility is designed to help everyone from legal and mission-critical leaders, to the C-Suite and technical security leaders prepare for a real-world cyber incident. According to IBM's 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million, with the US facing the highest breach costs across all regions. Organizations that formed an incident response (IR) team and tested their IR plan experienced faster incident response times and lower costs than organizations that did neither. In fact, the report found that high levels of IR planning and testing saved industry and government nearly $1.5 million in breach costs and 54 days from the data breach lifecycle.

"From national security threats to supply chain disruptions impacting the goods and services we rely on every day, cyberattacks on government and critical infrastructure can have ramifications that go far beyond the balance sheet," said Alice Fakir, Partner, Lead of Cybersecurity Services, US Federal Market for IBM Consulting. "The elite and highly customizable cyber response training we provide at our new DC range helps organizations and federal agencies better defend against existing and emerging threats, and also addresses federal mandates like those in the Biden Administration's Executive Order 14028 focused on improving the nation's cybersecurity."

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the "immersive graphics" market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications.

Farming Simulator 22 now supports AMD FSR 3 on PC, so you can enjoy even smoother farming. Download game update 1.13.1.1, and activate FSR plus Frame Generation to boost your frame rate on supported graphics cards! Wait, what's FSR? AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (in short: AMD FSR) uses upscaling technologies that aim to increase the frame rate. In simplified terms, it first renders Farming Simulator 22 at a lower resolution, but then upscales it using a variety of (very smart & efficient) techniques. Without sacrificing image quality, you can significantly increase the performance of Farming Simulator 22, especially when demanding settings are enabled. Try it!

What's new in FSR 3?
AMD FSR 3 improves upon FSR 2's upscaling and adds Frame Generation. This feature can be activated separately in the graphics settings of Farming Simulator 22. It generates additional frames to increase the frame rate. Imagine one new frame being inserted in between two existing frames. In some, ideal situations, depending on your hardware and individual settings, FSR 3 with activated Frame Generation can straight up double your displayed FPS to guarantee some extra-smooth farming! Please note: AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation is recommended to be used with a minimum of 60 FPS before FG-activation!

Ayar Labs, a leader in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, will showcase its in-package optical I/O solution integrated with Intel's industry-leading Agilex Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. In demonstrating 5x current industry bandwidth at 5x lower power and 20x lower latency, the optical FPGA - packaged in a common PCIe card form factor - has the potential to transform the high performance computing (HPC) landscape for data-intensive workloads such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and support novel new disaggregated compute and memory architectures and more.

"We're on the cusp of a new era in high performance computing as optical I/O becomes a 'must have' building block for meeting the exponentially growing, data-intensive demands of emerging technologies like generative AI," said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. "Showcasing the integration of Ayar Labs' silicon photonics and Intel's cutting-edge FPGA technology at Supercomputing is a concrete demonstration that optical I/O has the maturity and manufacturability needed to meet these critical demands."

Phison Electronics, a global leader in NAND controllers and storage solutions, announced today that the company has expanded its portfolio of PCIe 5.0 high-speed transmission solutions with PCIe 5.0, CXL 2.0 compatible redriver and retimer data signal conditioning IC products. Leveraging the company's deep expertise in PCIe engineering, Phison is the only signal conditioners provider that offers the widest portfolio of multi-channel PCIe 5.0 redriver and retimer solutions and PCIe 5.0 storage solutions designed specifically to meet the data infrastructure demands of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI+ML), edge computing, high-performance computing, and other data-intensive, next-gen applications. At the 2023 Open Compute Project Global Summit, the Phison team is showcasing its expansive PCIe 5.0 portfolio, demonstrating the redriver and retimer technologies alongside other enterprise NAND flash, illustrating a holistic vision for a PCIe 5.0 data ecosystem to address the most demanding applications of the AI-everywhere era.

"Phison has focused industry-leading R&D efforts on developing in-house, chip-to-chip communication technologies since the introduction of the PCIe 3.0 protocol, with PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 solutions now in mass production, and PCIe 6.0 solutions now in the design phase," said Michael Wu, President & General Manager, Phison US. "Phison's accumulated experience in high-speed signaling enables our team to deliver retimer and redriver design solutions that are optimized for top signal integration, low power usage, and high temperature endurance, to deliver interface speeds for the most challenging compute environments."

