The 63rd edition of the TOP500 reveals that Frontier has once again claimed the top spot, despite no longer being the only exascale machine on the list. Additionally, a new system has found its way into the Top 10.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA remains the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, an HPE Cray EX architecture that combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, and it relies on Cray's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer. On top of that, this machine has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.93 GFlops/Watt - putting Frontier at the No. 13 spot on the GREEN500.

Hello Drivers. Here we are. Taxi Life was released about two weeks ago. First of all, we'd like to thank you for all your support and feedback to improve the game. Reading your feedback, your kind messages and your encouragement has given us a lot of fuel for this first week. We are glad to read that many of you are enjoying driving in Barcelona! Now, let's get straight to the point. We are aware that you're interested in what is going on next in Taxi Life. And in this post, we want to share with you how our first week was for the team, and what's coming in the future of Taxi Life.

Driving Wheel
The main feedback we've received is that there aren't enough steering wheels compatible with the game. During the development of Taxi Life we worked with the driving wheels that were available for us. There are a lot of models out there, and it takes a lot of time to make every single driving wheel compatible with the game. It's not an excuse, but this was our situation. We really want to expand this list, and improve some actual driving wheels. We have a step-by-step plan that we are polishing right now and should let you know in more detail soon how it will look. In parallel we need to fix other issues you're already experiencing in-game.

Hello Drivers, we are excited to announce that Taxi Life: A Driving Simulator is now available! From landmarks to traffic jams, come to Barcelona! Climb into the driver's seat of your car and your business, transport passengers across Barcelona and grow your company! After arriving in Barcelona with nothing but a car and a dream, drive around the busy streets of the famous city and transport passengers while offering them impeccable service.

You will need to follow the rules of the road; deal with impatient tourists, changing weather and rush hours; adapt your routes to avoid traffic jams and accidents; and, most of all, ensure your clients are pleased with your service to earn the best ratings and the most generous tips! It's time to start your new career as a taxi driver in Barcelona! Available now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.

Intel has been hyping up their artificial intelligence-augmented processor products since late last year—their "AI Everywhere" marketing push started with the official launch of Intel Core Ultra mobile CPUs, AKA the much-delayed Meteor Lake processor family. CEO, Pat Gelsinger stated (mid-December 2023): "AI innovation is poised to raise the digital economy's impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product...Intel is developing the technologies and solutions that empower customers to seamlessly integrate and effectively run AI in all their applications—in the cloud and, increasingly, locally at the PC and edge, where data is generated and used." Team Blue's presence at this week's MWC Barcelona 2024 event introduced "AI Everywhere Across Network, Edge, Enterprise."

Nikkei Asia sat down with Intel's David Feng—Vice President of Client Computing Group and General Manager of Client Segments. The impressively job-titled executive discussed the "future of AI PCs," and set some lofty sales goals for his firm. According to the Nikkei report, Intel leadership expects to "deliver 40 million AI PCs" this year and a further 60 million units next year—representing "more than 20% of the projected total global PC market in 2025." Feng and his colleagues predict that mainstream customers will prefer to use local "on-device" AI solutions (equipped with NPUs), rather than rely on remote cloud services. Significant Edge AI improvements are expected to arrive with next generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processor families, the latter will be bringing Team Blue NPU technologies to desktop platforms—AMD's Ryzen 8000G series of AM5 APUs launched with XDNA engines last month.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. unveiled its latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona. From the new Qualcomm AI Hub, to cutting-edge research breakthroughs and a display of commercial AI-enabled devices, Qualcomm Technologies is empowering developers and revolutionizing user experiences across a wide range of devices powered by Snapdragon and Qualcomm platforms.

"With Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for smartphones and Snapdragon X Elite for PCs, we sparked commercialization of on-device AI at scale. Now with the Qualcomm AI Hub, we will empower developers to fully harness the potential of these cutting-edge technologies and create captivating AI-enabled apps," said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager, technology planning and edge solutions, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "The Qualcomm AI Hub provides developers with a comprehensive AI model library to quickly and easily integrate pre-optimized AI models into their applications, leading to faster, more reliable and private user experiences."

