Amazon's Secret Weapon in Chip Design is Amazon

Big-name makers of processors, especially those geared toward cloud-based AI, such as AMD and Nvidia, have been showing signs of wanting to own more of the business of computing, purchasing makers of software, interconnects, and servers. The hope is that control of the “full stack” will give them an edge in designing what their customers want.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) got there ahead of most of the competition, when they purchased chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015 and proceeded to design CPUs, AI accelerators, servers, and data centers as a vertically-integrated operation. Ali Saidi, the technical lead for the Graviton series of CPUs, and Rami Sinno, director of engineering at Annapurna Labs, explained the advantage of vertically-integrated design and Amazon-scale and showed IEEE Spectrum around the company’s hardware testing labs in Austin, Tex., on 27 August.

Saidi and Sinno on:

• What kind of engineer a vertically-integrated cloud company needs
• How the Graviton series of CPUs evolved
• How chip design is different at AWS
• How the lab location speeds design

What brought you to Amazon Web Services, Rami?

Rami SinnoAWS

Rami Sinno: Amazon is my first vertically integrated company. And that was on purpose. I was working at Arm, and I was looking for the next adventure, looking at where the industry is heading and what I want my legacy to be. I looked at two things:

One is vertically integrated companies, because this is where most of the innovation is—the interesting stuff is happening when you control the full hardware and software stack and deliver directly to customers.

And the second thing is, I realized that machine learning, AI in general, is going to be very, very big. I didn’t know exactly which direction it was going to take, but I knew that there is something that is going to be generational, and I wanted to be part of that. I already had that experience prior when I was part of the group that was building the chips that go into the Blackberries; that was a fundamental shift in the industry. That feeling was incredible, to be part of something so big, so fundamental. And I thought, “Okay, I have another chance to be part of something fundamental.”

Does working at a vertically-integrated company require a different kind of chip design engineer?

Sinno: Absolutely. When I hire people, the interview process is going after people that have that mindset. Let me give you a specific example: Say I need a signal integrity engineer. (Signal integrity makes sure a signal going from point A to point B, wherever it is in the system, makes it there correctly.) Typically, you hire signal integrity engineers that have a lot of experience in analysis for signal integrity, that understand layout impacts, can do measurements in the lab. Well, this is not sufficient for our group, because we want our signal integrity engineers also to be coders. We want them to be able to take a workload or a test that will run at the system level and be able to modify it or build a new one from scratch in order to look at the signal integrity impact at the system level under workload. This is where being trained to be flexible, to think outside of the little box has paid off huge dividends in the way that we do development and the way we serve our customers.

“By the time that we get the silicon back, the software’s done” —Ali Saidi, Annapurna Labs

At the end of the day, our responsibility is to deliver complete servers in the data center directly for our customers. And if you think from that perspective, you’ll be able to optimize and innovate across the full stack. A design engineer or a test engineer should be able to look at the full picture because that’s his or her job, deliver the complete server to the data center and look where best to do optimization. It might not be at the transistor level or at the substrate level or at the board level. It could be something completely different. It could be purely software. And having that knowledge, having that visibility, will allow the engineers to be significantly more productive and delivery to the customer significantly faster. We’re not going to bang our head against the wall to optimize the transistor where three lines of code downstream will solve these problems, right?

Do you feel like people are trained in that way these days?

Sinno: We’ve had very good luck with recent college grads. Recent college grads, especially the past couple of years, have been absolutely phenomenal. I’m very, very pleased with the way that the education system is graduating the engineers and the computer scientists that are interested in the type of jobs that we have for them.

The other place that we have been super successful in finding the right people is at startups. They know what it takes, because at a startup, by definition, you have to do so many different things. People who’ve done startups before completely understand the culture and the mindset that we have at Amazon.

[back to top]

What brought you to AWS, Ali?

Ali SaidiAWS

Ali Saidi: I’ve been here about seven and a half years. When I joined AWS, I joined a secret project at the time. I was told: “We’re going to build some Arm servers. Tell no one.”

We started with Graviton 1. Graviton 1 was really the vehicle for us to prove that we could offer the same experience in AWS with a different architecture.

The cloud gave us an ability for a customer to try it in a very low-cost, low barrier of entry way and say, “Does it work for my workload?” So Graviton 1 was really just the vehicle demonstrate that we could do this, and to start signaling to the world that we want software around ARM servers to grow and that they’re going to be more relevant.

Graviton 2—announced in 2019—was kind of our first… what we think is a market-leading device that’s targeting general-purpose workloads, web servers, and those types of things.

It’s done very well. We have people running databases, web servers, key-value stores, lots of applications... When customers adopt Graviton, they bring one workload, and they see the benefits of bringing that one workload. And then the next question they ask is, “Well, I want to bring some more workloads. What should I bring?” There were some where it wasn’t powerful enough effectively, particularly around things like media encoding, taking videos and encoding them or re-encoding them or encoding them to multiple streams. It’s a very math-heavy operation and required more [single-instruction multiple data] bandwidth. We need cores that could do more math.

We also wanted to enable the [high-performance computing] market. So we have an instance type called HPC 7G where we’ve got customers like Formula One. They do computational fluid dynamics of how this car is going to disturb the air and how that affects following cars. It’s really just expanding the portfolio of applications. We did the same thing when we went to Graviton 4, which has 96 cores versus Graviton 3’s 64.

[back to top]

How do you know what to improve from one generation to the next?

Saidi: Far and wide, most customers find great success when they adopt Graviton. Occasionally, they see performance that isn’t the same level as their other migrations. They might say “I moved these three apps, and I got 20 percent higher performance; that’s great. But I moved this app over here, and I didn’t get any performance improvement. Why?” It’s really great to see the 20 percent. But for me, in the kind of weird way I am, the 0 percent is actually more interesting, because it gives us something to go and explore with them.

