RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 were in stock at Newegg today – at reasonable prices
The RTX 3080 GPU is now on sale through the Newegg Shuffle, and these Nvidia GPUs are close to MSRP. Here's the cost.
Read MoreMany organizations think AI is a ‘plug and play’ technology that will deliver immediate returns to the business right from deployment. Sadly, it’s not as easy as this. In reality, it all depends on which type of AI your business is using, and the type of challenge you’re looking to overcome by implementing it. Take machine learning as an example. While companies may initially decide to adopt the technology to help identify patterns in their data and solve pressing business problems, this doesn’t happen overnight. IT management teams will have their work cut out before the business ever begins to see value.
Chris Stephenson, Technical Director at Sagacity.
For any kind of usable insight or data pattern to be generated from an AI machine, it must first be properly trained how to spot them. Organizations will need to feed their AI with reliable, labelled training data, most of which should be sourced internally but could also be purchased from a data marketplace or acquired via publicly available sources. The most important thing is ensuring any data fed into the AI is accurate and of high quality, and so the first step for businesses embarking on an AI strategy is operationalizing the data within their own organization.
It is critical to feed AI with the right information as, for example, machine learning models learn solely based on data that is presented to them. However, organizations run the risk of receiving inaccurate predictions or confusing conclusions if they improperly train their data models. It is best to use ‘representative’ data that reflects the characteristics of the real world and real people, as this gives the model the context it needs to recognize human patterns and make informed predictions.
Organizations must also remember that any changes in behavioral patterns must also be addressed, and machine learning models must be retrained with new data. For example, over the past 12 months we have seen a huge shift to remote working in the UK. Figures from the ONS published in July 2020 show that almost half (46.6%) of the entire population did some work from home because of the pandemic. Naturally, this has had an impact on how much gas and electric customers are using. Without retraining machine learning models to recognize that a change in customer behavior has taken place, they will not be aware of the shift and will continue to make inaccurate predictions on bills and usage.
For data to deliver value, it needs to be usable. Quality matters. It is not enough for organizations to just collect information, they need to properly categorize, cleanse and manage it appropriately, ensuring data uniformity. The first step for organizations is to gain an understanding of exactly what data they currently hold. They should look to answer questions like: what system is the data on? How is it formatted? Which departments have access? Are there any errors or duplications? From there, they should create a common 'key' that helps to link the data across different systems or within the same systems, cleaning and enriching it to ensure it is accurate, complete and usable.
It is only then that AI and algorithms can be brought in to connect the dots between these datasets. This enables organizations to identify key insights, solve business problems and, in some cases, unlock £million data insights.
In today’s digital dynasty, data is queen. With that in mind, the returns from using AI and machine learning to make sense of your organization's data are limitless. This doesn’t just mean using it to help build showy front-end services to satisfy today’s constant customer demand for new products and services. AI technologies can also be used to deliver operational benefits that shine a light on inefficiencies within a business, highlighting problems they may not have even been aware existed, let alone know how to solve.
This includes breaking down silos to pull together different data sets and provide answers to questions like: who are the business’ most valuable customers? Which are the most effective sales channels? How much demand will there be for a new service/launch? Are customers paying their bills on time? Am I meeting my compliance obligations? Do I have vulnerable customers that need additional support? Only by knowing this information can organizations put plans into place to improve their service for customers and determine untapped sources of profitability. Ultimately, when AI and machine learning are deployed to answer specific questions, organizations can expect to gain the ability to identify and solve any problems within their business model, as well as uncover new opportunities for growth.
The RTX 3080 GPU is now on sale through the Newegg Shuffle, and these Nvidia GPUs are close to MSRP. Here's the cost.
Read MoreWindows 11 has an issue with AMD processors, Team Red has confirmed, and it could have a substantial performance impact with some games. AMD made the warning via a support post on ‘Windows 11 performance variation in certain applications’, underlining that the issue is due to L3 cache latency potentially being around three times slower (cache is the small amount of very fast memory on-board the CPU). As you might imagine, that’s bad news for apps and games which are particularly sensitive to this cache access time, and AMD estimates that broadly, all supported Ryzen CPUs under Windows 11 (and some newer Athlon models, plus Epyc chips) could slow down by around 3% to 5% in affected apps. The rub is that slowdown could be worse with PC games, with around 10% to 15% of performance potentially being lost in what AMD calls ‘outliers’, specifically popular esports titles. The good news? There’s already a fix for the problem underway and it’ll come as a Windows update in October – which could mean the patch may arrive with the cumulative update due next week (October 12). A further issue highlighted by AMD is a performance flaw with UEFI CPPC2 (Collaborative Power and Performance Control 2) whereby that feature could fail to schedule threads successfully on the CPU’s fastest core (as it’s supposed to). This gremlin may also affect apps which are “sensitive to the performance of one or a few CPU threads”, driving performance down a little, and the problem may be more evident in processors with 8-cores or more and TDPs above 65W. Again, a solution is expected soon enough, and should be delivered at some point in October, also via a software update (presumably from AMD in this case, as Windows isn’t mentioned in the resolution to this second problem). This is a nasty volley of technical hitches for early adopters of Windows 11 who run AMD Ryzen chips, but it’s gamers who are mostly going to suffer here, of course. Performance drops of just a few percent in apps won’t be realistically noticeable, but a frame rate loss in double figures percentage-wise is obviously a big concern for gamers who might dabble in those particular titles. A 15% slowdown in a competitive esports title where every frame and millisecond of reaction time are vital is definitely a big problem. That said, those larger frame rate drops are in ‘outliers’ as AMD underlines – we’re guessing that could be high frame rate shooters, meaning those running CS:GO on massively high refresh rate monitors may be the most badly affected here – so some gamers may not see much difference overall. Even then, this clearly reinforces the perception that this initial release of Windows 11 was rushed out too early, given other issues already flagged up like the memory leak bug, and networking gremlins that could affect gamers too. We’ll repeat our previous advice on the topic of whether or not to upgrade from Windows 10 – don’t do it yet. It’ll take some time to iron out these issues by the sounds of things, so you’re likely best-off waiting until next month at least, for all the October patching to be done – and then tested to make sure it doesn’t break anything else as collateral damage (which has certainly happened in the past with Microsoft). Via Tom’s Hardware
Analysis: Windows 11 – is it still in (a very public) beta?
Best Buy is cutting up to $430 off its Surface Pro deals this week, with keyboard bundles offering up excellent value.
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