Intel celebrates Stephen Hawking’s birthday with personalized silicon wafer

By Anna Washenko January 21, 2013

Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday last January. At the State of the Universe symposium, Intel promised Hawking a special present in honor of his momentous birthday. A year later, Intel has completed its ambitious gift. Presented by Martin Curley, Intel vice president and director of Intel Labs Europe, Hawking received a special 300mm silicon wafer.

The wafer, which would normally be used to produce Intel chips, is inscribed with the words “Happy Birthday Stephen Hawking” hundreds of times by nano-scale copper lines. The width of each letter is about ten microns, or ten times smaller than the width of a human hair.

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The ceremony took place at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in Cambridge, UK, where Hawking is the founder and director of research. The research base features the COSMOS Mk IX supercomputer, which runs on 1,856 of Intel’s Xeon E5 processors cores and 31 of the company’s Xeon Phi coprocessors. The combined processors give the supercomputer a theoretical top performance of about 75 TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second). Right now, the COSMOS Mk will dedicate its significant power to investigating the origins of our universe, possibly unravelling the first few moments of the Big Bang. Intel announced that it will sponsor 2013’s annual Conference on Particle Physics and Cosmology (COSMO) in Cambridge this September.

According to Slashgear, the birthday present isn’t all that Intel’s working on for Hawking these days. As Hawking’s degenerative motor neuron disease progresses, the physicist has lost control over more of his muscles, which makes it harder for him to communicate. With Hawking’s current system, he uses twitches of his cheek to control a cursor that spells out words one letter at a time. He can only speak about one word each minute. Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said that since Hawking is still able to control a few other features, he may be able to communicate more quickly through Morse code in a system that responds to multiple facial cues. Intel is working on a new setup for Hawking that would allow him to speak faster by registering inputs from his eyebrow and mouth movements as well as movements in his cheek.

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Intel is building brain-like processors that will power the robots of the future

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At its keynote at CES 2018, Intel slid in mentions of its more experimental forms of data processing that could be coming down the pipeline. Amidst talk of the importance of data in virtually every aspect of life, the company believes that the future of computing resides within two key areas: Neuromorphic and quantum computing.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich made this revelation during his keynote Monday night during CES, showing off two new processors built for these computing segments.

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The new neuromorphic computing processor throws out the conventional desktop processor architecture, and instead attempts to mimic how the brain learns and grows on its own. The prototype chip, called Loihi, simulates the brain in silicon by implementing digital circuits (artificial neurons) and pathways. But according to Krzanich, these pathways will change as the chip receives data and self-learns as a result, just like our own brains.
Krzanich said the prototype chip learned how to perform simple object recognition in the company's labs in just several weeks. He believes this technology will influence "future products and innovations," and that will start by placing prototype chips in the hands of researchers to discover the true potential of neuromorphic computing. Even more, the chip promises faster machine learning with better power efficiency.
"The Loihi test chip offers highly flexible on-chip learning and combines training and inference on a single chip," added Intel Labs' Dr. Michael Mayberry. "This allows machines to be autonomous and to adapt in real time instead of waiting for the next update from the cloud. The self-learning capabilities prototyped by this test chip have enormous potential to improve automotive and industrial applications as well as personal robotics."
The Loihi prototype chip will be shared with universities and research institutions in the first half of 2018 with a focus on advancing the artificial intelligence field.

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Steam no longer supports sending gifts to another user’s inventory or via email

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Valve has announced some major changes to the way that games bought via Steam can be gifted to other users. The element of the online storefront has long been problematic for the company, as many unofficial resellers used the system to facilitate their sales, but it seems that the time has come for a crackdown.

Steam users will no longer be able to send gifts to their recipients email address, or have them forwarded to an inventory. Instead, games will be transferred directly from the gift giver to the library of the recipient, according to a post on the Steam Blog.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks out on the 28th anniversary of the World Wide Web

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On March 12, the World Wide Web celebrated its 28th birthday — or, more accurately, the 28th anniversary of a proposal for the project that was submitted by its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. To mark the occasion, Berners-Lee published a message outlining what he views as the three biggest challenges that the web faces today.

The first is the fact that we've lost control of our personal data. Today, many internet users exchange their personal information for access to various sites and services, agreeing to contracts tied to pages and pages of terms and conditions.