Most of our customers are very open to those kinds of engagements. So we can understand what their application is and build some kind of proxy for it. Or if it’s an internal workload, then we could just use the original software. And then we can use that to kind of close the loop and work on what the next generation of Graviton will have and how we’re going to enable better performance there.

What’s different about designing chips at AWS?

Saidi: In chip design, there are many different competing optimization points. You have all of these conflicting requirements, you have cost, you have scheduling, you’ve got power consumption, you’ve got size, what DRAM technologies are available and when you’re going to intersect them… It ends up being this fun, multifaceted optimization problem to figure out what’s the best thing that you can build in a timeframe. And you need to get it right.

One thing that we’ve done very well is taken our initial silicon to production.

How?

Saidi: This might sound weird, but I’ve seen other places where the software and the hardware people effectively don’t talk. The hardware and software people in Annapurna and AWS work together from day one. The software people are writing the software that will ultimately be the production software and firmware while the hardware is being developed in cooperation with the hardware engineers. By working together, we’re closing that iteration loop. When you are carrying the piece of hardware over to the software engineer’s desk your iteration loop is years and years. Here, we are iterating constantly. We’re running virtual machines in our emulators before we have the silicon ready. We are taking an emulation of [a complete system] and running most of the software we’re going to run.

So by the time that we get to the silicon back [from the foundry], the software’s done. And we’ve seen most of the software work at this point. So we have very high confidence that it’s going to work.

The other piece of it, I think, is just being absolutely laser-focused on what we are going to deliver. You get a lot of ideas, but your design resources are approximately fixed. No matter how many ideas I put in the bucket, I’m not going to be able to hire that many more people, and my budget’s probably fixed. So every idea I throw in the bucket is going to use some resources. And if that feature isn’t really important to the success of the project, I’m risking the rest of the project. And I think that’s a mistake that people frequently make.

Are those decisions easier in a vertically integrated situation?

Saidi: Certainly. We know we’re going to build a motherboard and a server and put it in a rack, and we know what that looks like… So we know the features we need. We’re not trying to build a superset product that could allow us to go into multiple markets. We’re laser-focused into one.

What else is unique about the AWS chip design environment?

Saidi: One thing that’s very interesting for AWS is that we’re the cloud and we’re also developing these chips in the cloud. We were the first company to really push on running [electronic design automation (EDA)] in the cloud. We changed the model from “I’ve got 80 servers and this is what I use for EDA” to “Today, I have 80 servers. If I want, tomorrow I can have 300. The next day, I can have 1,000.”

We can compress some of the time by varying the resources that we use. At the beginning of the project, we don’t need as many resources. We can turn a lot of stuff off and not pay for it effectively. As we get to the end of the project, now we need many more resources. And instead of saying, “Well, I can’t iterate this fast, because I’ve got this one machine, and it’s busy.” I can change that and instead say, “Well, I don’t want one machine; I’ll have 10 machines today.”

Instead of my iteration cycle being two days for a big design like this, instead of being even one day, with these 10 machines I can bring it down to three or four hours. That’s huge.

How important is Amazon.com as a customer?

Saidi: They have a wealth of workloads, and we obviously are the same company, so we have access to some of those workloads in ways that with third parties, we don’t. But we also have very close relationships with other external customers.

So last Prime Day, we said that 2,600 Amazon.com services were running on Graviton processors. This Prime Day, that number more than doubled to 5,800 services running on Graviton. And the retail side of Amazon used over 250,000 Graviton CPUs in support of the retail website and the services around that for Prime Day.

[back to top]

The AI accelerator team is colocated with the labs that test everything from chips through racks of servers. Why?

Sinno: So Annapurna Labs has multiple labs in multiple locations as well. This location here is in Austin… is one of the smaller labs. But what’s so interesting about the lab here in Austin is that you have all of the hardware and many software development engineers for machine learning servers and for Trainium and Inferentia [AWS’s AI chips] effectively co-located on this floor. For hardware developers, engineers, having the labs co-located on the same floor has been very, very effective. It speeds execution and iteration for delivery to the customers. This lab is set up to be self-sufficient with anything that we need to do, at the chip level, at the server level, at the board level. Because again, as I convey to our teams, our job is not the chip; our job is not the board; our job is the full server to the customer.

How does vertical integration help you design and test chips for data-center-scale deployment?

Sinno: It’s relatively easy to create a bar-raising server. Something that’s very high-performance, very low-power. If we create 10 of them, 100 of them, maybe 1,000 of them, it’s easy. You can cherry pick this, you can fix this, you can fix that. But the scale that the AWS is at is significantly higher. We need to train models that require 100,000 of these chips. 100,000! And for training, it’s not run in five minutes. It’s run in hours or days or weeks even. Those 100,000 chips have to be up for the duration. Everything that we do here is to get to that point.

We start from a “what are all the things that can go wrong?” mindset. And we implement all the things that we know. But when you were talking about cloud scale, there are always things that you have not thought of that come up. These are the 0.001-percent type issues.

In this case, we do the debug first in the fleet. And in certain cases, we have to do debugs in the lab to find the root cause. And if we can fix it immediately, we fix it immediately. Being vertically integrated, in many cases we can do a software fix for it. But in certain cases, we cannot fix it immediately. We use our agility to rush a fix while at the same time making sure that the next generation has it already figured out from the get go.

[back to top]

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Conference To Spotlight Harm Caused by Online Platforms

This year’s IEEE Conference on Digital Platforms and Societal Harms is scheduled to be held on 14 and 15 October in a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual keynote panel sessions. The in-person events are to take place at American University, in Washington, D.C.

The annual conference focuses on how social media and similar platforms amplify hate speech, extremism, exploitation, misinformation, and disinformation, as well as what measures are being taken to protect people.

With the popularity of social media and the rise of artificial intelligence, content can be more easily created and shared online by individuals and bots, says Andre Oboler, the general chair of IEEE DPSH. The IEEE senior member is CEO of the Online Hate Prevention Institute, which is based in Sydney. Oboler cautions that a lot of content online is fabricated, so some people are making economic, political, social, and health care decisions based on inaccurate information.

