NVIDIA today announced a new wave of networking switches, the X800 series, designed for massive-scale AI. The world's first networking platforms capable of end-to-end 800 Gb/s throughput, NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and NVIDIA Spectrum -X800 Ethernet push the boundaries of networking performance for computing and AI workloads. They feature software that further accelerates AI, cloud, data processing and HPC applications in every type of data center, including those that incorporate the newly released NVIDIA Blackwell architecture-based product lineup.

"NVIDIA Networking is central to the scalability of our AI supercomputing infrastructure," said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA X800 switches are end-to-end networking platforms that enable us to achieve trillion-parameter-scale generative AI essential for new AI infrastructures."

Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating generative AI, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based leading technology holding group, today announced the build of Condor Galaxy 3 (CG-3), the third cluster of their constellation of AI supercomputers, the Condor Galaxy. Featuring 64 of Cerebras' newly announced CS-3 systems - all powered by the industry's fastest AI chip, the Wafer-Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) - Condor Galaxy 3 will deliver 8 exaFLOPs of AI with 58 million AI-optimized cores. The Cerebras and G42 strategic partnership already delivered 8 exaFLOPs of AI supercomputing performance via Condor Galaxy 1 and Condor Galaxy 2, each amongst the largest AI supercomputers in the world. Located in Dallas, Texas, Condor Galaxy 3 brings the current total of the Condor Galaxy network to 16 exaFLOPs.

"With Condor Galaxy 3, we continue to achieve our joint vision of transforming the worldwide inventory of AI compute through the development of the world's largest and fastest AI supercomputers," said Kiril Evtimov, Group CTO of G42. "The existing Condor Galaxy network has trained some of the leading open-source models in the industry, with tens of thousands of downloads. By doubling the capacity to 16exaFLOPs, we look forward to seeing the next wave of innovation Condor Galaxy supercomputers can enable." At the heart of Condor Galaxy 3 are 64 Cerebras CS-3 Systems. Each CS-3 is powered by the new 4 trillion transistor, 900,000 AI core WSE-3. Manufactured at TSMC at the 5-nanometer node, the WSE-3 delivers twice the performance at the same power and for the same price as the previous generation part. Purpose built for training the industry's largest AI models, WSE-3 delivers an astounding 125 petaflops of peak AI performance per chip.

As GDC, the world's largest game developer conference, returns to San Francisco, Microsoft and Xbox will be there to engage and empower developers, publishers, and technology partners across the industry. We are committed to supporting game developers on any platform, anywhere in the world, at every stage of development. Our message is simple: Microsoft and Xbox are here to help power your games and empower your teams. From March 18 - 22, the Xbox Lobby Lounge in the Moscone Center South can't be missed—an easy meeting point, and a first step toward learning more about the ID@Xbox publishing program, the Developer Acceleration Program (DAP) for underrepresented creators, Azure cloud gaming services, and anything else developers might need.

GDC features dozens of speakers from across Xbox, Activision, Blizzard, King and ZeniMax who will demonstrate groundbreaking in-game innovations and share community-building strategies. Microsoft technology teams, with support from partners, will also host talks that spotlight new tools, software and services that help increase developer velocity, grow player engagement and help creators grow. See below for the Conference programming details.

Tech giant Microsoft and Paris-based startup Mistral AI, an innovator in open-source AI model development, have announced a new multi-year partnership to accelerate AI innovation and expand access to Mistral's state-of-the-art models. The collaboration will leverage Azure's cutting-edge AI infrastructure to propel Mistral's research and bring its innovations to more customers globally. The partnership focuses on three core areas. First, Microsoft will provide Mistral with Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure to power advanced AI training and inference for Mistral's flagship models like Mistral-Large. Second, the companies will collaborate on AI research and development to push AI model's boundaries. And third, Azure's enterprise capabilities will give Mistral additional opportunities to promote, sell, and distribute their models to Microsoft customers worldwide.

However, an investment in a European startup can not go smoothly without the constant eyesight of the European Union authorities and regulators to oversee the deal. According to Bloomberg, an EU spokesperson on Tuesday claimed that the EU regulators will perform an analysis of Microsoft's investment into Mistral after receiving a copy of the agreement between the two parties. While there is no formal investigation yet, if EU regulators continue to probe Microsoft's deal and intentions, they could launch a complete formal investigation that could lead to the termination of Microsoft's plans. Of course, the formal investigation is still on hold, but investing in EU startups might become unfeasible for American tech giants if the EU regulators continue to push the scrutiny of every investment made in companies based on EU soil.

