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Ex-Samsung Executive Arrested for Stealing Company Secrets to Build Fabs in China

According to the latest report from Reuters, a former Samsung executive was arrested by the South Korean authorities yesterday, being accused of stealing company secrets to build a similar chip production facility in China. The former executive had worked for SK Hynix before joining Samsung, where he was involved in the Samsung Electronics division responsible for semiconductor factories. According to the report, the person planned to build a competing factory 1.5 km from a Samsung chip manufacturing facility in Xian, China. The suspect, who was not identified publically, has a collective of 28 years of experience with the South Korean chip makers.

Interestingly, the suspect also caused financial harm to the company, which the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office estimates to be around 300 billion won ($233 million). Prosecutors have announced the indictment of six additional individuals suspected of involvement in the case, including an employee of an inspection company who is charged with allegedly disclosing the architectural blueprint of Samsung's semiconductor plant. A police official commented, "We will sternly deal with any leakage of our technology abroad and strongly respond to illegal leak of domestic companies' core technologies in semiconductor, automobile and shipbuilding sectors among other."

Zephyr GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Card Has a Pink PCB

Zephyr has produced an NVIDIA GeForce custom graphics card that sports a very unique pink printed circuit board—bright and pastel colors have featured on cooling solutions in the past, but this new-ish product presents the first example of a PCB with a tinge of blush. Renowned hardware tipster harukaze5719 broke from his normal delivery of very cold and macho tech on social media, and shared his discovery of Zephyr's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti compact ITX card.

International buyers will be disappointed to learn that the pink Ampere card is a China market exclusive, with the company only offering a limited number of products on JD.com. VideoCardz notes that the card's specifications are not at all special, despite its interesting compact form factor and brightly toned cooling solution design. It is a non-overclocked model based on the older RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6 GPU variant with a standard 1750 MHz boost clock, 8 GB VRAM configuration, and a single 8-pin power connector.

Chinese Games Market Hit $45.5 Billion in Revenue for 2022

A set of reports published by Niko Partners has calculated that the games market in China generated $45.5 billion in revenue last year. Native games companies (including Tencent and NetEase) accounted for 47% of worldwide mobile games revenue, along with a 39% revenue share of international PC games sales. Domestic figures show that 66% of China's gaming revenue comes from mobile, 31% from PC and 3% from console titles. The company's analysts posit that China persists as the largest global games market, with upward trends pushing growth to a predicted $57 billion of revenue by the year 2027. The gaming population is expected to expand to around 730 million participants by then.

Lisa Hanson, CEO and founder of Niko Partners included her own observations of the region's dominance: "Chinese game companies are growing internationally, and they are making bold investments at higher rates than ever. PC games revenue generated overseas by Chinese owned companies rose by 22% in 2022 and is expected to grow by a 13.8% CAGR through 2027 - which is higher than the domestic growth rate by a significant margin... China's market can be tough for domestic and foreign companies, but the country remains the number one market globally for games revenue and the number of gamers, and cannot be ignored.

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X & 7600 CPU Prices Drop Significantly

Newegg has been running various discount promotions on Ryzen 7000-series desktop processors over the past month, but their latest offer finally affects one of AMD's lower end models. The Ryzen 5 7600X CPU is on offer over at the American e-tailer - by using a time limited promo code (MDSCS2342) when checking out you can get the price down to $209 - resulting in a saving of about $31 (from the normal $240). The Ryzen 5 7600 (non-X) CPU is not part of this Memorial Weekend promotion - it is currently listed at $223, with no active Newegg promo code granting a generous saving.

Both of these Zen 4 (Raphael) Ryzen 5 processors were awarded TPU's Editor's Choice accolade - despite receiving criticism for "high platform costs," so it is nice to see that the 7600X is available for just north of $200 in the United States - this saving can offset the added premium of an AM5 motherboard, DDR5 RAM and necessary CPU cooling solution (no Wraith unit is included in the slimline box). Customers in China are fortunate to get an even better online deal - the Ryzen 5 7600X and 7600 are available for way below MSRP via JD.com, with both CPUs priced at an all-time low of $183 (1299 RMB) each.