“Addressing the creation, propagation, and engagement of harmful digital information is a complex problem. It requires broad collaboration among various stakeholders including technologists; lawmakers and policymakers; nonprofit organizations; private sectors; and end users.”

Misinformation (which is false) and disinformation (which is intentionally false) also can propagate hate speech, discrimination, violent extremism, and child sexual abuse, he says, and can create hostile online environments, damaging people’s confidence in information and endangering their lives.

To help prevent harm, he says, cutting-edge technical solutions and changes in public policy are needed. At the conference, academic researchers and leaders from industry, government, and not-for-profit organizations are gathering to discuss steps being taken to protect individuals online.

Experts to explore challenges and solutions

The event includes panel discussions and Q&A sessions with experts from a variety of technology fields and organizations. Scheduled speakers include Paul Giannasi from the U.K. National Police Chiefs’ Council; Skip Gilmour of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism; and Maike Luiken, chair of IEEE’s Planet Positive 2030 initiative.

“Addressing the creation, propagation, and engagement of harmful digital information is a complex problem,” Oboler says. “It requires broad collaboration among various stakeholders including technologists; lawmakers and policymakers; nonprofit organizations; private sectors; and end users.

“There is an emerging need for these stakeholders and researchers from multiple disciplines to have a joint forum to understand the challenges, exchange ideas, and explore possible solutions.”

To register for in-person and online conference attendance, visit the event’s website. Those who want to attend only the keynote panels can register for free access to the discussions. Attendees who register by 22 September and use the code 25off2we receive a 25 percent discount.

Check out highlights from the 2023 IEEE Conference on Digital Platforms and Societal Harms.

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Ultrasonic Chips Could Cut Interference in the IoT

The proliferation of IoT technology has made chatterboxes out of everyday hardware and new gadgets too, but it comes with a downside: the more devices sharing the airwaves the more trouble they have communicating. The nearly 30 billion connected devices expected by 2030 will be operating using different wireless standards while sharing the same frequency bands, potentially interfering with one another. To overcome this, researchers in Japan say they have developed a way to shrink the devices that filter out interfering signals. Instead of many individual filters, the technology would combine them onto single chips.

For smartphones to work with different communications standards and in different countries, they need dozens of filters to keep out unwanted signals. But these filters can be expensive and collectively take up a relatively large amount of real estate in the phone. With increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum , engineers will have to cram even more filters into phones and other gadgets, meaning further miniaturization will be necessary. Researchers at Japanese telecom NTT and Okayama University say they’ve developed technology that could shrink all those filters down to a single device they describe as an ultrasonic circuit that can steer signals without unintentionally scattering them.

The ultrasonic circuit incorporates filters that are similar to surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters used in smartphones. SAW filters convert an electronic RF signal into a mechanical wave on the surface of a substrate and back again, filtering out particular frequencies in the process. Because the mechanical wave is thousands of times shorter than the RF wave that creates it, SAW filters can be compact.

Today’s filters screen out unwanted RF signals by converting them to ultrasonic signals and back again. New research could lead to a way to integrate many such filters onto a single chip.NTT Corporation

“In the future IoT society, communication bandwidth and methods will increase, so we will need hundreds of ultrasonic filters in smartphones, but we cannot allocate a large area to them,” because the battery, display, processor and other components need room too, says Daiki Hatanaka a senior research scientist in the Nanomechanics Research Group at NTT. “Our technology allows us to confine ultrasound in a very narrow channel on a micrometer scale then guide the signal as we want. Based on this ultrasonic circuit, we can integrate many filters on just one chip.”

Valley Pseudospin-dependent Transport

Guiding ultrasonic waves along a path that changes direction can cause backscattering, degrading the signal quality. To counter this, Hatanaka and colleagues tapped Okayama University’s research into acoustic topological structures. Topology is mathematics concerned with how different shapes can be thought of as equivalent if they satisfy certain conditions—the classic example is a donut and a coffee mug being equivalent because they each have just one hole. But as highlighted by the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, it’s also used to explore exotic states of matter including superconductivity.

In their experiments, the researchers in Japan fashioned a waveguide made up of arrays of periodic holes with three-fold rotational symmetry. Where two arrays with holes that were rotated 10 degrees apart from each other met, a topological property called valley pseudospin arises. At this edge, tiny ultrasonic vortexes “pseudospin” in opposite directions, generating a unique ultrasonic wave known as valley pseudospin-dependent transport. This propagates a 0.5 GHz signal in only one direction even if there is a sharp bend in the waveguide, according to NTT. So the signal can’t suffer backscattering.

“The direction of the polarization of the valley states of ultrasound automatically forces it to propagate in only one direction, and backscattering is prohibited,” says Hatanaka. “

NTT says the gigahertz topological circuit is the first of its kind. The research team is now trying to fabricate a waveguide that connects 5 to 10 filters on a single chip. The initial chip will be about 1 square centimeter, but the researchers hope to shrink it to a few hundred square micrometers. In the second stage of research, they will try to dynamically control the ultrasound, amplify the signal, convert its frequency, and integrate these functions into one system.

The company will consider plans for commercialization as the research proceeds over the next two years. If the research becomes a commercial product the impact on future smartphones and IoT systems could be important, says Hatanaka. He estimates that future high-end smartphones could be equipped with up to around 20 ultrasonic circuits.

“We could use the space saved for a better user experience, so by using ultrasonic filters or other analog signal components we can improve the display or battery or other important components for the user experience,” he says.

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1.3 million Android-based TV boxes backdoored; researchers still don’t know how

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries.

Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the Android-based boxes by putting malicious components in their system storage area, where they can be updated with additional malware at any time by command-and-control servers. Google representatives said the infected devices are running operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project, a version overseen by Google but distinct from Android TV, a proprietary version restricted to licensed device makers.