We are delighted to announce our support for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot, a vital initiative highlighted in the President's Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. This initiative aligns with our commitment to broaden AI research and spur innovation by providing greater computing resources to AI researchers and engineers in academia and non-profit sectors. We look forward to contributing to the pilot and sharing insights that can help inform the envisioned full-scale NAIRR.

The NAIRR's objective is to democratize access to the computational tools essential for advancing AI in critical areas such as safety, reliability, security, privacy, environmental challenges, infrastructure, health care, and education. Advocating for such a resource has been a longstanding goal of ours, one that promises to equalize the field of AI research and stimulate innovation across diverse sectors. As a commissioner on the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), I worked with colleagues on the committee to propose an early conception of the NAIRR, underlining our nation's need for this resource as detailed in the NSCAI Final Report. Concurrently, we enthusiastically supported a university-led initiative pursuing a national computing resource. It's rewarding to see these early ideas and endeavors now materialize into a tangible entity.

Today at the "Advancing AI" event, AMD was joined by industry leaders including Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, Arista, Broadcom and Cisco to showcase how these companies are working with AMD to deliver advanced AI solutions spanning from cloud to enterprise and PCs. AMD launched multiple new products at the event, including the AMD Instinct MI300 Series data center AI accelerators, ROCm 6 open software stack with significant optimizations and new features supporting Large Language Models (LLMs) and Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI.

"AI is the future of computing and AMD is uniquely positioned to power the end-to-end infrastructure that will define this AI era, from massive cloud installations to enterprise clusters and AI-enabled intelligent embedded devices and PCs," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We are seeing very strong demand for our new Instinct MI300 GPUs, which are the highest-performance accelerators in the world for generative AI. We are also building significant momentum for our data center AI solutions with the largest cloud companies, the industry's top server providers, and the most innovative AI startups ꟷ who we are working closely with to rapidly bring Instinct MI300 solutions to market that will dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire AI ecosystem."

Dell Technologies announces financial results for its fiscal 2024 third quarter. Revenue was $22.3 billion, down 10% year-over-year. The company generated operating income of $1.5 billion and non-GAAP operating income of $2 billion, down 16% and 17% year-over-year, respectively. Diluted earnings per share was $1.36, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.88. Cash flow from operations for the third quarter was $2.2 billion, driven by profitability and strong working capital performance. The company has generated $9.9 billion of cash flow from operations throughout the last 12 months.

Dell ended the quarter with remaining performance obligations of $39 billion, recurring revenue of $5.6 billion, up 4% year-over-year, and deferred revenue of $29.1 billion, up 7% year-over-year, primarily due to increases in software and hardware maintenance agreements. The company's cash and investment balance was $9.9 billion.

Ansys has collaborated with TSMC and Microsoft to validate a joint solution for analyzing mechanical stresses in multi-die 3D-IC systems manufactured with TSMC's 3DFabric advanced packaging technologies. This collaborative solution gives customers added confidence to address novel multiphysics requirements that improve the functional reliability of advanced designs using TSMC's 3DFabric, a comprehensive family of 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technologies.

Ansys Mechanical is the industry-leading finite element analysis software used to simulate mechanical stresses caused by thermal gradients in 3D-ICs. The solution flow has been proven to run efficiently on Microsoft Azure, helping to ensure fast turn-around times with today's very large and complex 2.5D/3D-IC systems.

During its Ignite conference, Microsoft introduced a duo of custom-designed silicon made to accelerate AI and excel in cloud workloads. First of the two is Microsoft's Azure Cobalt 100 CPU, a 128-core design that features a 64-bit Armv9 instruction set, implemented in a cloud-native design that is set to become a part of Microsoft's offerings. While there aren't many details regarding the configuration, the company claims that the performance target is up to 40% when compared to the current generation of Arm servers running on Azure cloud. The SoC has used Arm's Neoverse CSS platform customized for Microsoft, with presumably Arm Neoverse N2 cores.