Samsung Electronics is making 2024 the year of the AI PC with the release of its most powerful and intelligent Galaxy Book product line yet, the Galaxy Book4 series. This latest lineup—consisting of the Galaxy Book4 Ultra, Galaxy Book4 Pro and Galaxy Book4 Pro 360—offers intelligent performance, enhanced security and a vivid, interactive display, all in an ultra-portable design. From the new Intel Core Ultra Processor to the suite of AI features, the Galaxy Book4 series is packed with cutting-edge technology that aims to not only simplify but amplify users' computing experience.

Visitors discovered the Galaxy Book4 series' full capabilities inside Samsung's booth at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, the world's largest mobile exhibition held from February 26-29 in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung Newsroom sat down with Mincheol Lee, Head of Galaxy Eco Biz Team, Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics, and David Feng, Vice President of Client Computing Group and General Manager of Client Segments at Intel, to explore how the advancements in the Galaxy Book4 series can enrich the lives of users.

At MWC Barcelona 2024, Huawei launched the Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 Pro, a new platform for Data Center Interconnect (DCI) designed for the intelligent era. This innovative platform ensures the efficient, secure, and stable transmission of data between data centers (DCs), setting a new standard for DCI networks. As AI continues to proliferate across various service scenarios, the demand for foundation models has intensified, leading to an explosion in data volume. DCs are now operating at the petabyte level, and DCI networks have evolved from single-wavelength 100 Gbit/s to single-wavelength Tbit/s.

In response to the challenges posed by massive data transmission in the intelligent era, Huawei introduces the next-generation DCI platform, the Huawei OptiXtrans DC908 Pro. Compared to its predecessor, the DC908 Pro offers higher bandwidth, reliability, and intelligence.

Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, delivers an expanded portfolio of purpose-built infrastructure solutions to accelerate performance and increase efficiency in 5G and telecom workloads. With one of the industry's most diverse offerings, Supermicro enables customers to expand public and private 5G infrastructures with improved performance per watt and support for new and innovative AI applications. As a long-term advocate of open networking platforms and a member of the O-RAN Alliance, Supermicro's portfolio incorporates systems featuring 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, AMD EPYC 8004 Series processors, and the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip.

"Supermicro is expanding our broad portfolio of sustainable and state-of-the-art servers to address the demanding requirements of 5G and telco markets and Edge AI," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Our products are not just about technology, they are about delivering tangible customer benefits. We quickly bring data center AI capabilities to the network's edge using our Building Block architecture. Our products enable operators to offer new capabilities to their customers with improved performance and lower energy consumption. Our edge servers contain up to 2 TB of high-speed DDR5 memory, 6 PCIe slots, and a range of networking options. These systems are designed for increased power efficiency and performance-per-watt, enabling operators to create high-performance, customized solutions for their unique requirements. This reassures our customers that they are investing in reliable and efficient solutions."

At MWC Barcelona 2024, Intel will demonstrate breakthrough innovations across a full spectrum of new hardware, software and services—bringing AI Everywhere - for the network, edge and enterprise in collaboration with the support and enablement of more than 65 pioneering customers and partners. Announcements will span AI network innovations, edge AI platforms, Intel Core Ultra processors and the AI PC. They are about empowering our ecosystem; modernizing and monetizing 5G, edge and enterprise infrastructures; and taking advantage of AI-based innovations. And it's all with the purpose of improving performance and power consumption for a more sustainable future.

Join Intel at MWC Barcelona (Hall 3, Stand 3E31) Feb. 26-29. Visitors will see and hear from ecosystem customers and partners about how innovations and collaborations across network, edge and enterprise create modern networks and opportunities for 5G monetization at the edge and bring AI across organizations making an impact across industries.

ASUS, a global infrastructure solution provider, is excited to announce its participation at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, the highly-anticipated annual event taking place at Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain, from February 26 - 29, 2024. It is the largest and most influential event for the connectivity ecosystem, bringing together industry leaders, innovators and decision-makers from around the world to explore and discuss the latest advancements in mobile communications industry. As a key player in the industry, ASUS invites valued customers and partners to explore its groundbreaking lineup of server solutions at the ASUS showroom, located in Hall 2 at booth #2A2MR.

ASUS is also proud to announce its strategic partnership with FuriosaAI, a fast-growing startup focusing on next-gen data-center AI accelerators. Its first-generation chip, WARBOY, accelerates vision intelligence and has demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse computer vision models at MLPerf Inference. ASUS servers have successfully qualified WARBOY cards, reinforcing our belief that this collaboration will empower customers to shape the future of AI without constraints. FuriosaAI will showcase WARBOY at ASUS showroom. Attendees will also have the opportunity to delve into a range of cutting-edge server solutions designed to seamlessly integrate with AI and 5G frameworks.

