Intel laid claim to the ‘world’s best mobile gaming platform’ with its 12th generation Alder Lake H-series GPUs at CES 2022, then shifted to overdrive to focus on autonomous driving, introducing its Mobileye EyeQ Ultra, AV-on-chip supercomputer offered as a full-stack AV driving solution. Intel in December announced plans to spin off Mobileye in an IPO sometime this year and used its CES press conference stage to demonstrate it is prepared to deliver, announcing a partnership with Zeekr to create all-electric AVs for the Chinese market, due to roll off the assembly line in 2024. Continue reading CES: Intel on AV Overdrive, Touts Fastest Mobile Game Chip

Samsung is heading to CES this week with new smart TV features including its Gaming Hub and an NFT platform that integrates the purchase and trade of digital art and assets. The company is also introducing the 4K 32-inch M8 smart monitor, which like the M7 combines computer functionality with smart TV features such as preloaded streaming apps but bests its predecessor by adding a SlimFit camera for video calls and a SmartThings IoT hub that maps smart devices throughout the household and lets you control them from the monitor. The M8 price and release date has yet to be announced. Continue reading CES: Samsung Reveals Its Latest Smart TVs and M8 Monitor

The Federal Trade Commission is suing to block Nvidia’s $40 billion acquisition of UK-based semiconductor IP firm Arm, claiming it would stifle competition and hurt consumers. In October, the European Commission cited like reasoning when it launched an investigation into the purchase. Arm licenses its chip and software technology to a about 500 companies, including Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, TSMC and Nvidia. The major concern is whether the purchase would provide Nvidia an unfair competitive advantage. The global chip shortage and opposition on both sides of the pond dim the deal’s prospects. Continue reading FTC Files Lawsuit to Block $40 Billion Nvidia Purchase of Arm

The 10th Amazon Web Services re:Invent cloud computing conference showcased faster chips, better developer tools, smarter AI and two new automotive initiatives. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s keynote led with the company’s next-generation processor, the Arm-based Graviton3, and culminated with a peek under the hood at AWS Automotive and AWS IoT FleetWise. Collecting data and spotting trends are enterprise priorities, and AWS is doing its part to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning across that matrix in the cloud. “We know your data is on a journey — and all the stops on this journey matter,” Selipsky said. Continue reading AWS re:Invent Showcases Sizzling Chips, New Tools for Cars

Nvidia is fast-tracking its cybersecurity efforts, emphasizing zero trust through new product integrations designed to protect enterprise customers from attack while supporting artificial intelligence, machine learning and server workloads that scale. Earlier this month Nvidia promoted its full-stack data center security solution: DOCA 1.2 accelerated software, running on BlueField-3 DPUs using the Morpheus AI framework — a configuration that can “secure a data center at every touchpoint,” including users, devices and the data itself, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang explained at Nvidia’s GTC 2021 event earlier this month. Continue reading Nvidia Introduces a Full-Stack Solution for Zero Trust Security

Supply chain woes have underscored a global shortage in high-end computer chips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s claim of 53 percent of the world market is practically a political crisis, as China eyes Taiwan. Now, California-based Intel plans to reclaim its once preeminent title in chip manufacturing and design. Under new CEO Pat Gelsinger, the company has doubled its number of chips in development, abandoning the “fabless” future some envisioned for it, selling off factories and joining the likes of Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm, which build on wafers supplied by foundries. Continue reading Intel Ramps Up Efforts to Reclaim Top Position in Chip Market

U.S. automakers are aiming to combat the global chip shortage by pursuing more decisive roles in their semiconductor supply chains. Ford CEO Jim Farley announced a relationship with GlobalFoundries that heralds Ford’s entre to chipmaking, describing the deal as “just the beginning, and a key part of our plan to vertically integrate key technologies and capabilities that will differentiate Ford far into the future.” GM president Mark Reuss emphasized North American manufacturing in unveiling seven companies with which his company will be working on the design and delivery of new processors. Continue reading Ford, GM Seek Greater Supply Chain Control with Chip Deals

