Hire the best, it’s a sound investment
In case you haven’t noticed, there is a battle going on across America. It’s a battle to attract workers amid nationwide staff shortages. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has termed this a “national economic emergency.”
Everywhere you look there’s a “help wanted” sign. On-the-spot interviews to bring candidates on board quickly, hiring bonuses, offers of benefits that were unheard of just months ago. Companies are going to great lengths to entice people to join their teams.
Target Corp. recently announced plans to cover the cost of tuition, fees and textbooks for part- and full-time workers at more than 40 institutions. It is also covering advanced degrees, paying up to $10,000 each year for master’s programs at these schools.
Other major companies like Walmart, Chipotle and Starbucks have also announced similar debt-free education programs.
The video monitors on the gas
The Telum is designed for use in IBM’S high-powered servers that are used by companies to operate their websites and process online transactions and data collection.
IBM said Telum would be ideal for not only bank transactions, but loan processing and credit checks, risk analysis, stock trading and for detection of money laundering.
“This could lead to breakthroughs in combating fraud, credit approval, claims and settlements, and financial trading, with systems that can conduct inferencing at the speed of a transaction,” IBM said Monday after unveiling Telum at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley, which was held virtually due to the COVID -19 pandemic.
Telum will be available commercially in IBM’S Z servers and mainframe computers starting in 2022. IBM sold off its chip factories to Globalfoundries several years ago and contracts with Globalfoundries and now Samsung for its manufacturing.
The release of Telum comes as upstate New York and Albany Nanotech have become the epicenter for computer research and manufacturing.
Earlier this year, IBM announced it had developed the world’s first chip using 2 nanometer architecture, which references the size of some of the features on the chip such as the size of certain parts of the transistors that move data around the processor.
The reduction of the size of transistors on each new generation of chips is at the heart of what the industry calls Moore’s Law — a theory that says that chipmakers can essentially double the power of chips every few years while driving costs down at a similar pace.
However, scientists expect that the industry may soon reach the point where chipmakers will not be able to keep shrinking the size of transistors, resulting in an end to Moore’s Law.
IBM and others believe they can make other innovations to chips that are not dependent on shrinking transistors such as adding more processing “cores,” to the chip or stacking multiple chips on top of one another. The Telum is actually two chips in one and has 22 billion transistors. It is embedded with 19 miles of wire and is made of 17 metal layers.
With more cores, the chip can respond to instructions more quickly without hesitation, which is known as latency.
Several of the world’s top chip manufacturers, including Samsung, are seriously looking at upstate New York for sites to build new chip factories. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, and Globalfoundries, which employs 3,000 people at its Fab 8 factory in Saratoga County, are also looking to build new factories in New York.
The surge in interest in building new fabs is being driven by plans by Congress to fund a $52 billion federal subsidy program to encourage the construction of new chip factories to combat the growth of China’s chip manufacturing capacity.