Attention is now turning to the late February Mobile World Congress (WWC) 2024 trade show—following journos recovering from their recent CES gauntlet-esque ordeals. An exclusive Windows Report piece proposes that Lenovo representatives will be heading to Barcelona with a very special next generation laptop in hand. The publication has a outed a number of upcoming portable devices, two weeks prior to Lenovo's intended showcase (February 26 - 29)—we witnessed a similar occurrence last year with WinFuture leaking Microsoft's September Surface refreshes. Six notebook refreshes (ThinkPad and ThinkBook) are mentioned in the latest report, as well as Gen 2 version of Lenovo's ThinkVision M14T portable monitor.

The alleged headliner seems to be a concept model, that slides into the company's ThinkBook range—Windows Report has leaked heavily watermarked images, but little in the way of technical specifications: "Lenovo's transparent laptop features a bezel-less design, with the display being completely see-through. The deck also seems completely transparent, with the main components being housed in and under the chin, which is the area that's not transparent. There's also a non-transparent slim frame that surrounds the entire deck, probably housing the ports." An anonymous source reckons that the transparent OLED ThinkBook runs on Windows 11, and Lenovo's tried and trusted design language is very apparent (when in use).

Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) has today announced that the General Purpose Partition of the MareNostrum 5, a new pre-exascale supercomputer running on Lenovo's HPC infrastructure, has been classified as the top x86 general-purpose cluster on the recently published TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers globally.

Officially inaugurated at Barcelona Supercomputing Center on December 21st, MareNostrum 5 has been built for the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). The pre-exascale supercomputer will bolster the EU's mission to provide Europe with the most advanced supercomputing technology and accelerate the capacity for artificial intelligence (AI) research, enabling new scientific advances that will help solve global challenges. It aims to empower a wide range of complex HPC-specific applications, from climate research and engineering to material science and earth sciences, adeptly handling tasks that extend beyond the capabilities of cloud computing.

Samsung Electronics today at Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2024 in Barcelona is showcasing how SmartThings will bolster its B2B displays to shape the future of business connectivity. Samsung's "SmartThings for Business" exhibition emphasizes the new advancements that the cutting-edge internet-of-things (IoT) platform will offer, as well as Samsung's commitment to providing more connected, easy-to-control digital signage across industries. "In a commercial display sector where operational efficiency is key, Samsung digital signage is leveraging SmartThings to deliver next-gen connectivity and features to organizations of all sizes," said SW Yong, President and Head of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. "This further expansion of the SmartThings ecosystem will serve to elevate experiences for customers and partners from a wide variety of industries."

How Businesses Can Leverage Connected Tech Through SmartThings—From the Smart Store to Smart Office
At the event, Samsung is showcasing how SmartThings enables business owners to leverage their digital signage to connect and gain more control of their smart devices across various landscapes. By offering the SmartThings connectivity feature to commercial display products such as Smart Signage and Hotel TVs, users can experience the convenience of hyper-connectivity in their business environments. These changes will include Samsung smart devices, as well as other devices that support the industry's latest IoT specifications, Matter and the Home Connectivity Alliance (HCA). Through the application of SmartThings to various business environments, Samsung contributes to the more efficient management of space and energy by transforming places of business into interconnected smart spaces. These connectivity improvements have been designed to benefit all types of business customers, from small and mid-sized business owners to enterprises. Examples of the smart spaces—including a smart store, smart office and smart hotel—are on display at Samsung's booth at ISE 2024.

Video interface and IP workflow innovator Magewell has announced that the company has joined the Q-SYS Technology Partner Program. This program enables software and hardware technology partners to create market-ready solutions that integrate seamlessly with Q-SYS, a cloud-manageable audio, video and control platform. The first result of the initiative—the Q-SYS Control plugin for Magewell's USB Fusion video capture, mixing and presentation device—has been endorsed with Q-SYS Certified status and is now available for download through the Q-SYS Designer Asset Manager found in Q-SYS Designer Software.

Magewell will showcase USB Fusion among other innovations in stand 5E710 at the ISE 2024 exhibition in Barcelona from January 30 to February 2. Magewell's USB Fusion hardware and accompanying app let users easily combine cameras, wired or wireless screenshares, and media file sources into visually compelling live presentations for streaming, live event production, online lectures, webinars, video conferencing and other applications. Users can switch between sources or combine inputs into attractive scene layouts.