Apple is accelerating its plans to enter the self-driving car market, with 2025 the new target date to launch a fully automated electric vehicle that the company is hoping to produce without steering wheel or pedals, although an emergency takeover mode is under discussion. Interior designs under consideration are said to look radically different than today’s cars, with u-shaped or side-facing seating configurations. Apple’s secretive car venture, known as Project Titan, is being led by technology vice president Kevin Lynch, who was instrumental in the success of the Apple Watch. Continue reading Apple Eyes an Earlier Launch Date for Its Self-Driving Vehicles

GeForce NOW’s six-month $100 tier that let’s players game using the equivalent of an RTX 3080 rig has officially been proclaimed “a big deal” by tech media, due to the fact that the top-rated $700 graphics card is virtually unavailable for legions of would-be purchasers (described as camping out at stores and resorting to truck heists to obtain them). After Google’s Stadia service was shuttered in February, some questioned whether cloud gaming had a viable future. First movers in the game space seem to feel GeForce NOW has provided a quality option. Continue reading Nvidia Brings Power Gaming to the Cloud with GeForce NOW

Nvidia is mapping out a customer service future populated with real-time avatars who use natural-language AI with real-world customers. The company, which has seemingly transformed from graphics powerhouse to AI authority (in just under 28 years since being founded by Jensen Huang, company CEO) used this week’s GTC conference to emphasize full-stack computing. The speed and flexibility of the company’s three GPU chips offer general purpose enterprise potential, thanks to Nvidia’s parallel-processing platform, CUDA. Huang backed this assertion with a slide indicating Nvidia has deployed more than 150 SDKs to industries generating $1 trillion. Continue reading Nvidia Goes Full-Stack, Touts Artificial Intelligence and Cloud

Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook in 2004 and is now its CEO and controlling shareholder, announced that the company has changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc. (doing business as Meta), reflecting its pursuit of growth opportunities in the VR and AR realms known as the metaverse. As of December 1, the company will trade as MVRS on the Nasdaq exchange, retiring the FB ticker symbol that took a long ride from a first-day close of $38.23 per share on May 18, 2012, to close at $316 on October 28, the day Zuckerberg announced the new name at the Facebook Connect developer’s conference. Continue reading Meta: Facebook Blasts Off for the Metaverse with New Name

Nvidia is introducing its next-generation cloud gaming platform, GeForce NOW, which offers GeForce RTX 3080-class gaming online. GeForce NOW RTX 3080 will make available to users what Nvidia describes as “the most powerful gaming supercomputer ever built,” ready to take on Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming’s xCloud. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the company has spent the past decade improving GeForce NOW cloud gaming “to bring the best gaming platform to anyone with a computer,” thanks to second-generation GeForce NOW SuperPOD servers. Continue reading Cloud Gaming: Nvidia Rolls Out Its GeForce NOW RTX 3080

On the heels of several successful tests that included Tokyo 2020 Olympics telecasts in Brazil and Japan, Intel is moving full steam ahead to bring live, end-to-end 8K HDR streaming to audiences across the globe. The company sees the future of 8K HDR as revolutionizing the worlds of sports, entertainment and gaming by delivering spectacular, immersive events at stadium scale, augmented by 3D, VR, AR and UHD audio. The key to this brave new broadcast world is Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors for local encoding and delivery over-the-top. And of course, the slickest compression algorithms. Continue reading Intel’s 8K HDR Live Streams ‘Way Beyond Proof of Concept’

Microsoft and Nvidia have trained what they describe as the most powerful AI-driven language model to date, the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG), which has “set the new standard for large-scale language models in both model scale and quality,” the firms say. As the successor to the companies’ Turing NLG 17B and Megatron-LM, the new MT-NLG has 530 billion parameters, or “3x the number of parameters compared to the existing largest model of this type” and demonstrates unmatched accuracy in a broad set of natural language tasks. Continue reading Microsoft and Nvidia Debut World’s Largest Language Model

The chip shortage has highlighted the role of substrates that connect chips to circuit boards and the companies that make them. Substrate manufacturing offers low profit margins, so investment in this sector has also been low. Now, the lack of substrates has added to the problems of churning out enough chips to serve the global market. Substrates — panels of resin embedded with wiring onto which chips are affixed — connects the die at the heart of a chip to the motherboard, delivering power and data. Continue reading Substrate Shortage Is Adding to Problem of Producing Chips