The next and hottest topic in the server space is AI acceleration, which is needed for running today's large language models. Microsoft hosts OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and many other AI services. To help make them run as fast as possible, Microsoft's project Athena now has the name of Maia 100 AI accelerator, which is manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm process. It features 105 billion transistors and supports various MX data formats, even those smaller than 8-bit bit, for maximum performance. Currently tested on GPT 3.5 Turbo, we have yet to see performance figures and comparisons with competing hardware from NVIDIA, like H100/H200 and AMD, with MI300X. The Maia 100 has an aggregate bandwidth of 4.8 Terabits per accelerator, which uses a custom Ethernet-based networking protocol for scaling. These chips are expected to appear in Microsoft data centers early next year, and we hope to get some performance numbers soon.

NVIDIA today introduced an AI foundry service to supercharge the development and tuning of custom generative AI applications for enterprises and startups deploying on Microsoft Azure.

The NVIDIA AI foundry service pulls together three elements—a collection of NVIDIA AI Foundation Models, NVIDIA NeMo framework and tools, and NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing services—that give enterprises an end-to-end solution for creating custom generative AI models. Businesses can then deploy their customized models with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to power generative AI applications, including intelligent search, summarization and content generation.

The recent development of AI models that are more capable than ever has led to a massive demand for hardware infrastructure that powers them. As the dominant player in the industry with its GPU and CPU-GPU solutions, NVIDIA has reportedly discussed leasing data center space to power its own cloud service for these AI applications. Called NVIDIA Cloud DGX, it will reportedly put the company right up against its clients, which are cloud service providers (CSPs) as well. Companies like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle actively acquire NVIDIA GPUs to power their GPU-accelerated cloud instances. According to the report, this has been developing for a few years.

Additionally, it is worth noting that NVIDIA already owns parts for its potential data center infrastructure. This includes NVIDIA DGX and HGX units, which can just be interconnected in a data center, with cloud provisioning so developers can access NVIDIA's instances. A great benefit that would attract the end-user is that NVIDIA could potentially lower the price point of its offerings, as they are acquiring GPUs for much less compared to the CSPs that receive them with a profit margin that NVIDIA imposes. This can attract potential customers, leaving hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google without a moat in the cloud game. Of course, until this project is official, we should take this information with a grain of salt.

Microsoft Azure users can now turn to the latest NVIDIA accelerated computing technology to train and deploy their generative AI applications. Available today, the Microsoft Azure ND H100 v5 VMs using NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking—enables scaling generative AI, high performance computing (HPC) and other applications with a click from a browser. Available to customers across the U.S., the new instance arrives as developers and researchers are using large language models (LLMs) and accelerated computing to uncover new consumer and business use cases.

The NVIDIA H100 GPU delivers supercomputing-class performance through architectural innovations, including fourth-generation Tensor Cores, a new Transformer Engine for accelerating LLMs and the latest NVLink technology that lets GPUs talk to each other at 900 GB/s. The inclusion of NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand with 3,200 Gbps cross-node bandwidth ensures seamless performance across the GPUs at massive scale, matching the capabilities of top-performing supercomputers globally.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $56.2 billion and increased 8% (up 10% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $24.3 billion and increased 18% (up 21% in constant currency)
• Net income was $20.1 billion and increased 20% (up 23% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.69 and increased 21% (up 23% in constant currency)

"Organizations are asking not only how - but how fast - they can apply this next generation of AI to address the biggest opportunities and challenges they face - safely and responsibly," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "We remain focused on leading the new AI platform shift, helping customers use the Microsoft Cloud to get the most value out of their digital spend, and driving operating leverage."

Today, at the "Data Center and AI Technology Premiere," AMD announced the products, strategy and ecosystem partners that will shape the future of computing, highlighting the next phase of data center innovation. AMD was joined on stage with executives from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Citadel, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft Azure and PyTorch to showcase the technological partnerships with industry leaders to bring the next generation of high performance CPU and AI accelerator solutions to market.

"Today, we took another significant step forward in our data center strategy as we expanded our 4th Gen EPYC processor family with new leadership solutions for cloud and technical computing workloads and announced new public instances and internal deployments with the largest cloud providers," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "AI is the defining technology shaping the next generation of computing and the largest strategic growth opportunity for AMD. We are laser focused on accelerating the deployment of AMD AI platforms at scale in the data center, led by the launch of our Instinct MI300 accelerators planned for later this year and the growing ecosystem of enterprise-ready AI software optimized for our hardware."