IQM Quantum Computers (IQM), the European leader in quantum computers, announced today it has been selected to deliver quantum processing units for the first Spanish quantum computer to be installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and integrated into the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the most powerful in Spain. "This is another example of our European leadership, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the Spanish quantum ecosystem in collaboration with both public and private institutions. Through our office in Madrid, we are also able to provide the necessary support for this project."

IQM is a member of the consortium led by Spanish companies Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech and GMV that was selected by Quantum Spain, an initiative promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA) in December 2022, to build the first quantum computer for public use in Southern Europe.

Today, ahead of MWC Barcelona 2022, Intel launched new Intel Xeon D processors: the D-2700 and the D-1700. They are Intel's newest system-on-chip (SoC) built for the software-defined network and edge, with integrated AI and crypto acceleration, built-in Ethernet, support for Intel Time Coordinated Computing (Intel TCC) and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), and industrial-class reliability. New Intel Xeon D processors extend compute with acceleration beyond the core data center, generating a better overall experience for key network and edge usages and workloads.

"As the industry enters a world of software-defined everything, Intel is delivering programmable platforms for networking and the edge to enable one of the most significant transformations our industry has ever seen. The new Intel Xeon D processor is built for this. Based on the proven and trusted Intel architecture, this processor is designed for a range of use cases to unleash innovation across the network and edge," said Dan Rodriguez, Intel corporate vice president, Network & Edge Group, general manager of the Network Platforms Group.

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has launched 3 new research and innovation projects. The projects aim to bring the EU and its partners in the EuroHPC JU closer to developing independent microprocessor and HPC technology and advance a sovereign European HPC ecosystem. The European Processor Initiative (EPI SGA2), The European PILOT and the European Pilot for Exascale (EUPEX) are interlinked projects and an important milestone towards a more autonomous European supply chain for digital technologies and specifically HPC.

With joint investments of €140 million from the European Union (EU) and the EuroHPC JU Participating States, the three projects will carry out research and innovation activities to contribute to the overarching goal of securing European autonomy and sovereignty in HPC components and technologies, especially in anticipation of the European exascale supercomputers.

The European Processor Initiative (EPI) https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/, a project with 28 partners from 10 European countries, with the goal of making EU achieve independence in HPC chip technologies and HPC infrastructure, is proud to announce that EPAC 1.0 RISC-V Test Chip samples were delivered to EPI and initial tests of their operation were successful.

One key segment of EPI activities is to develop and demonstrate fully European-grown processor IPs based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, providing power-efficient and high-throughput accelerator cores named EPAC (European Processor Accelerators).

Most of TechPowerUp's regulars surely remember the contentious John McAfee - best known for the launch of the McAfee antivirus software, which still is one of the most common OEM-installed antivirus services today (and which is now owned by Intel). After numerous close encounters with law enforcement and some actual escapes from the clutches of the law, John McAfee was eventually captured and was being held in a Barcelona prison, under the Catalan Department of Justice. There was a pending extradition request to the U.S. on account of accusations on tax evasion and cryptocurrency fraud.

That extradition request was signed yesterday morning, and John McAfee was found dead in his prison cell later in the day. His death is being reported as a suicide - and the Internet is already busy poring through his tweets, where he affirmed numerous times that he would never be looking to commit suicide. John McAfee had millions of dollars in outstanding judgments that he never paid, and a 2016 documentary by showtime, "Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee", was a piece of investigative journalism that looked into purported crimes committed, aided or abetted by John McAfee, including the murder of his neighbor Greg Faull in Belize, the torture and attempted murder of another Belizean, David Middleton, and the alleged drugging and rape of one of his former business partners, Allison Adonizio.

Intel's "Haswell" micro-architecture introduced the transactional synchronization extensions (TSX) as part of its upgraded feature-set over its predecessor. The instructions are designed to speed up certain types of multithreaded software, and although it's too new for any major software vendor to implement, some of the more eager independent software developers began experimenting with them, only to discover that TSX is buggy and can cause critical software failures.

The buggy TSX implementation on Core "Haswell" processors was discovered by a developer outside Intel, who reported it to the company, which then labeled it as an erratum (a known design flaw). Intel is addressing the situation by releasing a micro-code update to motherboard manufacturers, who will then release it as a BIOS update to customers. The update disables TSX on affected products (Core and Xeon "Haswell" retail, and "Broadwell-Y" engineering samples).