SiMa.ai, the machine learning company delivering solutions for the embedded edge, today announced the results of its second MLPerf submission, outperforming industry ML leader, NVIDIA's Orin NX and AGX Orin in the Closed Edge power category in the MLCommons ML Perf 3.1 benchmark. SiMa.ai participated in the MLPerf Inference 3.1 closed, edge, power division of this benchmarking process, focusing on the image classification benchmark Resnet50. Since the company's prior submission in April 2023, SiMa.ai achieved a 20 percent improvement in its results for Single Stream Resnet50 for performance and power, while exhibiting up to 85 percent greater Resnet50 MultiStream efficiency compared to NVIDIA. With frames per second per watt as the defacto performance standard for edge AI and ML, these results demonstrate SiMa.ai's pushbutton approach drives continued leadership in unrivaled power efficiency that does not compromise performance.

"Outperforming the industry leader not only once, but again for a second time is great validation for our technology. Our team at SiMa.ai will persistently pursue performance per watt leadership and new standards in ease of use for the embedded edge market as part of our core DNA," said Krishna Rangasayee, CEO and founder, SiMa.ai. "We are proud of the SiMa.ai team's leadership in the latest MLPerf benchmark and excited to extend these latest improvements to our customers' real-world needs and use cases."

NVIDIA joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk today to found the Alliance for OpenUSD, a major leap toward unlocking the next era of 3D graphics, design and simulation. The group will standardize and extend OpenUSD, the open-source Universal Scene Description framework that's the foundation of interoperable 3D applications and projects ranging from visual effects to industrial digital twins.

Several leading companies in the 3D ecosystem already signed on as the alliance's first general members—Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, SideFX and Unity. Standardizing OpenUSD will accelerate its adoption, creating a foundational technology that will help today's 2D internet evolve into a 3D web. Many companies are already working with NVIDIA to pioneer this future.

To help bridge the growing gap between modern systems and the legacy technology still in use around the world, global industrial computing specialists, OnLogic (www.onlogic.com), have released the Helix 511 Edge Computer. Designed for use in manufacturing, automation, energy management, and other edge and IoT applications, the Helix 511 easily interfaces with on-site systems thanks to a broad selection of modern and legacy connectivity options.

"We frequently have conversations with customers who are struggling to update their technology infrastructure simply because they can't connect existing systems to newer, more powerful and more capable devices," says OnLogic Product Manager, Hunter Golden. "The embedded computing space has traditionally lagged behind when it comes to adopting new technologies. We want to shift that paradigm while still allowing innovators to access and exchange data with their existing equipment. In many cases, you don't need to rip and replace everything, you just need a Helix 511."

Samsung and LG are among an number of tech companies reportedly pushing for radical changes in the cinema viewing experience. In a piece published by the Hollywood Reporter last week, new behind-the-scenes information has come to light about an effort to replace the (some will say tried and true) traditional cinema theater projection system with LED walls. The vast majority of international theater chains rely on a front projection method (via a back of the booth), and very few locations have a more state-of-the-art LED display-based system in place. The Culver Theater (naturally located in Culver City, CA) is one of a hundred cinemas worldwide to possess a Samsung Onyx LED display - although the tech on show is said to be of an older standard. Industry insiders have been invited to attend demonstrations of a newer generation LED wall technology destined for cinemas in the future, and early impressions are purported to be mixed.

A cinema-based LED wall display functions in a similar way to how a modern LED-based flat screen TV works - although on a much greater massive scale - with particular benefits of the technology resulting in fantastic performance in terms of high dynamic range and peak brightness. The main downside of having a tightly packed array of large LED panels is the resultant heat output - critics of the technology state that it will be difficult to implement an adequate cooling system (through air conditioning) to tame the wall's temperature increasing properties. The power required to operate the LED panel array (plus required cooling solution) is said to be much higher than that of an old-fashioned projector's relatively modest draw from the electricity supply. An LED wall will also completely negate the traditional placement of loudspeakers behind a cinema's front-placed screen - and sound engineers will need to explore a different method of front audio channel output within the context of a next generation LED theater room.