Today, at the "Data Center and AI Technology Premiere," AMD announced the addition of two new, workload optimized processors to the 4th Gen EPYC CPU portfolio. By leveraging the new "Zen 4c" core architecture, the AMD EPYC 97X4 cloud native-optimized data center CPUs further extend the EPYC 9004 Series of processors to deliver the thread density and scale needed for leadership cloud native computing. Additionally, AMD announced the 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache technology, ideally suited for the most demanding technical computing workloads.

"In an era of workload optimized compute, our new CPUs is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the data center, delivering new levels of performance, efficiency, and scalability," said Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Business Group, AMD. "We closely align our product roadmap to our customers' unique environments and each offering in the 4th Gen AMD EPYC family of processors is tailored to deliver compelling and leadership performance in general purpose, cloud native or technical computing workloads."

Inference software enables shift to NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, delivering 7x throughput for the search giant. Jiusheng Chen's team just got accelerated. They're delivering personalized ads to users of Microsoft Bing with 7x throughput at reduced cost, thanks to NVIDIA Triton Inference Server running on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It's an amazing achievement for the principal software engineering manager and his crew.

Tuning a Complex System
Bing's ad service uses hundreds of models that are constantly evolving. Each must respond to a request within as little as 10 milliseconds, about 10x faster than the blink of an eye. The latest speedup got its start with two innovations the team delivered to make AI models run faster: Bang and EL-Attention. Together, they apply sophisticated techniques to do more work in less time with less computer memory. Model training was based on Azure Machine Learning for efficiency.

Technology is creating amazing opportunities for our industry and the world, and Windows 11 is at the center of innovation with new experiences that transform how we interact with the Windows PC and each other. With Windows 11, we're seeing record engagement, our highest customer satisfaction over any previous version of Windows in the U.S., and accelerated growth in commercial deployments. In fact, we recently shared as part of our latest earnings report that over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are currently trialing or have already deployed Windows 11.

In February, we brought the new AI-powered Bing to the taskbar and other features to improve the way people get things done on their PCs. Today, we are providing a look at new features and enhancements for Windows 11 that will start to become available tomorrow, May 24, that focus on business needs, such as security and IT management, and new benefits that enhance professional and personal usability. For developers building on Windows, this week we are announcing new innovation at Microsoft Build.

NVIDIA today announced that it is integrating its NVIDIA AI Enterprise software into Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning to help enterprises accelerate their AI initiatives. The integration will create a secure, enterprise-ready platform that enables Azure customers worldwide to quickly build, deploy and manage customized applications using the more than 100 NVIDIA AI frameworks and tools that come fully supported in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of NVIDIA's AI platform.

"With the coming wave of generative AI applications, enterprises are seeking secure accelerated tools and services that drive innovation," said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. "The combination of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and Azure Machine Learning will help enterprises speed up their AI initiatives with a straight, efficient path from development to production."

Ampere Computing today announced a new AmpereOne Family of processors with up to 192 single threaded Ampere cores - the highest core count in the industry. This is the first product from Ampere based on the company's new custom core, built from the ground up and leveraging the company's internal IP. CEO Renée James, who founded Ampere Computing to offer a modern alternative to the industry with processors designed specifically for both efficiency and performance in the Cloud, said there was a fundamental shift happening that required a new approach.

"Every few decades of compute there has emerged a driving application or use of performance that sets a new bar of what is required of performance," James said. "The current driving uses are AI and connected everything combined with our continued use and desire for streaming media. We cannot continue to use power as a proxy for performance in the data center. At Ampere, we design our products to maximize performance at a sustainable power, so we can continue to drive the future of the industry."

Intel and SAP SE today announced a strategic collaboration to deliver more powerful and sustainable SAP software landscapes in the cloud. Designed to help customers derive greater scalability, agility and consolidation of existing SAP software landscapes, the collaboration deepens Intel's focus on delivering extremely powerful and secure instances for SAP, powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Using SAP Application Performance Standard benchmarks, Intel's 4th Gen Xeon processors enable significantly higher performance numbers when compared to previous generations of Xeon processors, and these impressive results will be passed along to SAP customers around the globe. Additionally, Intel enables current virtual machine (VM) sizes up to 24 TB with a goal to ramp up to VM sizes of 32 TB with the RISE with SAP solution.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended March 31, 2023, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $52.9 billion and increased 7% (up 10% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $22.4 billion and increased 10% (up 15% in constant currency)
• Net income was $18.3 billion and increased 9% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.45 and increased 10% (up 14% in constant currency)

"The world's most advanced AI models are coming together with the world's most universal user interface - natural language - to create a new era of computing," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "Across the Microsoft Cloud, we are the platform of choice to help customers get the most value out of their digital spend and innovate for this next generation of AI."

