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Best early Prime Day mini PC deals: Save big on tiny computers

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Mini PCs are affordable, compact alternatives to standard desktops! Amazon Prime Day is one of the best times of the year to score a mini PC deal. These compact machines have exploded in popularity thanks to their tiny footprints, surprisingly strong performance, and wallet-friendly prices. Whether you need a capable productivity box, a living-room PC, or even a compact gaming rig, Prime Day is packed with discounts worth considering.


AMD revives 7-year-old chip designs for budget laptops

PCWorld

PCWorld reports AMD is reintroducing three mobile processors from 2019-2020, including Ryzen 3 3100U, Ryzen 5 3501U, and Ryzen 4700LE for budget laptops. This strategy addresses rising PC prices by offering significantly cheaper alternatives to current Ryzen AI 400 series chips through select OEMs in limited volumes. Intel is also rumored to pursue similar re-releases, highlighting industry-wide efforts to provide affordable computing solutions for cost-conscious consumers. AMD has resuscitated three mobile chips from 2019 and 2020 to ship to PC makers asking for cheaper processors for budget PCs, the company confirmed. AMD is now offering the AMD Ryzen 3 3100U and the the Ryzen 5 3501U, based on the Zen+ (Ryzen 3000 Mobile / Picasso) architecture it launched in 2019.


RTX Spark vs. Snapdragon X2 Elite: Which chip do you want in your AI PC?

PCWorld

PCWorld compares Nvidia's RTX Spark and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite processors for AI-powered mini PCs, highlighting their distinct strengths for different use cases. Qualcomm's chip excels in single-core performance and general productivity tasks, while Nvidia's platform dominates AI content creation and gaming with its RTX 5070-equivalent GPU. The choice depends on specific needs, as both face compatibility challenges with some applications requiring emulation or specialized optimization for optimal performance. One big thing changed at Computex this past week: Windows on Arm processors became the next big thing for Windows desktops, specifically for mini PCs designed for productivity and AI applications. So which Arm processor is the best bet? Until they hit our test bench, we can't say for sure.


Watch out, MacBook Neo: Cheap Windows laptops are getting good again

PCWorld

PCWorld reports that budget Windows laptops are becoming competitive again with new Intel Wildcat Lake and Qualcomm Snapdragon C processors targeting $300-$449 price points. These chips promise significant performance improvements and all-day battery life, with major manufacturers like Acer, HP, and Lenovo planning affordable models. The emerging budget laptops offer a strong alternative to expensive options like Apple's MacBook Neo, making powerful computing accessible to more consumers. Two years ago, budget PCs were often passed over in favor of expensive, premium laptops. Now, they're all anyone can talk about.






ComBack: A Versatile Dataset for Enhancing Compiler Backend Development Efficiency

Neural Information Processing Systems

Compiler backends are tasked with generating executable machine code for processors. With the proliferation of diverse processors, it is imperative for programmers to tailor specific compiler backends to accommodate each one. Meanwhile, compiler backend development is a laborious and time-consuming task, lacking effective automation methods. Although language models have demonstrated strong abilities in code related tasks, the lack of appropriate datasets for compiler backend development limits the application of language models in this field.In this paper, we introduce ComBack, the first public dataset designed for improving compiler backend development capabilities of language models. ComBack includes 178 backends for mainstream compilers and three tasks including statement-level completion, next-statement suggestion and code generation, representing common development scenarios. We conducted experiments by fine-tuning six pre-trained language models with ComBack, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing model accuracy across the three tasks. We further evaluated the top-performing model(CodeT5+) across the three tasks for new targets, comparing its accuracy with conventional methods (Fork-Flow), ChatGPT-3.5-Turbo,


Short-Dot: Computing Large Linear Transforms Distributedly Using Coded Short Dot Products

Neural Information Processing Systems

Faced with saturation of Moore's law and increasing size and dimension of data, system designers have increasingly resorted to parallel and distributed computing to reduce computation time of machine-learning algorithms. However, distributed computing is often bottle necked by a small fraction of slow processors called stragglers that reduce the speed of computation because the fusion node has to wait for all processors to complete their processing. To combat the effect of stragglers, recent literature proposes introducing redundancy in computations across processors, e.g., using repetition-based strategies or erasure codes. The fusion node can exploit this redundancy by completing the computation using outputs from only a subset of the processors, ignoring the stragglers. In this paper, we propose a novel technique - that we call Short-Dot - to introduce redundant computations in a coding theory inspired fashion, for computing linear transforms of long vectors. Instead of computing long dot products as required in the original linear transform, we construct a larger number of redundant and short dot products that can be computed more efficiently at individual processors. Further, only a subset of these short dot products are required at the fusion node to finish the computation successfully. We demonstrate through probabilistic analysis as well as experiments on computing clusters that Short-Dot offers significant speed-up compared to existing techniques. We also derive trade-offs between the length of the dot-products and the resilience to stragglers (number of processors required to finish), for any such strategy and compare it to that achieved by our strategy.