Despite global uncertainty, $500m hit doesn't rattle Nvidia execs

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AMD’s AI strategy comes into view with Xilinx, GPU, software plans

Chip designer hopes to have broad inference and training coverage from the edge to the cloud

Dylan Martin Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 19:30 UTC

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.
It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.
But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

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AMD touts big datacenter, AI ambitions in CPU-GPU roadmap

Epyc future ahead, along with Instinct, Ryzen, Radeon and custom chip push

Dylan Martin Fri 10 Jun 2022 // 01:58 UTC

After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.
These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.
"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."

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Nvidia wants to lure you to the Arm side with fresh server bait

GPU giant promises big advancements with Arm-based Grace CPU, says the software is ready

Dylan Martin Fri 17 Jun 2022 // 19:17 UTC

Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.
Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.
The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.

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Samsung invests in ML chip startup NeuReality

Coining the term hardware-based 'AI hypervisor' has to be worth several million, dontcha think?

Dylan Martin Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 23:28 UTC

The venture capital arm of Samsung has cut a check to help Israeli inference chip designer NeuReality bring its silicon dreams a step closer to reality.
NeuReality announced Monday it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Samsung Ventures, adding to the $8 million in seed funding it secured last year to help it get started.
As The Next Platform wrote in 2021, NeuReality is hoping to stand out with an ambitious system-on-chip design that uses what the upstart refers to as a hardware-based "AI hypervisor."

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Lenovo reveals small but mighty desktop workstation

ThinkStation P360 Ultra packs latest Intel Core processor, Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU, support for eight monitors

Dan Robinson Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 17:14 UTC

Lenovo has unveiled a small desktop workstation in a new physical format that's smaller than previous compact designs, but which it claims still has the type of performance professional users require.
Available from the end of this month, the ThinkStation P360 Ultra comes in a chassis that is less than 4 liters in total volume, but packs in 12th Gen Intel Core processors – that's the latest Alder Lake generation with up to 16 cores, but not the Xeon chips that we would expect to see in a workstation – and an Nvidia RTX A5000 GPU.
Other specifications include up to 128GB of DDR5 memory, two PCIe 4.0 slots, up to 8TB of storage using plug-in M.2 cards, plus dual Ethernet and Thunderbolt 4 ports, and support for up to eight displays, the latter of which will please many professional users. Pricing is expected to start at $1,299 in the US.

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GPUs aren’t always your best bet, Twitter ML tests suggest

Graphcore processor outperforms Nvidia rival in team's experiments

Tobias Mann Thu 16 Jun 2022 // 00:25 UTC

GPUs are a powerful tool for machine-learning workloads, though they’re not necessarily the right tool for every AI job, according to Michael Bronstein, Twitter’s head of graph learning research.
His team recently showed Graphcore’s AI hardware offered an “order of magnitude speedup when comparing a single IPU processor to an Nvidia A100 GPU,” in temporal graph network (TGN) models.
“The choice of hardware for implementing Graph ML models is a crucial, yet often overlooked problem,” reads a joint article penned by Bronstein with Emanuele Rossi, an ML researcher at Twitter, and Daniel Justus, a researcher at Graphcore.

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PCIe 7.0 pegged to arrive in 2025 with speeds of 512 GBps

Although PCIe 5.0 is just coming to market, here's what we can expect in the years ahead

Dan Robinson Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 15:30 UTC

Early details of the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are out, and it's expected to deliver data rates of up to 512 GBps bi-directionally for data-intensive applications such as 800G Ethernet.
The announcement from the The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI SIG) was made to coincide with its Developers Conference 2022, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California this week. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the PCI-SIG itself.
While the completed specifications for PCIe 6.0 were only released this January, PCIe 7.0 looks to double the bandwidth of the high-speed interconnect yet again from a raw bit rate of 64 GTps to 128 GTps, and bi-directional speeds of up to 512 GBps in a x16 configuration.

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Train once, run anywhere, almost: Qualcomm's drive to bring AI to its phone, PC chips

Software toolkit offered to save developers time, effort, battery power

Dylan Martin Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 18:51 UTC

Qualcomm knows that if it wants developers to build and optimize AI applications across its portfolio of silicon, the Snapdragon giant needs to make the experience simpler and, ideally, better than what its rivals have been cooking up in the software stack department.
That's why on Wednesday the fabless chip designer introduced what it's calling the Qualcomm AI Stack, which aims to, among other things, let developers take AI models they've developed for one device type, let's say smartphones, and easily adapt them for another, like PCs. This stack is only for devices powered by Qualcomm's system-on-chips, be they in laptops, cellphones, car entertainment, or something else.
While Qualcomm is best known for its mobile Arm-based Snapdragon chips that power many Android phones, the chip house is hoping to grow into other markets, such as personal computers, the Internet of Things, and automotive. This expansion means Qualcomm is competing with the likes of Apple, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and others, on a much larger battlefield.

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Microsoft promises to tighten access to AI it now deems too risky for some devs

Deep-fake voices, face recognition, emotion, age and gender prediction ... A toolbox of theoretical tech tyranny

Katyanna Quach Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 22:54 UTC

Microsoft has pledged to clamp down on access to AI tools designed to predict emotions, gender, and age from images, and will restrict the usage of its facial recognition and generative audio models in Azure.
The Windows giant made the promise on Tuesday while also sharing its so-called Responsible AI Standard, a document [PDF] in which the US corporation vowed to minimize any harm inflicted by its machine-learning software. This pledge included assurances that the biz will assess the impact of its technologies, document models' data and capabilities, and enforce stricter use guidelines.
This is needed because – and let's just check the notes here – there are apparently not enough laws yet regulating machine-learning technology use. Thus, in the absence of this legislation, Microsoft will just have to force itself to do the right thing.

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Arm jumps on ray tracing bandwagon with beefy GPU design

British chip designer’s reveal comes months after mobile RT moves by AMD, Imagination

Dylan Martin Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 15:00 UTC

Arm is beefing up its role in the rapidly-evolving (yet long-standing) hardware-based real-time ray tracing arena.
The company revealed on Tuesday that it will introduce the feature in its new flagship Immortalis-G715 GPU design for smartphones, promising to deliver graphics in mobile games that realistically recreate the way light interacts with objects.
Arm is promoting the Immortalis-G715 as its best mobile GPU design yet, claiming that it will provide 15 percent faster performance and 15 percent better energy efficiency compared to the currently available Mali-G710.

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