At the GTC Conference this week, Nvidia unveiled the Hyperion 9 AV architecture, its next-generation autonomous vehicle platform. In a bid to build momentum for its growing ecosystem, Nvidia claimed Hyperion 9 will elevate its automotive pipeline to more than $11 billion over the next six years.
Read More »Nvidia’s Automotive Playbook: Hyperion 9, Drive Map, Omniverse
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories examining AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx and what it means for the evolving FPGA market.
What’s at stake?
AMD is looking to cement its future in automotive, one of the hottest markets for semiconductor companies armed with high-performance computing platforms today. Xilinx’s extensive contacts with Tier Ones and OEMs can help, but AMD needs a lot more – including a long-term commitment and a product road map that melds its embedded experience with Xilinx’s FPGAs.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories examining AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx and what it means for the evolving FPGA market.
By Ron Wilson
What’s at stake?
Both Intel and AMD have invested heavily to own a leading FPGA company. Setting aside relatively small embedded-computing and communications/networking markets, these are essentially bets on the future of the FPGA as a key partner for the CPU chip in data center servers. But unless major challenges in accessibility to software programmers and in device management are overcome, the partnership may not happen.
To appreciate why AMD would be so interested in FPGA vendor Xilinx — or for that matter, what Intel saw years ago in Altera — it helps to have some idea of just what an FPGA is, and what role the devices play in today’s semiconductor industry. The answer rests in one simple idea, unfortunately obscured by a poor choice of acronym and a lot of technical complexity. Perhaps we can untangle things a bit.
Read More »Just What is an FPGA, Anyway?
What’s at stake?
Convinced that Western democracies are in decline, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seek to reshape the geopolitical map. With Russia bogged down in Ukraine, Beijing must weigh support for an international pariah against continued access to Western markets. Stiff Ukrainian resistance may also delay any Chinese moves on Taiwan.
China continues to walk a fine line of seeming neutrality in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as the U.S. ratchets up pressure on Beijing to comply with Western financial sanctions and technology controls.
Read More »Wary China Clings to Neutrality Over Ukraine Invasion
By Robert Hollingsworth
The Covid-19 pandemic engendered numerous unanticipated challenges for many companies. This is a story of the steps taken by one tech company to avoid closing its doors, and actually succeeding, while dealing with supply chain disruptions and other market forces largely out of its control.
Read More »Surviving the Semiconductor Supply Chain Crisis
It often takes a tragedy for people to see the flip side of a promising and lucrative new technology. This applies to the pioneer who operates a highly autonomous vehicle as test driver or to an average Joe or Jane who rides as a passenger in a robotaxi.
Read More »Who’s Driving — and Crashing — My Robocar?
By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake?
Semiconductor inventories have ballooned among chipmakers, foundries, and component distributors despite complaints of severe shortages. Most available parts have been prepaid and accounted for, however, and therefore cannot be released to just any prospective buyers, putting a further squeeze on supply chains. If the situation persists, the ongoing shortages will be indefinitely prolonged.
With the current supply shortages serving as cover and justification for their actions, chipmakers have been asking for and receiving billions of dollars as prepayment for components, splitting purchasers into two camps: the deep-pocketed enterprises that can afford to pay a premium for products and services, and the hardscrabble OEMs and fabless chip vendors that must scramble for leftover supplies and foundry manufacturing space, which they may only be able to secure by paying much higher prices.
Read More »Semiconductor Inventories Surge Despite Shortages
By David Benjamin
Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.
— Alan Turing in The Imitation Game
In the film The Imitation Game, Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is being interviewed by a police detective who’s curious about Turing’s work in what has come to be known, decades since, as artificial intelligence. His explanation is both visionary and tempered.
Read More »The Turing Dilemma in Machine Learning
What’s at Stake?
As a Russian military convoy inches toward the Ukrainian capital, Western export controls on access to semiconductor and other technologies are beginning to bite—and China’s chipmakers can’t provide the salve Moscow needs.
What’s at stake?
The AI chip market is notoriously crowded, with many startups gunning for a share of the potentially large but highly fragmented edge AI segment. As the competitors court investors and some look down the road to an M&A exit, gaining market traction for an AI chip design will require more than a specsmanship game of “my TOPS are better than your TOPS.”
AlphaICs, an AI fabless chip startup based in Milpitas, California, is sampling an 8-TOPS edge AI inference co-processor that it says provides “the best frames-per-second (fps)/watt performance in the market for classification and detection neural networks.” The company will offer both the chip, called Gluon, and the software stack.
Read More »AlphaICs: How to Stand Out in the AI Startup Crowd