Dozens of variants

Although Doctor Web has a thorough understanding of Vo1d and the exceptional reach it has achieved, company researchers say they have yet to determine the attack vector that has led to the infections.

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Google beats OpenAI to wide release of interruptible AI voice chat mode

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google made Gemini Live, its voice-based AI chatbot feature, available for free to all Android users. The move brings conversational AI capabilities to a wider audience, allowing users to interact with Gemini through voice commands on their Android devices. That's notable because competitor OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode feature of ChatGPT, which is similar to Gemini Live, has not yet fully shipped.

Google first unveiled Gemini Live during its Pixel 9 launch event last month. Initially, the feature was exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers, but now it's accessible to anyone using the Gemini app or its overlay on Android.

Gemini Live enables users to ask questions aloud and even interrupt the AI's responses mid-sentence. Users can choose from several voice options for Gemini's responses, adding a level of customization to the interaction.

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Driving Middle East’s Innovation in Robotics and Future of Automation

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Khalifa University of Science and Technology.

Abu Dhabi-based Khalifa University of Science and Technology in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be hosting the 36th edition of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) to highlight the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s rapidly advancing capabilities in the robotics and intelligent transport systems.

aspect_ratio

Themed “Robotics for Sustainable Development,” the IROS 2024 will be held from 14-18 October 2024 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center (ADNEC) in the UAE’s capital city. It will offer a platform for universities and research institutions to display their research and innovation activities and initiatives in robotics, gathering researchers, academics, leading corporate majors, and industry professionals from around the globe.

A total of 13 forums, nine global-level competitions and challenges covering various aspects of robotics and AI, an IROS Expo, as well as an exclusive Career Fair will also be part of IROS 2024. The challenges and competitions will focus on physical or athletic intelligence of robots, remote robot navigation, robot manipulation, underwater robotics, as well as perception and sensing.

Delegates for the event will represent sectors including manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, agriculture, defense, security, and mining sectors with 60 percent of the talent pool having over six years of experience in robotics. A major component of the conference will be the poster sessions, keynotes, panel discussions by researchers and scientists, and networking events.

Khalifa University will be hosting IROS 2024 to highlight the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s rapidly advancing capabilities in the robotics and intelligent transport systems.Khalifa University

Abu Dhabi ranks first on the world’s safest cities list in 2024, according to online database Numbeo, out of 329 global cities in the 2024 standings, holding the title for eight consecutive years since 2017, reflecting the emirate’s ongoing efforts to ensure a good quality of life for citizens and residents.

With a multicultural community, Abu Dhabi is home to people from more than 200 nationalities and draws a large number of tourists to some of the top art galleries in the city such as Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as well as other destinations such as Ferrari World Abu Dhabi and Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi.

The UAE and Abu Dhabi have increasingly become a center for creative skillsets, human capital and advanced technologies, attracting several international and regional events such as the global COP28 UAE climate summit, in which more than 160 countries participated.

Abu Dhabi city itself has hosted a number of association conventions such as the 34th International Nursing Research Congress and is set to host the UNCTAD World Investment Forum, the 13th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC13), the 12th World Environment Education Congress in 2024, and the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2025.

Khalifa University’s Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (KU-CARS) includes a vibrant multidisciplinary environment for conducting robotics and autonomous vehicle-related research and innovation.Khalifa University

Dr. Jorge Dias, IROS 2024 General Chair, said: “Khalifa University is delighted to bring the Intelligent Robots and Systems 2024 to Abu Dhabi in the UAE and highlight the innovations in line with the theme Robotics for Sustainable Development. As the region’s rapidly advancing capabilities in robotics and intelligent transport systems gain momentum, this event serves as a platform to incubate ideas, exchange knowledge, foster collaboration, and showcase our research and innovation activities. By hosting IROS 2024, Khalifa University aims to reaffirm the UAE’s status as a global innovation hub and destination for all industry stakeholders to collaborate on cutting-edge research and explore opportunities for growth within the UAE’s innovation ecosystem.”

“This event serves as a platform to incubate ideas, exchange knowledge, foster collaboration, and showcase our research and innovation activities” —Dr. Jorge Dias, IROS 2024 General Chair

Dr. Dias added: “The organizing committee of IROS 2024 has received over 4000 submissions representing 60 countries, with China leading with 1,029 papers, followed by the U.S. (777), Germany (302), and Japan (253), as well as the U.K. and South Korea (173 each). The UAE with a total of 68 papers comes atop the Arab region.”

Driving innovation at Khalifa University is the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (KU-CARS) with around 50 researchers and state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, including a vibrant multidisciplinary environment for conducting robotics and autonomous vehicle-related research and innovation.

IROS 2024 is sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau, the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), the New Technology Foundation, and the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES).

More information at https://iros2024-abudhabi.org/

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Video Friday: Jumping Robot Leg, Walking Robot Table

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA@40: 23–26 September 2024, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

IROS 2024: 14–18 October 2024, ABU DHABI, UAE

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH

Enjoy today’s videos!

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich have developed a robotic leg with artificial muscles. Inspired by living creatures, it jumps across different terrains in an agile and energy-efficient manner.

[ Nature ] via [ MPI ]

Thanks, Toshi!

ETH Zurich researchers have now developed a fast robotic printing process for earth-based materials that does not require cement. In what is known as “impact printing,” a robot shoots material from above, gradually building a wall. On impact, the parts bond together, and very minimal additives are required.

[ ETH Zurich ]

How could you not be excited to see this happen for real?

[ arXiv paper ]

Can we all agree that sanding, grinding, deburring, and polishing tasks are really best done by robots, for the most part?

[ Cohesive Robotics ]

Thanks, David!

Using doors is a longstanding challenge in robotics and is of significant practical interest in giving robots greater access to human-centric spaces. The task is challenging due to the need for online adaptation to varying door properties and precise control in manipulating the door panel and navigating through the confined doorway. To address this, we propose a learning-based controller for a legged manipulator to open and traverse through doors.

