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AMD hopes to win over enterprise AI customers with a more affordable datacenter GPU that can drop into conventional air-cooled servers. Announced on Thursday, the MI350P is the House of Zen’s first PCIe-based Instinct accelerator since the MI210 debuted all the way back in 2022. Until now, AMD’s best GPUs have only been available in packs of eight and used socketed OAM modules that weren’t compatible with most server platforms. By comparison, The MI350P can slot into just about any 19-inch pizza box design that offers enough power and airflow, making it a much easier sell for enterprises dipping their toes into on-prem AI for the first time. The 600-watt, dual-slot card is essentially a MI350X that’s been cut in half. That means the CNDA-based GPU is packing 4.6 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute and 144 GB of VRAM spread across four HBM3e stacks delivering a respectable 4 TB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD supports configurations ranging from one to eight MI350Ps, though a lack of high-speed interconnects on these cards means it’ll be limited to PCIe 5.0 speeds (128 GB/s) for chip-to-chip communications, potentially limiting its potential in larger models. AMD hasn’t shared pricing for the cards just yet, but at least on paper, the MI350P is well positioned to compete with either Nvidia’s H200 NVL or RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell PCIe cards. Compared to the 141 GB H200, the MI350P promises about 38 percent higher peak performance at FP8, while eking out a narrow VRAM capacity advantage. But the H200 does pull ahead when it comes to memory bandwidth. With six HBM3e stacks to the MI350P’s four, the nearly two-year-old card’s memory is still about 20 percent faster. Nvidia's H200 also supports high-speed chip-to-chip communications over NVLink, while the MI350P doesn’t use AMD’s equivalent Infinity Fabric interconnect. However, all this assumes you can still find H200 NVLs in the wild. Since last summer, Nvidia has been pushing its RTX Pro 6000 Server cards on enterprise customers. As of writing, the card is Nvidia’s most powerful Blackwell-based accelerator offered in a PCIe formfactor. Compared to the RTX Pro 6000, the MI350P’s price starts becoming a bigger factor than performance. Workstation versions of the RTX Pro, which ditch the passive cooler for an active one, routinely sell for between $8,000 to $10,000 apiece, making it one of Nvidia’s more affordable datacenter-class GPUs. Depending on how pricing shakes out, AMD may have to push hard to be competitive. Having said that, the MI350P is still the better-specced part, delivering 2.3x higher peak flops, 2.5x the memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more vRAN of the RTX Pro. Now, this all assumes peak FLOPS and memory bandwidth, which is rarely realistic. The tensors used by AI workloads are rarely the ideal shape for squeezing the maximum number of FLOPS out of a chip. This is why we run for Maximum Achievable MatMul FLOPS (MAMF) and Babel Stream memory bandwidth benchmarks as part of our AI test suite. AMD seems to understand that peak FLOPS don’t really translate cleanly into real-world performance, and in the marketing materials shared with El Reg prior to publication, compared the MI350P’s theoretical performance against its real-world delivered performance. It’d be nice to see Nvidia and others adopt similar practices regarding accelerator performance claims, though we suspect getting everyone to agree on the best way to measure this might not be easy. The MI350P’s launch comes as AMD prepares to address a very different and likely more lucrative segment with its first rack-scale compute platform, codenamed Helios. That system is due out in the second half of the year, and is aimed primarily at large hyperscale and neocloud deployments. The system packs 72 of its all-new MI455X GPUs into a single double-wide OCP rack that behaves like an enormous accelerator. The platform will be AMD’s first crack at Nvidia’s NVL72 racks, which launched alongside its Blackwell generation nearly two years ago. ®

20-year-old fessed up after investigators found video of crime in progress

Brussels says it's simplification, critics may call it retreat

NewtonsLaw writes: According to Realtor.com, a California startup called Span plans to partner with Nvidia, PulteGroup, and other homebuilders to equip new homes with mini-data centers, so as to relieve the need to build and power much larger traditional centers. The article states the company "can install 8,000 XFRA units about six times faster and at five times lower cost than the construction of a typical centralized 100 megawatt data center of the same size." Could this be the solution to at least some of the problems hindering the rollout of greater data-center capacity for AI systems? "One big reason the XFRA model works is that the average American home only uses about 40 percent of its electrical capacity," Span said. "As big data center developers struggle to find power sources and distribution capacity, XFRA uses capacity that's already available." The startup says they will launch a 100-home proof of concept within the year to see if the idea is viable.