Chinese Powerstar x86 CPUs are Rebadged Intel Comet Lake Chips

PowerLeader, a Chinese computer manufacturer, recently introduced its Powerstar lineup of processors, the first being the PSTAR P3-01105 CPU. Initially, the PSTAR SKU closely resembled the Intel Core i3-10105 10th Generation Comet Lake CPU from Intel. Using a "storm core" microarchitecture, this CPU claims to beat any domestic x86 CPU on performance. While the similarity with the Core i3-10105 CPU was close, the clock speed of 3.7 GHz, core configuration, and a slightly different name were significant indicators of similarity between the two. Thanks to the recent Geekbench 5 benchmark run submission, we now know that the Powerstar CPU is just a rebadged Intel Comet Lake processor. PowerLeader expects the Powerstar units to reach 1.5 million shipments this year, and presumably, more models will be rebadged for an announcement later.

Originally, PowerLeader wanted to ship these designs in pre-assembled systems, so the pricing and availability of standalone PowesStar chips are unknown.

Chinese Antitrust Regulators Approve Microsoft's Activision Blizzard Acquisition

There were rumblings late last week about China's competition regulatory bodies giving Microsoft the go ahead for its proposed takeover of the Activision, Blizzard & King games publishing group. The crowd-sourced content site Seeking Alpha was the first online outlet to break the news last Friday - the author had learned from capital market firm - Dealreporter - that China's State Administration for Market Regulation had granted unconditional approval for the $68.7 billion bid, following the conclusion of a "Phase 3" investigation. The latest judgement arrived only a few days after the EU Commission's approval of the deal.

Microsoft has chosen to make an official announcement about this verdict - and has today released statements to several gaming news outlets, including GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer: "China's unconditional clearance of our acquisition of Activision Blizzard follows clearance decisions from jurisdictions such as the European Union and Japan, bringing the total to 37 countries representing more than two billion people. The acquisition combined with our recent commitments to the European Commission will empower consumers worldwide to play more games on more devices." Microsoft's next challenge sits with the US government's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - a final deliberation is due this August.

Frontier Remains As Sole Exaflop Machine on TOP500 List

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

China Goes Ahead with Micron Technology Sales Ban

The Chinese Government over the weekend announced restrictions on sales of Micron Technology memory products to Chinese government agencies and infrastructure operators, including the country's telecommunications network infrastructure and data-center service providers. The country's cyberspace regulator conducted a cybersecurity review of Micron Technology products and found that they fail a "network security review."

"The review found that Micron's products have serious network security risks, which pose significant security risks to China's critical information infrastructure supply chain, affecting China's national security," the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement to Reuters. This move by China is seen as a geopolitical retaliation to the U.S. Government restricting the sales of memory products by YMTC to American PC and ICT companies, a decision that caused the Chinese memory maker to lose major customers such as Apple. This is, however, a partial ban on the Idaho-based memory maker, since China hasn't yet restricted Chinese PC and ICT companies from sourcing Micron Technology products the way Washington banned YMTC.

Enablement Continues for Chinese Loongson 3A6000 CPUs Poised to Compete with Intel Willow Cove and AMD Zen 3

Chinese company Loongson, specializing in creating processors for usage in mainland China, has been steadily working on enabling its next-generation Loongson 3A6000 CPUs. Aiming to provide the performance level of Intel Willow Cove and AMD Zen 3, these new CPUs will use Loongson's custom LoongArch Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) with a new set of 64-bit superscalar LA664 cores. Today, thanks to the report from Phoronix, we find out that Loongson has submitted some Linux patches that enable the upcoming 3A6000 CPUs to work with Linux-based operating systems at launch. Interestingly, as the new CPU generation gets closer to launch, more Linux kernel patches begin to surface.

Today's kernel patches focus on supporting the hardware page table walker (PTW). As PTW can handle all fast paths of TLBI/TLBL/TLBS/TLBM exceptions by hardware, software only needs to handle slow paths such as page faults. Additionally, in the past, LoongArch utilized "dbar 0" as a complete barrier for all operations. However, this full completion barrier severely impacted performance. As a result, Loongson-3A6000 and subsequent processors have introduced various alternative hints. Loongson plans to ship samples to select customers in the first half of 2023, so we could see more information surfacing soon.