[ arXiv paper ]

Isaac is the first robot assistant that’s built for the home. And we’re shipping it in fall of 2025.

Fall of 2025 is a long enough time from now that I’m not even going to speculate about it.

[ Weave Robotics ]

By patterning liquid metal paste onto a soft sheet of silicone or acrylic foam tape, we developed stretchable versions of conventional rigid circuits (like Arduinos). Our soft circuits can be stretched to over 300% strain (over 4x their length) and are integrated into active soft robots.

[ Science Robotics ] via [ Yale ]

NASA’s Curiosity rover is exploring a scientifically exciting area on Mars, but communicating with the mission team on Earth has recently been a challenge due to both the current season and the surrounding terrain. In this Mars Report, Curiosity engineer Reidar Larsen takes you inside the uplink room where the team talks to the rover.

[ NASA ]

I love this and want to burn it with fire.

[ Carpentopod ]

Very often, people ask us what Reachy 2 is capable of, which is why we’re showing you the manipulation possibilities (through teleoperation) of our technology. The robot shown in this video is the Beta version of Reachy 2, our new robot coming very soon!

[ Pollen Robotics ]

The Scalable Autonomous Robots (ScalAR) Lab is an interdisciplinary lab focused on fundamental research problems in robotics that lie at the intersection of robotics, nonlinear dynamical systems theory, and uncertainty.

[ ScalAR Lab ]

Astorino is a 6-axis educational robot created for practical and affordable teaching of robotics in schools and beyond. It has been created with 3D printing, so it allows for experimentation and the possible addition of parts. With its design and programming, it replicates the actions of #KawasakiRobotics industrial robots, giving students the necessary skills for future work.

[ Astorino ]

I guess fish-fillet-shaping robots need to exist because otherwise customers will freak out if all their fish fillets are not identical, or something?

[ Flexiv ]

Watch the second episode of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission—Europe’s ambitious exploration journey to search for past and present signs of life on Mars. The rover will dig, collect, and investigate the chemical composition of material collected by a drill. Rosalind Franklin will be the first rover to reach a depth of up to two meters below the surface, acquiring samples that have been protected from surface radiation and extreme temperatures.

[ ESA ]

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Free Starlink Internet is coming to all of United’s airplanes

Enlarge / Soon you'll be able to stream games and video for free on United flights. (credit: United)

United Airlines announced this morning that it is giving its in-flight Internet access an upgrade. It has signed a deal with Starlink to deliver SpaceX's satellite-based service to all its aircraft, a process that will start in 2025. And the good news for passengers is that the in-flight Wi-Fi will be free of charge.

The flying experience as it relates to consumer technology has come a very long way in the two-and-a-bit decades that Ars has been publishing. At the turn of the century, even having a power socket in your seat was a long shot. Laptop batteries didn't last that long, either—usually less than the runtime of whatever DVD I hoped to distract myself with, if memory serves.

Bring a spare battery and that might double, but it helped to have a book or magazine to read.

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Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying

Enlarge / Hard drives, unfortunately, tend to die not with a spectacular and sparkly bang, but with a head-is-stuck whimper. (credit: Getty Images)

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."

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The Next Frontier for EV Batteries: Nanoscale Coatings

Over the past 25 years, the longest driving range of an electric vehicle on a single charge has gone from about 260 kilometers to slightly over 800 km. Increasingly, these advanced battery packs have also begun storing energy from the grid or renewable sources to power homes or businesses. No wonder, then, that the global automotive battery market has surpassed US $50 billion a year and there is increasing pressure to produce greater numbers of even better batteries.

Now, several companies are applying a well-established chemical technique called atomic layer deposition (ALD) to coat battery electrodes with metal oxides or nitrides, which they claim improves both the energy capacity and the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries. The companies include Thornton, Colo.–based Forge Nano, Picosun (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Santa Clara, Calif.–based Applied Materials), and Beneq, in Espoo, Finland; they are leveraging the technique, which was originally developed in the 1960s. After years of refining their respective processes, these companies now hope to gain a toehold in markets for EV and smartphone batteries dominated by such giants as CATL, Panasonic, and Samsung.

Of the three, Forge Nano appears to have the most developed technology. It recently announced that its subsidiary, Forge Battery, has begun sending samples of a prototype battery cell made with ALD-coated materials to customers for testing. The company says its proprietary ALD formulation, which it calls Atomic Armor, makes batteries’ electrodes better at storing energy and helps them last longer.

What Goes Into a Lithium-Ion Battery?

The batteries found in today’s electric vehicles and smartphones consist of three main components. The anode, or negative electrode, usually made of graphite, is where lithium ions are stored during the charging process. The cathode (positive electrode) is made of a lithium-metal oxide such as lithium cobalt oxide or lithium-iron phosphate. Then there’s the electrolyte, which is a lithium salt dissolved in an organic solvent that allows lithium ions to move between the anode and cathode. Also important is the separator, a semi-porous material that allows the movement of ions between the cathode and anode during charging and discharging but blocks the flow of electrons directly between the two, which would quickly short out the battery.

A cathode coating is deposited for R&D battery cells by Forge Nano.Forge Nano

Coating the materials that make up the anode, cathode, and separator at the molecular level, these companies say, boosts batteries’ the performance and durability without an appreciable increase in their weight or volume.

. The films are formed by a chemical reaction between two gaseous precursor substances, which are introduced to the substrate by turns. The first one reacts with the substrate surface at active sites, the points on the precursor molecules and on the surface of the substrate where the two materials chemically bond. Then, after all the non-reacted precursor gas is pumped away, the next precursor is introduced and bonds with the first precursor at their respective active sites. ALD technology is self-terminating, meaning that when all active sites are filled, the reaction stops. The film forms one atomic layer at a time, so its thickness can be set with precision as fine as a few tenths of a nanometer simply by cutting off exposure of the substrate to the precursors once the desired coating thickness is reached.

