AMD says it is well on its way to achieving its ambitious goal to deliver a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency across its high-performance compute (HPC) platforms by 2025.

In an update released Tuesday, CTO Mark Papermaster claimed the processor designer has already achieved a 6.79x efficiency gain in the eight months since the 30x25 initiative was announced.

The initiative seeks to dramatically reduce operating costs, preserve natural resources, and mitigate climate impacts, while simultaneously keeping up with demand for HPC and AI/ML workloads, Papermaster said in a statement.

Pushing the envelope of energy efficiency is nothing new for the House of Zen. Previously AMD set out to achieve a 25x improvement in mobile processor efficiency from 2014 to 2022. The company ultimately says it has surpassed that goal, claiming a 31.7x improvement.

To put the chip designer's latest goal into perspective, a 30x efficiency gain on its 2020 baseline — an Epyc 7002 processor and Vega 20 Instinct MI150 GPU combo — will require AMD to curb the power consumption required to perform a single calculation by 97 percent.

“Getting there will not be easy. To achieve this goal means that we will need to increase the energy efficiency of an accelerated compute node at a rate that is more than 2.5x faster than the aggregate industry-wide improvement made during the period 2015-2020,” Papermaster wrote.

Achieving this goal could have a profound impact on the sustainability of modern datacenters, Papermaster wrote. “For example, if all global AI and HPC server nodes were to make similar gains, we project up to 51 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity could be saved from 2021-2025, relative to industry trends.”

This, AMD claimed, would amount to $6.2 billion in electricity savings.

Since announcing the initiative in September, the company claims it's achieved a 6.79-fold improvement in efficiency from its baseline.

As promised, much of these gains were achieved through improvements to the company’s Instinct GPU accelerators — which received a significant update at AMD's Accelerated Datacenter Event in November.

The aforementioned efficiency improvement this week involved a single third-generation AMD Epyc processor accompanied by four top-of-the-line MI250x GPUs, and were validated by power-efficiency guru John Koomey. He previously discussed bending the efficiency curves for supercomputing with our sister title, The Next Platform.

The MI250x is based on a twin-die architecture that packs 58 billion transistors using a 6nm manufacturing process. AMD claims the GPUs offer more than 1.8x the performance of its MI100-series chips.

AMD’s third-gen Epyc and MI250x are at the heart of America's Oakridge National Laboratory’s 1.5 exaFLOP Frontier Supercomputer, which came online earlier this year.

Papermaster also alluded to the use of domain-specific processors — an entire portfolio of which it acquired with the $49 billion purchase of FPGA giant Xilinx that completed this year — in graphic captioned: “Application specific accelerated compute nodes enable greater efficiency.”

FPGAs — field programmable gate arrays — fit somewhere between a fixed-function ASIC and a general-purpose processor from, say, AMD or Intel. Their digital logic circuits can dynamically reconfigured — or, in other words, rearchitected — on the fly to accelerate domain-specific applications.

Xilinx is a titan of the FPGA market, and has large portfolio of products tailored to use cases including space travel, industrial systems, embedded electronics, telecommunications, and AI. Xilinx's Alveo FPGAs are a likely candidate to aid AMD’s 30x25 goal. ®

Right-to-repair advocates are applauding the passage of New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, which state assembly members approved Friday in a 145–1 vote.

The law bill, previously green-lit by the state senate in a 49-14 vote, now awaits the expected signature of New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D).

Assuming the New York bill becomes law as anticipated, it will be the first US state legislation to address the repairability of electronic devices. A week ago, a similar right-to-repair bill died in California due to industry lobbying.

The Russian-based Evil Corp is jumping from one malware strain to another in hopes of evading sanctions placed on it by the US government in 2019.

You might be wondering why cyberextortionists in the Land of Putin give a bit flip about US sanctions: as we understand it, the sanctions mean anyone doing business with or handling transactions for gang will face the wrath of Uncle Sam. Evil Corp is therefore radioactive, few will want to interact with it, and the group has to shift its appearance and operations to keep its income flowing.

As such, Evil Corp – which made its bones targeting the financial sector with the Dridex malware it developed – is now using off-the-shelf ransomware, most recently the LockBit ransomware-as-a-service, to cover its tracks and make it easier to get the ransoms they demand from victims paid, according to a report this week out of Mandiant.

Australia's federal police and Monash University are asking netizens to send in snaps of their younger selves to train a machine-learning algorithm to spot child abuse in photographs.

Researchers are looking to collect images of people aged 17 and under in safe scenarios; they don't want any nudity, even if it's a relatively innocuous picture like a child taking a bath. The crowdsourcing campaign, dubbed My Pictures Matter, is open to those aged 18 and above, who can consent to having their photographs be used for research purposes.

