Good Morning! AWS re:Invent 2023 has wrapped up with Amazon unveiling new AI assistant Amazon Q, hardware upgrades like Graviton4 chips, and storage cost reductions with S3 Express One Zone. China showed off its next supercomputer at Supercomputing 2023, revealing upgraded SW26010-Pro processors for the system expected to rank number 2 on the TOP500 list. Microsoft announced SharePoint Embedded in public preview, allowing developers to build custom headless content applications leveraging Microsoft 365 capabilities.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

AWS re:Invent 2023 Wrapped Up (So Far)

The major AWS conference re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas has concluded, with the cloud giant unveiling a torrent of new offerings spanning infrastructure, platforms, tools and industry-specific solutions. Let's break down some of the most notable drops.

Amazon Q could be a potential game-changer - an AI assistant tailored to your business' unique needs. Leveraging 17 years of AWS data, it can handle everything from analytics to programming queries. Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock allows better governance over generative models, letting you define taboo topics.

On the hardware front, the Graviton4 chip delivers up to 40% faster performance for databases and Java apps, while the Trainium 2 chip trains models up to 4x quicker. AWS is also the first provider to deploy Nvidia's new GH200 GPUs in 2024.

The Amazon S3 storage tier received a major upgrade with S3 Express One Zone, promising up to 10x lower latency and 50% cheaper costs. Serverless flavors of Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB should simplify scaling.

AWS is expanding access options to virtual desktops via new $195 thin client devices. The hardware repurposes Fire TV Cubes to lower costs. Amazon One Enterprise allows palm-print authentication for facility access.

Other notable drops include Amazon Transcribe gaining generative foundations for speech-to-text across 100 languages. Amazon Connect can now generate post-call summaries too. Multiple Titan natural language models were announced, but no sight of the mythical Project Olympus 2 trillion parameter model yet.

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China Unveils Upgraded SW26010-Pro Supercomputer

At Supercomputing 2023, China showed off an upgraded version of their homegrown SW26010 processor, creatively named SW26010-Pro. This chip powers their latest supercomputer which looks to take the number two spot on the TOP500 supercomputer list, after the US's Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Lab.

The SW26010-Pro builds on the original SW26010 chip used in Sunway's TaihuLight supercomputer, currently ranked number 11. At a high level, it scales up the basic concept of the SW26010 while modernizing connectivity. The chip consists of six core groups, each with 64 compute processing elements (CPEs) arranged in a mesh, plus one management processing element (MPE) per group.

Compared to the SW26010, the Pro version doubles the vector execution width to 512-bit and increases clock speed from 1.45 GHz to 2.25 GHz. This quadruples per-chip compute throughput to 13.8 teraflops FP64. The MPE also enjoys a larger L2 cache and higher clocks for improved management performance.

However, the DRAM configuration looks concerning - just dual-channel DDR4-3200 per core group. With no L3 cache, that setup seems inadequate to feed all those execution units. Expect the system to be very optimization-sensitive.

The supercomputer interconnect provides 56.25 GB/s bidirectional bandwidth per node. A supernode groups 256 nodes to a leaf switch. Uplinks lead to a central switching network of unknown topology. Compared to RIKEN's Fugaku, Sunway provides less per-node bandwidth to the global interconnect.

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Microsoft Unveils SharePoint Embedded for Headless Content Apps

Microsoft recently announced the public preview of SharePoint Embedded, a new platform that allows developers to build custom content applications that integrate with Microsoft 365.

SharePoint Embedded provides a headless, API-only interface for constructing apps that store content within an enterprise's existing Microsoft 365 tenant. This allows the development of content-centric line-of-business applications with built-in collaboration, security, compliance, and other Microsoft 365 capabilities.

“Now you can bring the most flexible content platform with an elastic architecture supporting millions of requests per second and exabytes of data to your app for the AI era,” said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's President of Collaboration Apps and Platforms.

Key Features

SharePoint Embedded is built on the same backend as SharePoint and OneDrive, providing scalability, performance, and suitability for large-scale deployments. Key features include:

• Integration with Microsoft 365 security, compliance, and business continuity features

• Support for co-authoring, search, content previews, and version history

• Customizable experiences and access controls

• A pay-as-you-go pricing model based on storage, API calls, and data transfer

Use Cases

Microsoft envisions several key use cases, including:

• Line-of-business apps with integrated enterprise content management

• Independent software vendor (ISV) apps that incorporate Microsoft 365 capabilities

• Content repositories, collaboration platforms, and custom portals

The product will enable developers to embed trusted content services into any app while exerting control over customization, security, and lifecycle management.

General availability is planned for mid-2024. Microsoft Loop and Microsoft Designer already leverage SharePoint Embedded, demonstrating its versatility across first- and third-party scenarios.

With SharePoint Embedded now in public preview, developers can start building the next generation of intelligent content applications powered by Microsoft 365.

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Reflashing Vintage Mac ROMs Just Got Easier

Have you ever wondered how Apple developers updated the read-only memory (ROM) chips inside Macintosh computers back in the 1990s? Thanks to intrepid retrocomputing enthusiast Doug Brown, we now have insight into this formerly obscure process.

Doug recently got his hands on an internal Apple utility for reflashing ROMs on certain 68000-based Macs. By reverse-engineering the software, he learned it could reprogram compatible ROM SIMM modules installed in the processor direct slot (PDS) or SIMM slots inside select Mac models like the Quadra and PowerBook 500 series.

The utility targeted Intel and AMD flash memory chips popular in the early '90s. After adapting the software to work with modern flash chips, Doug developed custom ROM SIMM boards using newold stock chips purchased on eBay along with 3D-printed SIMM shells. He successfully tested reflashing the ROM on his Quadra by playing a custom startup chime.

While the original ROM flashing process was meant for developers only, Doug's work breathes new life into these extinct tools. It opens possibilities like creating custom boot chime sounds or augmented system software. However, there are still limitations – the reflashable area is restricted to 4MB and it requires a physical SIMM slot.

Still, Doug's project illuminates a fascinating aspect of early Mac history. It shows the lengths Apple went to equip their developers with the best tools during Macintosh's formative years. We can expect hobbyists will build on Doug's findings to push the retrocomputing scene into new territory.

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Youtube Spotlight

Building the Dev Platform Ep 10: Code with Me

In this episode of Building the Dev Platform, the focus is on coding the post page and addressing the issues with fetching data for the post details. Forrest also addresses the issue of organizing the code and talks about a comment he received.

More Notes

1. How Python's New Security Developer Hopes To Help All Software Supply Chains

2. Apple Employees Most Likely to Leave to Join Google, Says LinkedIn Analysis

3. AWS Reveals AI Chatbot, Chips, Nvidia Partnership

4. Fake AI Images Are Showing Up in Google Search — and It's a Problem

5. Apple Ending Apple Card Partnership With Goldman Sachs

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