On August 26, 2022, the U.S. government, or USG, informed NVIDIA Corporation, or the Company, that the USG has imposed a new license requirement, effective immediately, for any future export to China (including Hong Kong) and Russia of the Company’s A100 and forthcoming H100 integrated circuits. DGX or any other systems which incorporate A100 or H100 integrated circuits and the A100X are also covered by the new license requirement.
另外是禁止新產品的部份,效能與 A100 相等或是更好的卡也被禁止輸出,除非有取得授權:
The license requirement also includes any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100, as well as any system that includes those circuits.
然後有提到軍事相關考量:
A license is required to export technology to support or develop covered products. The USG indicated that the new license requirement will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia. The Company does not sell products to customers in Russia.
單 CPU 的伺服器是四個 100Gbps 界面接出來,雙 CPU 的伺服器是八個 (這邊 SUT 是 system under test 的縮寫):
These client systems were connected to the CDN servers using 100 GbE links through a switch; 4x100 GbE connections for the single-processor SUT, and 8x100 GbE for the dualprocessor SUT. Testing was done using Wrk, a widely recognized open-source HTTP(S) benchmarking tool.
在白皮書最後面也有提到測試的配置,都是在 Ubuntu 20.04 上面跑,單 CPU 用的是兩張 Intel 的 100Gbps 網卡,雙 CPU 的用的是四張 Mellanox 的 100Gbps 網卡:
3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable testing done by Intel in September 2021. Single processor SUT configuration was based on the Supermicro SMC 110P-WTR-TNR single socket server based on Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8380 processor (microcode: 0xd000280) with 40 cores operating at 2.3 GHz. The server featured 256 GB of RAM. Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology was enabled, as was Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. Platform controller hub was the Intel C620. NUMA balancing was enabled. BIOS version was 1.1. Network connectivity was provided by two 100 GbE Intel® Ethernet Network Adapters E810. 1.2 TB of boot storage was available via an Intel SSD. Application storage totaled 3.84TB per drive and was provided by 8 Intel P5510 SSDs. The operating system was Ubuntu Linux release 20.04 LTS with kernel 5.4.0-80 generic. Compiler GCC was version 9.3.0. The workload was wrk/master (April 17, 2019), and the version of Varnish was varnishplus-6.0.8r3. Openssl v1.1.1h was also used. All traffic from clients to SUT was encrypted via TLS.
3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable testing done by Intel in September 2021. Dual processor SUT configuration was based on the Supermicro SMC 22OU-TNR dual socket server based on Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8380 processor (microcode: 0xd000280) with 40 cores operating at 2.3 GHz. The server featured 256 GB of RAM. Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology was enabled, as was Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. Platform controller hub was the Intel C620. NUMA balancing was enabled. BIOS version was 1.1. Network connectivity was provided by four 100 GbE Mellanox MCX516A-CDAT adapters. 1.2 TB of boot storage was available via an Intel SSD. Application storage totaled 3.84TB per drive and was provided by 12 Intel P5510 SSDs. The operating system was Ubuntu Linux release 20.04 LTS with kernel 5.4.0-80- generic. Compiler GCC was version 9.3.0. The workload was wrk/master (April 17, 2019), and the version of Varnish was varnish-plus6.0.8r3. Openssl v1.1.1h was also used. All traffic from clients to SUT was encrypted via TLS.
These VT1 instances feature Xilinx® Alveo™ U30 media accelerator transcoding cards with accelerated H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC codecs and provide up to 30% better price per stream compared to the latest GPU-based EC2 instances and up to 60% better price per stream compared to the latest CPU-based EC2 instances.
Work from home 期間開會基本上就是幾個視訊軟體換來換去,Zoom 的話公司有買,自己開免費版的時候是 40mins 限制,另外 Slack 的畫面品質不怎麼樣,而 Google Meet 在疫情期間不限制時間,拿來聊天還蠻好用的。
看到「TLS support for Google Meet」這篇,文章裡面提到先前 Google Meet 是用 443/udp 跑 SRTP,這對很多公司的 firewall 需要另外開 (看到這個 UDP port 想到 QUIC 好像也是走這個 UDP port),在家裡的話應該還好,對於公司的電腦就會麻煩一些。
文章裡提到,這次支援了 TLS (over 443/tcp):
Some network setups do not work with SRTP over 443 which was preventing Meet calls from connecting. Meet now encapsulates SRTP in TLS which increases overall compatibility. This change will initially be available on the web, and will be available for mobile soon. We’ll announce it on the Google Workspace Updates blog when it’s available.
可以 fallback 回 443/tcp 走 TLS 的話穿透力應該就更好了,不過不知道免費版的有沒有也一起上,這邊只題到了 G Suite 系列會上:
Available to all Google Workspace customers, as well as G Suite Basic and Business customers
Apple's transfer service is available to customers in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States at this time.
服務的區域主要是歐洲北美紐西蘭,台灣暫時還沒辦法用,只能先看一下 screenshot 了:
既然是 Google Photos,能搬過去的就只有 Google Photos 有支援的類型,包括了大部分的圖片與影片格式:
Smart Albums, Live Photos, photo stream content, some metadata, and some RAW photos are not able to be transferred, but formats including .jpg, .png, .webp, .gif, some RAW files, .mpg, .mod, .mmv, .tod, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .divx, .mov, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .m2t, .m2ts, .mts, and .mkv are compatible.
Pairing Lyra with new video compression technologies, like AV1, will allow video chats to take place, even for users connecting to the internet via a 56kbps dial-in modem.
這次的突破在於可以使用 3kbps 的頻寬傳輸,但清晰度比 Opus 的 6kbps 效果還好不少。
Google 在文章裡面給了兩個 sample,一個是乾淨背景音,另外一個是吵雜的背景音,跟 Opus 與 Speex 比起來都好很多。
We provide extensive subjective performance evaluations that show that our system based on generative modeling provides state-of-the-art coding performance at 3 kb/s for real-world speech signals at reasonable computational complexity.