All the images will be amassed into a dataset in an attempt to train an AI model to tell the difference between a minor in a normal environment and an exploitative, unsafe situation. The software could, in theory, help law enforcement better automatically and rapidly pinpoint child sex abuse material (aka CSAM) in among thousands upon thousands of photographs under investigation, avoiding having human analysts inspect every single snap.

Rick Smith, founder and CEO of body camera and Taser maker Axon, believes he has a way to reduce the risk of school children being shot by people with guns.

No, it doesn't involve reducing access to guns, which Smith dismisses as politically unworkable in the US. Nor does it involve relocating to any of the many countries where school shootings seldom, if ever, occur and – coincidentally – where there are laws that limit access to guns.

Here's a hint – his answer involves Axon.

A critical flaw in the LTE firmware of the fourth-largest smartphone chip biz in the world could be exploited over the air to block people's communications and deny services.

The vulnerability in the baseband – or radio modem – of UNISOC's chipset was found by folks at Check Point Research who were looking for ways the silicon could be used to remotely attack devices. It turns out the flaw doesn't just apply to lower-end smartphones but some smart TVs, too.

Check Point found attackers could transmit a specially designed radio packet to a nearby device to crash the firmware, ending that equipment's cellular connectivity, at least, presumably until it's rebooted. This would be achieved by broadcasting non-access stratum (NAS) messages over the air that when picked up and processed by UNISOC's firmware would end in a heap memory overwrite.

A crew using malware that performs cryptomining and clipboard-hacking operations have made off with at least $1.7 million in stolen cryptocurrency.

The malware, dubbed Trojan.Clipminer, leverages the compute power of compromised systems to mine for cryptocurrency as well as identify crypto-wallet addresses in clipboard text and replace it to redirect transactions, according to researchers with Symantec's Threat Intelligence Team.

The first samples of the Windows malware appeared in January 2021 and began to accelerate in their spread the following month, the Symantec researchers wrote in a blog post this week. They also observed that there are several design similarities between Clipminer and KryptoCibule – another cryptomining trojan that, a few months before Clipminer hit the scene, was detected and written about by ESET analysts.

Healthcare organizations, already an attractive target for ransomware given the highly sensitive data they hold, saw such attacks almost double between 2020 and 2021, according to a survey released this week by Sophos.

The outfit's team also found that while polled healthcare orgs are quite likely to pay ransoms, they rarely get all of their data returned if they do so. In addition, 78 percent of organizations are signing up for cyber insurance in hopes of reducing their financial risks, and 97 percent of the time the insurance company paid some or all of the ransomware-related costs.

However, while insurance companies pay out in almost every case and are fueling an improvement in cyber defenses, healthcare organizations – as with other industries – are finding it increasingly difficult to get insured in the first place.

Something for the Weekend We're standing still. The suspense is unbearable. One of us is going to crack.

On the large projector screen is a message: "The application is not responding." Facing the large projector screen is a roomful of startup dudes. Staring back at them, and situated just underneath the projector screen, is the flailing, forlorn presenter himself: me.

"It's never done that before," I lie as I eventually give up frantically tapping the keyboard and jabbing the trackpad as if I was playing whack-a-mole.

On Call Welcome back to On Call wherein a Register reader accidentally improved an airline's productivity by the simple virtue of knowing their stuff.

"Eric" (for that is not his name) spent much of his career working on systems in the airline industry. "Since airlines were the first commercial organisations to use large-scale transaction processing systems, many of their features date back to the late 1950s," he said.

"Some of them were surprisingly sophisticated for the period. In the IBM mainframe world, each user terminal could support up to five simultaneous sessions which were designated by the letters A through E."

Disgraced tech giant Toshiba has revealed it has received ten buyout proposals, and devised a plan to grow its digital businesses.

"As of today, the Company has received eight initial proposals for privatization, as well as two initial proposals for a strategic capital and business alliance with the Company remaining listed from Potential Partners," the Japanese conglomerate stated in a canned statement [PDF] dated June 2.

Toshiba didn't say who submitted the buyout proposals, but Bain Capital is known to have expressed an interest. Reports have indicated CVC Capital Partners and KKR might be in the running too. It's worth noting that CVC has sought this opportunity before.

Amazon.com has decided to end its Kindle digital book business in China.

A statement posted to the Kindle China WeChat account states that Amazon has already stopped sending new Kindle devices to resellers and will cease operations of the Kindle China e-bookstore on June 30, 2023. The Kindle app will last another year, allowing users to download previously purchased e-books. But after June 30, 2024, Kindle devices in China won’t be able to access content.

An accompanying FAQ doesn’t offer a reason for the decision, but an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters “We periodically evaluate our offerings and make adjustments, wherever we operate.”

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