According to The Information, Microsoft has been working on creating custom processors for processing AI with a project codenamed Athena. Based on TSMC's 5 nm process, these chips are designed to accelerate AI workloads and scale to hundreds or even thousands of chips. With the boom of Large Language Models (LLMs) that require billions of parameters, training them requires a rapid increase of computational power to a point where companies purchase hundreds of thousands of GPUs from the likes of NVIDIA. However, creating custom processors is a familiar feat for a company like Microsoft. Hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Meta are already invested in the creation of processors for AI training, and Microsoft is just joining as well.

While we don't have much information about these processors, we know that Microsoft started the project in 2019, and today these processors are in the hands of select employees of Microsoft and OpenAI that work with AI projects and need computational horsepower. Interestingly, some projections assume that if Microsoft could match NVIDIA's GPU performance, the cost would only be a third of NVIDIA's offerings. However, it is challenging to predict that until more information is provided. Microsoft plans to make these chips more widely available as early as next year; however, there is no specific information on when and how, but Azure cloud customers would be the most logical place to start.

Western Digital has declared that its My Cloud online service has been compromised by a group of hackers late last month: "On March 26, 2023, Western Digital identified a network security incident involving Western Digital's systems. In connection with the ongoing incident, an unauthorized third party gained access to a number of the Company's systems. Upon discovery of the incident, the Company implemented incident response efforts and initiated an investigation with the assistance of leading outside security and forensic experts. This investigation is in its early stages and Western Digital is coordinating with law enforcement authorities."

The statement, issued on April 4, continues: "The Company is implementing proactive measures to secure its business operations including taking systems and services offline and will continue taking additional steps as appropriate. As part of its remediation efforts, Western Digital is actively working to restore impacted infrastructure and services. Based on the investigation to date, the Company believes the unauthorized party obtained certain data from its systems and is working to understand the nature and scope of that data. While Western Digital is focused on remediating this security incident, it has caused and may continue to cause disruption to parts of the Company's business operations."

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. today announced the world's first integrated 5G IoT processors that are designed to support four major operating systems, in addition to two new robotics platforms, and an accelerator program for IoT ecosystem partners. These new innovations will empower manufacturers participating in the rapidly expanding world of devices at the connected intelligent edge.

The need for connected, intelligent, and autonomous devices is growing rapidly, and it is expected to hit $116 billion by 2030 according to Precedence Research. Businesses attempting to compete in this fast-moving economy need a reliable source of control and connectivity technology for their IoT and robotic devices. Qualcomm Technologies, which has shipped over 350 million dedicated IoT chipsets, is uniquely capable of providing manufacturers with the platforms needed to address this expanding segment.

Microsoft Azure announced their new ND H100 v5 virtual machine which packs Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processors with NVIDIA's Hopper H100 GPUs, as well as NVIDIA's Quantum-2 CX7 interconnect. Inside each physical machine sits eight H100s—presumably the SXM5 variant packing a whopping 132 SMs and 528 4th generation tensor cores—interconnected by NVLink 4.0 which ties them all together with 3.6 TB/s bisectional bandwidth. Outside each local machine is a network of thousands more H100s connected together with 400 GB/s Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand, which Microsoft says allows 3.2 Tb/s per VM for on-demand scaling to accelerate the largest AI training workloads.

Generative AI solutions like ChatGPT have accelerated demand for multi-ExaOP cloud services that can handle the large training sets and utilize the latest development tools. Azure's new ND H100 v5 VMs offer that capability to organizations of any size, whether you're a smaller startup or a larger company looking to implement large-scale AI training deployments. While Microsoft is not making any direct claims for performance, NVIDIA has advertised H100 as running up to 30x faster than the preceding Ampere architecture that is currently offered with the ND A100 v4 VMs.