Weekend Update 2

This is my second update post where I cover things that I have covered before, and where there is some news, but no enough to make a completely new post. The first update was Weekend Update.

Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine

I wrote about the Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine when they announced it almost a year ago. It also made a guest appearance at TSMC's Technology Symposium (they manufactured it). One of the Tech Talks at DAC was by Andrew Feldman, their CEO and co-founder. But most of what he talked about I have already covered in more detail so I'll just leave you to read my post HOT CHIPS: The Biggest Chip in the World. He did have some cool pictures that I'll share.

On the left, the doors to the cabinet, much of which is taken up with cooling and power supplies. On the right is what Andrew called the "engine block".

Plus they have been getting a lot of press, and the "chip" is being used in a lot of applications from drug discovery, to image recognition, to research to supercomputing.

SpaceX

In my post First US Manned Launch Since 2011...Not Yet I wrote about the launch of the SpaceX rocket with astronauts on board that was aborted ten minutes from planned takeoff due to weather. The launch actually took place the following weekend, and since then the astronauts went to the space station and came back.

I also wrote about SpaceX's launch of Starlink satellites in What If It's Not 5G, But Satellites? and now there are over 500 of them up there.

Nikola Tesla

I wrote about Tesla in my post There Is a Statue of Nikola Tesla in Palo Alto...with Free WiFi. I wrote about how Edison's electricity generation was DC and Tesla's was AC. Both are important these days. AC allows you to ramp up the voltage so that there is not a lot of power loss. But it requires a lot of synchronization across what are known as "wide area synchronous grid" where all the AC is in phase. In Europe it is all 50Hz, and in the US it is 60Hz. Most of continental Europe forms the largest such area (the US is split into several).

Surprisingly, in Japan, it is both. In the north of the country it is 50Hz and in the south 60Hz. But you can't link a 50Hz network to a 60Hz network. So when Fukushima happened, and a lot of power in the north went offline, there was no way to do the obvious thing and bring up power from the south.

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