Computing

The AI Boom Is Giving Rise to “GPU-as-a-Service”

January 20, 2025
Computer & Information Technology

The surge of interest in AI is creating a massive demand for computing power. Around the world, companies are trying to keep up with the vast amount of GPUs needed to power more and more advanced AI models. While GPUs are not the only option for running an AI model,…

December 26, 2024
Computer & Information Technology

This year, IEEE Spectrum readers had a keen interest in all things software: What’s going on in the tumultuous world of open-source, why the sheer size of code is causing security vulnerabilities, and how we need to take seriously the energy costs of inefficient code. The ever-growing presence of artificial…

December 16, 2024
Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Metallurgy & Material Science

The future of memory is massive, diverse, and tightly integrated with processing. That was the message of an invited talk this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. H.-S. Philip Wong, an electrical engineer at Stanford University and former vice president of research at TSMC who remains…

December 12, 2024
Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Metallurgy & Material Science

This week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, research teams spanning academia and industry presented data on high-performance carbon nanotube transistors (CNTs) and circuits. While it may be a decade or more before these devices are integrated into products, engineers at the conference argued that the field…

November 5, 2024
Aerospace & Aeronautical

Lightning is one of the most common natural hazards on Earth, and our warming planet is just beginning to feel the effects of a future with more severe thunderstorms and increased lightning strikes. But there’s a lot that atmospheric scientists don’t understand about how lightning works. Better lightning data could…

16 Apr 24

The Legacy of the Datapoint 2200 Microcomputer

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

As the history committee chair of the IEEE Lone Star Section, in San Antonio, Texas, I am responsible for documenting, preserving, and raising the visibility of technologies developed in the local area. One such technology is the Datapoint 2200, a programmable terminal that laid the foundation for the personal computer…

16 Apr 24

Announcing a Benchmark to Improve AI Safety

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

One of the management guru Peter Drucker’s most over-quoted turns of phrase is “what gets measured gets improved.” But it’s over-quoted for a reason: It’s true. Nowhere is it truer than in technology over the past 50 years. Moore’s law—which predicts that the number of transistors (and hence compute capacity)…

16 Apr 24

Prepping For Post-Quantum Cryptography

Computer & Information Technology

Encryption today is typically a game of very large numbers. Some of today’s cryptographic systems, like RSA or elliptic-curve cryptography, utilize as keys integers that are hundreds or thousands of bits long. Cracking a key requires breaking down one of these integers into its prime-number factors. Even the mightiest non-quantum…

16 Apr 24

What Software Engineers Need to Know About AI Jobs

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

AI hiring has been growing at least slightly in most regions around the world, with Hong Kong leading the pack; however, AI careers are losing ground compared with the overall job market, according to the 2024 AI Index Report. This annual effort by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)…

15 Apr 24

15 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2024

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Each year, the AI Index lands on virtual desks with a louder virtual thud—this year, its 393 pages are a testament to the fact that AI is coming off a really big year in 2023. For the past three years, IEEE Spectrum has read the whole damn thing and pulled…

The AI Boom Is Giving Rise to “GPU-as-a-Service”

The Top 8 Computing Stories of 2024

Can Remixing Memory Curb AI’s Energy Problem?

Carbon Nanotube Circuits Find Their Place in Chips

Space-Based Sensor Captures Lightning Data in a Bottle

The Legacy of the Datapoint 2200 Microcomputer

Announcing a Benchmark to Improve AI Safety

Google won two major awards at MWC Barcelona 2025.

Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode

This MRI Can Run on Batteries

The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore’s Law