Today at Hot Chips 2024, FuriosaAI is pulling back the curtain on RNGD (pronounced "Renegade"), our new AI accelerator designed for high-performance, highly efficient large language model (LLM) and multimodal model inference in data centers. As part of his Hot Chips presentation, Furiosa co-founder and CEO June Paik is sharing technical details and providing the first hands-on look at the fully functioning RNGD card.

With a TDP of 150 watts, a novel chip architecture, and advanced memory technology like HBM3, RNGD is optimized for inference with demanding LLMs and multimodal models. It's built to deliver high performance, power efficiency, and programmability all in a single product - a trifecta that the industry has struggled to achieve in GPUs and other AI chips.

Colorful has announced a limited-edition, six-part reinvention of its RTX 3090 iGame Vulcan graphics card. The new card simply adds RNG to the name, a homage to Chinese e-Sports team RNG (Royal Never Give Up), who have climbed to fame through their League of Legends antics - the perfect use-case for an RTX 3090 GPU, obviously.

Colorful has changed the color profile of the card, trading in the gray color found in the vanilla RTX 3090 iGame Vulcan for a satin gold finish. The backplate has also received a special treatment, with a golden graphic depicting all six team members of the e-Sports team. Five of these cards will be given to clan members - a great partnership payment if I've ever seen one), while the last one will be offered via social media. We're looking at another collector's graphics card, although its development nature and graphics might affect its final selling price. All in all, this 6-card edition likely represents at least half of the available stock for the RTX 3090 GPU.

Red Hat Systemd (system and service manager) lead developer Lennart Poettering discovered that AMD A6-6310 "Beema" SoC that's popular among low-cost notebooks, has a faulty implementation of the RdRand random-number generation instruction. The processor's hardware random number generator (RNG) loses "randomness" after the machine resumes from a suspended state (i.e. waking up the notebook from sleep by opening its lid while it's powered on). Modern computers rely on RNGs for "entropy," critical to generation of unpredictable keys on the fly for SSL. However, the entropy source needn't be hardware, and isn't so by default. Software RNGs exist, and by default the Linux kernel does not use RdRand to generate entropy. Windows is not known to use RdRand for basic ACPI functions such as suspend/resume; however a faulty hardware RNG is not without implications for the platform, and applications that run on it.

Users on GitHub and Bugzilla report that with this bug, you cannot make a machine suspend a second time after waking it up from a suspended state, if your kernel uses RdRand. Commit cc83d51 to Systemd introduced optional randomness generation based on RdRand instruction. So, if RdRand instruction is present, it is used to generate UUIDs for invocation IDs. Michael Larabel of Phoronix comments that the RdRand bug is only found on older generations of AMD processors, "Excavator" and older; and does not affect the latest "Zen" processors. This bug report chronicles what's wrong with RdRand on the affected processors, as does this Linux kernel bugzilla thread. By avoiding RdRand usage on the system as part of generating a UUID, the reported systemd issue no longer happens. Red Hat is working on a solution to this bug.

RGB LEDs are a thing of the past - why would you settle for that limited 16.7 billion colors when you can have those colors actually forming images? That seems to be the thought process behind Colorful's new RTX 2080 Ti RNG Edition, which brings to the table a full-color LCD display for that ultimate build peek (and pic) capability. This seems to be a very limited edition run for NVIDIA's (current; you know that will change) top of the line graphics card, and brings a new color scheme and detailing on just about every part of the graphics card.