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Plus a petition for the UK Civil Service to go FOSS by default

Fortunately, it was a legit contractor who guessed it

You did remember to opt out of AI, didn't you?

Roles span eGates, passports, visas, asylum applications, and enterprise services – yours for up to £105K

£330M contract defended as value for money despite concerns over IP and lock-in

A small study found that a single 25mg dose of psilocybin produced measurable brain changes that were still visible a month later, along with reported improvements in psychological insight, wellbeing, and mental flexibility. The Guardian reports: Evidence for the changes came from specialized scans that measured the diffusion of water along nerve bundles in the brain. They suggested that some nerve tracts had become denser and more robust after the drug was taken. While the findings are preliminary, the scientists said the opposite was seen in ageing and dementia. "It's remarkable to see potential anatomical brain changes one month after a single dose of any drug," said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and senior author on the study. "We don't yet know what these changes mean, but we do note that overall, people showed positive psychological changes in this study, including improved wellbeing and mental flexibility." [...] Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers describe another key finding. Those who had the largest spike in brain entropy after psilocybin were most likely to report deeper psychological insight and better wellbeing a month later, underlining the link between flexible thinking and improved mental health. "It suggests a psychobiological therapeutic action for psilocybin," said Carhart-Harris. Prof Alex Kwan, a neuroscientist at Cornell University in New York, said studies in mice had shown that psychedelics can rewire connections between nerves, a form of "plasticity" that could underlie their therapeutic effects. The big question is whether the same occurs in humans. "This study comes closer than most to addressing that question, by giving evidence of lasting changes in brain structure after psychedelic use," he said. But while the results were "exciting," the study involved a small number of people and DTI provides an indirect and limited view of brain connections, he said.

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Former bitcoin miner plans to build an easier cloudy AI on ramp while remaining a friend to FOSS

Sam Altman's management style came under scrutiny on the seventh day of Elon Musk's high-stakes OpenAI trial, as former OpenAI figures Mira Murati, Shivon Zilis, and Helen Toner took the stand to testify about their experiences working with him. Their testimony resurfaced many of the criticisms that first emerged during Altman's brief ouster as CEO in 2023. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: The first witness was Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer and now founder of her own AI shop, Thinking Machines Lab. Jurors watched a recorded video deposition of Murati, who was also OpenAI's interim CEO after the board briefly ousted Sam Altman. Murati's testimony focused on her concerns about Altman's "difficult and chaotic" management style. She said Altman had trouble "making decisions on big controversial things." He also had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. "My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and a completely different thing to another person, and that makes it a very difficult and chaotic environment to work with," said Murati. Murati said that her issue with Altman was not about safety, "it is about Sam creating chaos." She said she supported Altman's return to OpenAI because the company "was at catastrophic risk of falling apart" at the time of his ousting. "I was concerned about the company completely blowing up." Zilis said she was upset that Altman rolled out ChatGPT without involving the board. "It wasn't just me but the entire board raised concern about that whole thing happening without any board communication," she said. Zilis said she was also concerned about a potential OpenAI deal with a nuclear energy startup called Helion Energy because both Altman and Greg Brockman were investors. Although the executives had disclosed the investment to the board, Zilis said the deal talk made her uneasy. It "felt super out of left field," she said. "How is it the case that we want to place a major bet on a speculative technology?" In a video deposition, Helen Toner, a former member of OpenAI's board who resigned in 2023, said she first became aware of ChatGPT's release when an OpenAI employee asked another board member whether the board was aware of the development. [...] Toner also elaborated on why the board, including herself, voted to remove Altman as CEO in 2023. "There were a number of things -- the pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor, his resistance of board oversight, as well as the concerns that two os his inner management team raised to the board about his management practices, his manipulation of board processes," said Toner. Recap: Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