In a conventional lithium-ion battery, with a graphite anode, silicon (and sometimes other materials) is added to the graphite to improve the anode’s ability to store ions. The practice boosts energy density, but silicon is much more prone to side reactions with the electrolyte and to expansion and contraction during charging and discharging, which weakens the electrode. Eventually, the mechanical degradation diminishes the battery’s storage capacity. ALD technology, by coating anode molecules with a protective layer, enables a higher proportion of silicon in the anode while also inhibiting the expansion-contraction cycles and therefore, slowing the mechanical degradation. The result is a lighter, more energy-dense battery that is more durable than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Picosun says its ALD technology has been used to create coated nickel oxide anodes with more than twice the energy storage capacity and three times the energy density of those relying on traditional graphite.

How big is the benefit? Forge Nano says that although the third-party testing and validation are underway, it’s too soon to make definitive statements about the coating-enhanced batteries’ lifespans. But a company spokesperson told IEEE Spectrum the data it has received thus far indicates that specific energy is improved by 15 percent compared with comparable batteries currently on the market.

The company has made a big bet that the players all along the battery production chain—from fabricators of anodes and cathodes to Tier 1 battery suppliers, and even electric vehicle manufacturers—will view its take on ALD as a must-have step in battery manufacturing. Forge Battery is building a 25,700 square meter gigafactory in North Carolina that it says will turn out 1 gigawatt-hour of its Atomic Armor–enhanced lithium-ion cells and finished batteries when it becomes operational in 2026.

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My dead father is “writing” me notes again

Enlarge / An AI-generated image featuring my late father's handwriting. (credit: Benj Edwards / Flux)

Growing up, if I wanted to experiment with something technical, my dad made it happen. We shared dozens of tech adventures together, but those adventures were cut short when he died of cancer in 2013. Thanks to a new AI image generator, it turns out that my dad and I still have one more adventure to go.

Recently, an anonymous AI hobbyist discovered that an image synthesis model called Flux can reproduce someone's handwriting very accurately if specially trained to do so. I decided to experiment with the technique using written journals my dad left behind. The results astounded me and raised deep questions about ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the personal meaning behind handwriting itself.

Beyond that, I'm also happy that I get to see my dad's handwriting again. Captured by a neural network, part of him will live on in a dynamic way that was impossible a decade ago. It's been a while since he died, and I am no longer grieving. From my perspective, this is a celebration of something great about my dad—reviving the distinct way he wrote and what that conveys about who he was.

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As quantum computing threats loom, Microsoft updates its core crypto library

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers.

The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core cryptographic code library for handing cryptographic functions in Windows and Linux. The library, started in 2006, provides operations and algorithms developers can use to safely implement secure encryption, decryption, signing, verification, hashing, and key exchange in the apps they create. The library supports federal certification requirements for cryptographic modules used in some governmental environments.

Massive overhaul underway

Despite the name, SymCrypt supports both symmetric and asymmetric algorithms. It’s the main cryptographic library Microsoft uses in products and services including Azure, Microsoft 365, all supported versions of Windows, Azure Stack HCI, and Azure Linux. The library provides cryptographic security used in email security, cloud storage, web browsing, remote access, and device management. Microsoft documented the update in a post on Monday.

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Taylor Swift cites AI deepfakes in endorsement for Kamala Harris

Enlarge / A screenshot of Taylor Swift's Kamala Harris Instagram post, captured on September 11, 2024. (credit: Taylor Swift / Instagram)

On Tuesday night, Taylor Swift endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for US President on Instagram, citing concerns over AI-generated deepfakes as a key motivator. The artist's warning aligns with current trends in technology, especially in an era where AI synthesis models can easily create convincing fake images and videos.

"Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site," she wrote in her Instagram post. "It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth."

In August 2024, former President Donald Trump posted AI-generated images on Truth Social falsely suggesting Taylor Swift endorsed him, including a manipulated photo depicting Swift as Uncle Sam with text promoting Trump. The incident sparked Swift's fears about the spread of misinformation through AI.

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Transistor-like Qubits Hit Key Benchmark

A team in Australia has recently demonstrated a key advance in metal-oxide-semiconductor-based (or MOS-based) quantum computers. They showed that their two-qubit gates—logical operations that involve more than one quantum bit, or qubit—perform without errors 99 percent of the time. This number is important, because it is the baseline necessary to perform error correction, which is believed to be necessary to build a large-scale quantum computer. What’s more, these MOS-based quantum computers are compatible with existing CMOS technology, which will make it more straightforward to manufacture a large number of qubits on a single chip than with other techniques.

“Getting over 99 percent is significant because that is considered by many to be the error correction threshold, in the sense that if your fidelity is lower than 99 percent, it doesn’t really matter what you’re going to do in error correction,” says Yuval Boger, CCO of quantum computing company QuEra and who wasn’t involved in the work. “You’re never going to fix errors faster than they accumulate.”

There are many contending platforms in the race to build a useful quantum computer. IBM, Google and others are building their machines out of superconducting qubits. Quantinuum and IonQ use individual trapped ions. QuEra and Atom Computing use neutrally-charged atoms. Xanadu and PsiQuantum are betting on photons. The list goes on.

In the new result, a collaboration between the University of New South Whales (UNSW) and Sydney-based startup Diraq, with contributors from Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S., has taken yet another approach: trapping single electrons in MOS devices. “What we are trying to do is we are trying to make qubits that are as close to traditional transistors as they can be,” says Tuomo Tanttu, a research fellow at UNSW who led the effort.

Qubits That Act Like Transistors

These qubits are indeed very similar to a regular transistor, gated in such a way as to have only a single electron in the channel. The biggest advantage of this approach is that it can be manufactured using traditional CMOS technologies, making it theoretically possible to scale to millions of qubits on a single chip. Another advantage is that MOS qubits can be integrated on-chip with standard transistors for simplified input, output, and control, says Diraq CEO Andrew Dzurak.

