Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Nvidia’s “Lovelace” RTX 4000 GPUs will be faster than the top-end RTX 3090 Ti. (credit: Nvidia)

It has been nearly two years since Nvidia introduced its Ampere GPU architecture in the GeForce RTX 3080, and the company is reportedly gearing up to announce its replacement. Tom’s Hardware reports, based on tweets from a normally reliable leaker, that the RTX 4000-series and its Lovelace GPU architecture will begin rolling out early in Q3 of this year.

It has been so difficult to buy Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series GPUs for so long that it feels almost too soon to be talking about their replacements, though there was a similar two-year-ish gap between the first RTX 2000 GPUs and the RTX 3000 series. The difference is in how long it took Ampere to trickle all the way down to the bottom of the lineup. The Turing architecture debuted in September 2018 and had made its way down to the low-end GeForce GTX 1650 by April 2019; the first Ampere cards appeared in September 2020 but didn’t come to the GeForce RTX 3050 until January 2022.

Other reports from the same source suggest that the RTX 4000 GPU could be a big boost over the top-end RTX 3090 Ti, stepping up from 84 of Nvidia’s streaming multiprocessors (SMs) to somewhere between 126 and 140 SMs. The supposed RTX 4090 will come with 24GB of GDDR6 RAM (the same amount as the RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti) and is said to roughly double the RTX 3090’s performance within the same 450 W power envelope. Whether any of these performance claims are true remains to be seen—Nvidia’s GPUs do typically offer impressive performance bumps between generations, but double the performance in the same power envelope would be an anomalously large jump, historically speaking.

Enlarge / This mosaic consists of 16 different data sets from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope that were studied as part of the Asteroid Hunter citizen science project. Each of these data sets was assigned a color based on the time sequence of exposures. The blue tones represent the first exposure in which the asteroid was captured, and the red tones represent the last. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Kruk (ESA/ESTEC), Hubble Asteroid Hunter citizen science team, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble))

On International Asteroid Day in 2019, a group of research institutions launched a program that could make a deep impact on our knowledge of the diminutive bodies. Using citizen science to train a machine-learning algorithm, the Hubble Asteroid Hunter project identified more than 1,000 new asteroids; the discoveries could help scientists better understand the ring of heavenly bodies that primarily float between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid Hunter is a collaborative effort between various groups, including the European Science and Technology Centre, the European Space Astronomy Centre’s Science Data Centre, the Zooniverse citizen science platform, and Google.

In 2019, the researchers sent out a call for citizen scientists to collaborate on the crowd-sourced effort. Through the Zooniverse platform, 11,400 members of the public from around the world identified asteroid trails in 37,000 composite images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2021. The citizen scientists pored over the images for a year and identified more than 1,000 trails.