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Someone other than Meta is buying $1bn of its new AGI chips

For AI agents, seeing is expensive

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Security researcher Tom Joran Sonstebyseter Ronning has found that Microsoft Edge stores passwords in plaintext in RAM. After creating a password and storing it using Edge's password manager, Ronning found that he could dump the RAM and recover his password which was stored in plaintext. Part of the issue is Edge loads all passwords to all sites upon a single verification check, even if the user was not visiting a specific site. This is very different from Chrome, which only loads passwords for specific websites when challenged for the site's password. Also, Chrome will delete the password from memory once the password has been filled. Edge does not delete the passwords from memory once they are used. Microsoft downplayed the risk noting access would require control over a user's PC like a malware infection: "Access to browser data as described in the reported scenario would require the device to already be compromised," Microsoft said. Ronning countered that it was possible to dump passwords for multiple users using administrative privileges for one user to view the passwords for other logged-on users. "Design choices in this area involve balancing performance, usability, and security, and we continue to review it against evolving threats," Microsoft said. "Browsers access password data in memory to help users sign in quickly and securely -- this is an expected feature of the application. We recommend users install the latest security updates and antivirus software to help protect against security threats."

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Google is updating AI Overviews and AI Mode to more prominently surface "Expert Advice" from public discussions, social platforms, forums, blogs, and Reddit. Engadget reports: Via a new "Expert Advice" section that can appear in AI responses, Google will display "a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media and other firsthand sources." In the sample screenshot the company provided, quotes from forums, WordPress blogs and Reddit were arranged above links to their respective sources. Google plans to add more context to these links, too, showing "a creator's name, handle or community name," so you can judge what you might want to click through and read from a glance. Google will also start recommending in-depth articles at the end of AI responses for further exploration of a given topic, and link to more sources directly in its generated answers rather than just at the end. If you subscribe to any publications, AI responses will also highlight sources from the subscriptions you link to your Google account.

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Valve has released CAD files for the new Steam Controller and its Puck under a Creative Commons license. "The idea is to let enterprising modders create their own Steam Controller add-ons, like skins, charging stands, grip extenders or smartphone mounts," reports Digital Foundry. From the report: The Valve release includes files for the external shell ("surface topology") of the Controller and Puck, with a .STP, .STL and engineering diagram of each device, with the latter showing areas that must remain uncovered to let the device maintain its signal strength and otherwise function as designed. Valve has previously released CAD files for its Steam Deck handheld, Valve Index VR suite and even the original Steam Controller a decade ago, so this release is welcomed but not unexpected. The release is under a fairly restrictive Creative Commons license which allows for non-commercial use and requires attribution and sharing of designs back to the community. However, the license also suggests that commercial entities interested in making accessories for the Steam Controller or its Puck can contact Valve directly to discuss terms. You can find the files here.

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Okay, the rodent was a willing participant - after all, who turns down treats for a spin that charges a phone?

Compute from Colossus leads to relaxed limits

Morgan Stanley is adding crypto trading to E*Trade, with a pilot now underway and a broader rollout planned for the platform's 8.6 million customers later this year. The bank is reportedly undercutting rivals with a 50-basis-point trading fee as it bets traditional finance and DeFi will converge. "By contrast, Robinhood Markets' (HOOD) fees start at 95 bps, Coinbase Global's (COIN) begins at 60 bps, and Charles Schwab (SCHW) will charge 75 bps," notes Seeking Alpha. Morgan Stanley's head of wealth management, Jed Finn, told Bloomberg: "This is much bigger than trading crypto at a cheaper rate. In a way, the strategy is disintermediating the disintermediators."

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