The drawback of this approach, however, is that MOS qubits have historically suffered from device-to-device variability, causing significant noise on the qubits.

“The sensitivity in [MOS] qubits is going to be more than in transistors, because in transistors, you still have 20, 30, 40 electrons carrying the current. In a qubit device, you’re really down to a single electron,” says Ravi Pillarisetty, a senior device engineer for Intel quantum hardware who wasn’t involved in the work.

The team’s result not only demonstrated the 99 percent accurate functionality on two-qubit gates of the test devices, but also helped better understand the sources of device-to-device variability. The team tested three devices with three qubits each. In addition to measuring the error rate, they also performed comprehensive studies to glean the underlying physical mechanisms that contribute to noise.

The researchers found that one of the sources of noise was isotopic impurities in the silicon layer, which, when controlled, greatly reduced the circuit complexity necessary to run the device. The next leading cause of noise was small variations in electric fields, likely due to imperfections in the oxide layer of the device. Tanttu says this should be straightforward to improve by transitioning from a laboratory clean room to a foundry environment.

“It’s a great result and great progress. And I think it’s setting the right direction for the community in terms of thinking less about one individual device, or demonstrating something on an individual device, versus thinking more longer term about the scaling path,” Pillarisetty says.

Now, the challenge will be to scale up these devices to more qubits. One difficulty with scaling is the number of input/output channels required. The quantum team at Intel, who are pursuing a similar technology, has recently pioneered a chip they call Pando Tree to try to address this issue. Pando Tree will be on the same substrate as the quantum processor, enabling faster inputs and outputs to the qubits. The Intel team hopes to use it to scale to thousands of qubits. “A lot of our approach is thinking about, how do we make our qubit processor look more like a modern CPU?” says Pillarisetty.

Similarly, Diraq CEO Dzurak says his team plan to scale their technology to thousands of qubits in the near future through a recently announced partnership with Global Foundries. “With Global Foundries, we designed a chip that will have thousands of these [MOS qubits]. And these will be interconnected by using classical transistor circuitry that we designed. This is unprecedented in the quantum computing world,” Dzurak says.

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Rogue WHOIS server gives researcher superpowers no one should ever have

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

It’s not every day that a security researcher acquires the ability to generate counterfeit HTTPS certificates, track email activity, and execute code of his choice on thousands of servers—all in a single blow that cost only $20 and a few minutes to land. But that’s exactly what happened recently to Benjamin Harris.

Harris, the CEO and founder of security firm watchTowr, did all of this by registering the domain dotmobilregistry.net. The domain was once the official home of the authoritative WHOIS server for .mobi, a top-level domain used to indicate that a website is optimized for mobile devices. At some point—it’s not clear precisely when—this WHOIS server, which acts as the official directory for every domain ending in .mobi, was relocated, from whois.dotmobiregistry.net to whois.nic.mobi. While retreating to his Las Vegas hotel room during last month’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Harris noticed that the previous dotmobiregistry.net owners had allowed the domain to expire. He then scooped it up and set up his own .mobi WHOIS server there.

Misplaced trust

To Harris’s surprise, his server received queries from slightly more than 76,000 unique IP addresses within a few hours of setting it up. Over five days, it received roughly 2.5 million queries from about 135,000 unique systems. The entities behind the systems querying his deprecated domain included a who’s who of Internet heavyweights comprising domain registrars, providers of online security tools, governments from the US and around the world, universities, and certificate authorities, the entities that issue browser-trusted TLS certificates that make HTTPS work.

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Where VR Gaming Took a Wrong Turn

This article is based on the authors’ new book, Fantasies of Virtual Reality (The MIT Press).

In 2017 Mark Zuckerberg stated a bold goal: He wanted one billion people to try virtual reality (VR) by 2027. While he still has a few years to pull it off, the target remains impossibly farfetched. The most recent estimates place total worldwide VR headset sales at only 34 million.

VR Gaming was expected to lead this uptake, but why hasn’t it? We believe that VR gaming has been held back by game developers who are committed to a fantasy. In this fantasy, VR games align with the values of “hardcore” gamer culture, with advanced graphics and wholly immersive play. Aspirational attempts to reach this flawed fantasy have squashed the true potential of VR for gaming.

VR Gaming’s Contemporary Emergence

The 1990s and 2000s saw several ill-fated attempts to launch VR gaming systems—including the Sega VR system, which the company promoted breathlessly but then never released, because it gave players motion sickness and headaches. But VR gaming’s contemporary emergence really began in August 2009, when then-17-year-old Palmer Luckey began posting on a VR enthusiasts forum about his plan to make a head-mounted VR gaming device. One early reader of Luckey’s posts was John Carmack, lead programmer for several of the most influential first-person shooter games, including Doom and Wolfenstein.

Palmer Luckey, shown here in 2013 at the age of 20, holds an early Oculus Rift virtual reality head-mounted display.Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

While working on the remaster of Doom 3—which included support for 3D displays—Carmack was experimenting with different VR headsets that were available at the time. The two connected through their forum posts, and Luckey sent one of his prototype VR headsets to Carmack. When Carmack took the prototype to the major gaming expo E3 in 2012, it catalyzed an avalanche of interest in the project.

Carmack’s involvement put Luckey’s newly formed company, Oculus VR, on a trajectory towards a particular kind of gaming: the hyper-violent games with high-fidelity graphics that hardcore gamers revere. Carmack, far beyond anyone else, pioneered the genre of hardcore games with his first-person shooter games.

Sega Visions Magazine promoted Sega VR in its August/September 1993 issue. Sega

Here’s how the gaming scholar Shira Chess sums up the genre: “Traditionally, ‘hardcore’ describes games that are difficult to learn, expensive, and unforgiving of mistakes and that must be played over longer periods of time. Conversely, casual games can be learned quickly, are forgiving of mistakes and cheap or free, and can be played for either longer or shorter periods of time, depending on one’s schedule.”

