HARDWARE CHAT ⚙🏁

How optical interconnects and silicon photonics emerged as AI's next hot commodity — looming US-China summit puts photonics into the crosshairs https://ift.tt/cPb0zOJ Via Reddit 💬 | @HW_HUB 🖥

The irony at the center of analog AI chips: the multiply is free, but the ADCs converting the result back to digital often dominate the energy and area budget Analog in-memory computing is having a moment again (EnCharge with TSMC, Mythic's $125M round, IBM's HERMES chip), and the pitch is interesting: collapse the von Neumann round trip by storing weights as conductances and letting physics do the MAC.What gets left out of most coverage is that the analog/digital boundary is still there. Voltages in, currents out, they need conversion, and in practice a meaningful share of the chip budget goes to the converters rather than the crossbar array.The other problem is drift. An analog weight is a material property, so a PCM or RRAM cell reads differently a week after it was written. That means periodic recalibration or reprogramming is a permanent overhead digital memory doesn't pay.I wrote up the mechanism plus a numpy simulation showing how programming noise, read noise, and a 4-bit ADC stack up to >8% relative error on a single layer, before any compounding: https://towardsdatascience.com/analog-ai-is-back-can-it-survive-its-own-noise/Disclosure: my article on Towards Data Science. Via Reddit 💬 | @HW_HUB 🖥

Unlocked XBAR, Core Voltage, XOC mode on 5090 gpu.s (works on 5070, 5070Ti, 5080 too) https://ift.tt/I1FdCmf Guy on overlockers forum reported the RTX 5070 pulling 650watt with 1.15 core voltage and +300 xbar with 20% gains Via Reddit 💬 | @HW_HUB 🖥

EU GPU prices are up ~19% in one month, tracked the same 176 models across 3+ retailers daily to rule out cherry-picking hey again! I run a EU PC hardware price tracker (pricesquirrel.com), 25+ stores across 9 countries, and wanted to check: are GPU prices actually rising, or does it just feel that way?To make this defensible, I didn't just average "whatever's in stock" each day, that inflates the trend if cheap cards sell out and drop off the average. Instead I built a fixed basket: 176 GPU models tracked at 3+ different retailers, every single day for the last 30 days, no gaps, no swapping in or out.Result:July 15: €808.57 averageAugust 14: €963.56 average+19.2% in one month, same 176 cards throughoutThe rise wasn't sudden, it started climbing around July 24-25 and has been steady since, not one spike from a single event:July 15-23: flat, €805-815July 24-31: climbing, €826 → €906Aug 1-14: continued rise, plateauing slightly in the last week, €910 → €964Methodology, upfront: "price" here is each product's average price across whichever 3+ retailers carried it that day (not the single cheapest, not a blended market average across a shifting product list). Basket is fixed, same 176 SKUs day 1 and day 30, verified daily. This is EU-wide, not one country.Happy to break this down by tier (5060 vs 5070 vs 5080/5090) or AMD vs NVIDIA if there's interest, this is currently the aggregate number.source: pricesquirrel.com, updated every 6 hours Via Reddit 💬 | @HW_HUB 🖥