At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company's next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.

During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world's first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.

It's been in the works for over three years now. That's right, the first we heard of "Bulldozer" as a processor architecture under development was shortly after the launch of "Barcelona" K10 architecture. Granted, it wasn't possible to load close to 2 billion transistors on the silicon fab technology AMD had at the time, but AMD had a clear window over the last year to at least paper-launch the AMD FX. Delays and bad marketing may have cost AMD dearly in shaping up the product for the market.

After drawing a consensus from about 25 reviews (links in Today's Reviews on the front page), it emerges that:

• AMD FX-8150 is missing its performance expectations by a fair margin. Not to mention performance gains in its own presentation, these expectations were built up by how AMD was shaping the product to be a full-fledged enthusiast product with significant performance gains over the previous generation
• AMD ill-marketed the FX-8150. Hype is a double-edged sword, and should not be used if you're not confident your offering will live up to at least most of the hype. AMD marketed at least the top-tier FX-8000 series eight-core processors as the second coming of Athlon64 FX.

Today at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona, AMD is marking the one-year anniversary of the AMD Fusion Partner Program with the introduction of the AMD Fusion Partner Program distributor track. The expanded program will provide distributor partners access to all of the benefits within the AMD Fusion Partner Program to help accelerate sales of AMD-based solutions. AMD is also unveiling the AMD Rewards Program, which creates added sales-based incentives for partners to drive channel sales growth.

"It's amazing to see how far we've come in such a short amount of time," said David Kenyon, corporate vice president, Worldwide Channel Marketing, AMD. "By extending the AMD Fusion Partner Program to all of our valued distribution partners, AMD is proud to now offer them vital information, motivation, support and incentives to help them to be successful in today's marketplace."

AMD is finally going to embrace a truly next generation x86 processor architecture that is built from ground up. AMD's current architecture, the K10(.5) "Stars" is an evolution of the more market-successful K8 architecture, but it didn't face the kind of market success as it was overshadowed by competing Intel architectures. AMD codenamed its latest design "Bulldozer", and it features an x86 core design that is radically different from anything we've seen from either processor giants. With this design, AMD thinks it can outdo both HyperThreading and Multi-Core approaches to parallelism, in one shot, as well as "bulldoze" through serial workloads with a broad 8 integer pipeline per core, (compared to 3 on K10, and 4 on Westmere). Two almost-individual blocks of integer processing units share a common floating point unit with two 128-bit FMACs.

AMD is also working on a multi-threading technology of its own to rival Intel's HyperThreading, that exploits Bulldozer's branched integer processing backed by shared floating point design, which AMD believes to be so efficient, that each SMT worker thread can be deemed a core in its own merit, and further be backed by competing threads per "core". AMD is working on another micro-architecture codenamed "Bobcat", which is a downscale implementation of Bulldozer, with which it will take on low-power and high performance per Watt segments that extend from all-in-One PCs all the way down to hand-held devices and 8-inch tablets. We will explore the Bulldozer architecture in some detail.

Over a month into the release of its flagship enterprise processor, the six-core Opteron codenamed "Istanbul", the company expressed plans to roll out another line of Opteron chips, this time targeting the cost-effective SME market, and not exactly power scaling and parallelism offered by its two-socket and multi-socket capable Opteron 2000 and Opteron 8000 series. The new quad-core processor will be codenamed "Suzuka", and will be made for single-socket systems. For this reason, it will not use the 1207-pin Socket F, but rather the AM3 socket, and will be compatible with existing AM2(+) motherboards that support the Budapest quad-core chip (single socket version of Barcelona).

Suzuka shares the same die design as Shanghai (Opteron) and Deneb (Phenom II). It features four x86-64 processing cores on a monolithic die, with 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and a shared 6 MB L3 cache. Dual DDR2/DDR3 memory controllers work in ganged or unganged dual-channel modes. Currently three models are ready, the 2.50 GHz Opteron 1381, 2.70 GHz Opteron 1385, and 2.90 GHz 1389. These chips are specified to come with system bus speeds of 2200 MT/s (HyperTransport bus actual speed of 1100 MHz). All three models come with a rated TDP of around 115 W, and is built on the 45 nm SOI process. Opteron 1381 is priced at US $189, Opteron 1385 at $229, and Opteron 1389 at $269.