Oculus’s Kickstarter campaign in 2012 was proudly “designed for gamers, by gamers.” Soon after, Meta (then Facebook) acquired Oculus for US $3 billion in March 2014. The acquisition enraged many of those in the gaming community and those who had backed the original Kickstarter. Facebook was already an unpopular platform with the tech-enthusiast community, associated more closely with data collection and surveillance than gaming. If Facebook was associated with gaming, it was with casual social media games like Farmville and Bejeweled. But as it turns out, Meta went on to invest billions in VR, a level of investment highly unlikely if Oculus had remained independent.

The Three Wrong Assumptions of VR Gaming

VR’s origin in hardcore gaming culture resulted in VR game development being underpinned by three false assumptions about the types of experiences that would (or could) make VR gaming successful. These assumptions were that gamers wanted graphical realism and fast-paced violence, and that they didn’t want casual play experiences.

Over the past three decades, “AAA” game development—a term used in the games industry to signify high-budget games distributed by large publishers—has driven the massive expansion of computing power in consumer gaming devices. Particularly in PC gaming, part of what made a game hardcore was the computing power needed to run it at “maximum settings,” with the most detailed and textured graphics available.

The enormous advances in game graphics over the past 30 years contributed to significant improvements in player experience. This graphical realism became closely entwined with the concept of immersion.

For VR—which sold itself as “ truly immersive”—this meant that hardcore gamers expected graphically real VR experiences. But VR environments need to be rendered smoothly in order to not cause motion sickness, something made harder by a commitment to graphical realism. This aspiration saddling VR games with a nearly impossible compute burden.

One game that sidesteps this issue—and has subsequently become one of the most celebrated VR games—is Superhot VR, an action puzzle with basic graphics in which enemy avatars and their bullets only move when the player moves their body.

The video game Superhot VR remains one of the top-selling VR games years after its release due to its unique experience of time manipulation through body movements.Superhot VR

Play begins with the player surrounded by attacking enemies, with death immediately returning the player to the starting moment. Play thus involves discovering what sequence of movements and attacks can get the player out of this perilous situation. It’s a learning curve reminiscent of the 2014 science-fiction film Edge of Tomorrow, in which a hapless soldier (played by Tom Cruise) quicky becomes an elite, superhuman soldier while stuck in a time loop.

The attention in Superhot’s gameplay is not to visual fidelity or sensory immersion, but what genuinely makes VR distinct: embodiment. The effect of its conceit is a superhuman-like control of time manipulation, with players deftly contorting their bodies to evade slow moving bullets while dispatching enemies with an empowering ease. Superhot VR provides an experience worth donning a headset for, and it consequently remains one of VR gaming’s top selling titles eight years after its release.

When Immersion Is Too Much

John Carmack’ Doom and Wolfenstein, on which VR’s gaming fantasy was based, are first-person shooters that closely map to hardcore gaming ideals. They’re hyperviolent, fast-paced, and difficult; they have a limited focus on story; and they feature some of the goriest scenes in games. In the same way that VR gaming has been detrimentally entwined with the pursuit of photorealism, VR gaming has been co-opted by these hardcore values that ultimately limit the medium. They lack mainstream appeal and valorise experiences that simply aren’t as appealing in VR as it is in a flat screen.

In a discussion around the design of Half Life: Alyx—one of the only high-budget VR-only games—designers Greg Coomer and Robin Walker explain that VR changes the way that people interact with virtual environments. As Coomer says, “people are slower to traverse space, and they want to slow down and be more interactive with more things in each environment. It has affected, on a fundamental level, how we’ve constructed environments and put things together.” Walker adds that the changes aren’t “because of some constraint around how they move through the world, it’s just because they pay so much more attention to things and poke at things.” Environments in VR games are much denser; on PC they feel small, but in VR they feel big.

This in part explains why few games originally designed for flat screens and “ported” to VR have been successful. The rapidly paced hyperviolence best characterized by Doom is simply sensory overload in VR, and the “intensity of being there”—one of Carmack’s aspirations—is unappealing. In VR, unrelenting games are unpleasurable: Most of us aren’t that coordinated, and we can’t play for extended periods of time in VR. It’s physically exhausting.

Casual Virtual Reality?

Beat Saber is a prime example of a game that might be derided as casual, if it weren’t the bestselling VR game of all time. Beat Saber is a music rhythm-matching game, a hybrid of Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Fruit Ninja. In time with electronic music, a playlist of red or blue boxes streams towards the player. Armed with two neon swords—commonly described as light sabers—the player must strike these boxes in the correct direction, denoted by a subtle white arrow.

Striking a box releases a note in the accompanying song, resulting in an experience that is half playing an instrument, and half dance. Well patterned songs create sweeping movements and rhythms reminiscent of the exaggerated gestures used by Nintendo Wii players.

Beat Saber youtube

Beat Saber’s appeal is immersion-through-embodiment, also achieved by disregarding VR’s gaming fantasy of hardcore experiences. With each song being, well, song length, Beat Saber supports a shorter, casual mode of engagement that isn’t pleasurable because it is difficult or competitive, but simply because playing a song feels good.

Gaming in VR has been subjected to a vicious self-reinforcing cycle wherein VR developers create hardcore games, which appeal to a certain kind of hardcore gamer user, whose purchasing habits in turn drive further development of those kinds of games, and not others. Attempts to penetrate this feedback loop have been met with the hostility of VR’s online gaming culture, appropriated from gamer culture at large.

As a result, the scope of VR games remains narrow, and oblivious to the kinds of games that might take VR to its billionth user. Maybe then, the one thing that could save VR gaming is the one possibility that VR enthusiasts decried the most when Facebook purchased Oculus in 2014: Farmville VR.

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