Oppo Closes Chip Design Unit Zeku

Following the news that Oppo is likely to pull out of the French market, it now appears that the company has closed its chip design unit named Zeku. According to the South China Morning Post, workers at Zeku got less than a day's notice that the company was shutting down, which was on Thursday last week. Employees weren't even allowed back into the office to collect their personal belongings. As recent as two weeks ago, Zeku was still looking for new hires, which makes the abrupt closure even more peculiar, especially as Zeku is said to have employed upwards of 3,000 people.

Considering that Oppo is ranked as the fourth largest smartphone maker in terms of globally shipped units in Q1, the way the company has handled the closure of its chip design unit reeks of desperation. It should be noted that Zeku wasn't designing chips to power Oppo's phones, but presumably Zeku was behind the MariSilicon X, which was Oppo's own imaging co-processor. In all fairness, Oppo is far from the only company to have closed down business units this year, but the company is also said to be suffering in terms of shipments of smartphones, as the company saw a drop of 22 percent in shipments last year, to 103 million units. This appears to be part of the reason behind the shutdown of Zeku, but Oppo hasn't provided much in terms of details behind the closure.

Legislation Introduced to Restore America's Printed Circuit Board Industry after Two Decades of Decline

The bipartisan Protecting Circuit Boards and Substrates Act of 2023 introduced by Representatives Blake Moore (R-UT-1) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA-16) finishes the job the CHIPS Act began by incentivizing investment in the domestic printed circuit board (PCB) industry. This bill is a necessary follow-on to the CHIPS Act: without a trusted, reliable domestic source of PCBs and substrates, computer chips don't connect to end use electronic devices.

Domestic PCB production shrunk over the past 20 years, falling from 30% to barely 4% of the world's supply. Ninety percent of the world's supply now comes from Asia…56% in China alone.

Report: DRAM and NAND Flash Prices Expected to Fall Further in 2Q23 Due to Weak Server Shipments and High Inventory Levels

TrendForce's latest research indicates that, as production cuts to DRAM and NAND Flash have not kept pace with weakening demand, the ASP of some products is expected to decline further in 2Q23. DRAM prices are projected to fall 13~18%; NAND Flash is expected to fall between 8~13%.

TrendForce reports that the significant drop in DRAM prices was mostly attributed to high inventory levels of DDR4 and LPDDR5 as PC DRAM, server DRAM, and mobile DRAM collectively account for over 85% of DRAM consumption. Meanwhile, the market share for DDR5 remains relatively low.

NVIDIA A800 China-Tailored GPU Performance within 70% of A100

The recent growth in demand for training Large Language Models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has sparked the interest of many companies to invest in GPU solutions that are used to train these models. However, countries like China have struggled with US sanctions, and NVIDIA has to create custom models that meet US export regulations. Carrying two GPUs, H800 and A800, they represent cut-down versions of the original H100 and A100, respectively. We reported about H800; however, it remained as mysterious as A800 that we are talking about today. Thanks to MyDrivers, we have information that the A800 GPU performance is within 70% of the regular A100.

The regular A100 GPU manages 9.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64, 19.5 TeraFLOPS of FP64 Tensor, and up to 624 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPS with sparsity. A rough napkin math would suggest that 70% performance of the original (a 30% cut) would equal 6.8 TeraFLOPs of FP64 precision, 13.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64 Tensor, and 437 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPs with sparsity. MyDrivers notes that A800 can be had for 100,000 Yuan, translating to about 14,462 USD at the time of writing. This is not the most capable GPU that Chinese companies can acquire, as H800 exists. However, we don't have any information about its performance for now.

PowerLeader Announces x86 CPU for the Chinese Market, Looks like an Intel CPU

Rather unexpectedly, a mostly unknown Chinese company called PowerLeader—who seems to have mainly been in the server market space until now—has launched an unheard of x86 compatible CPU. There's no product information on the company website, not even a press release on the CPU which was announced only yesterday according to IT Home. Fortunately, there's a picture of the new CPU, which gives us a few more details. The CPU appears to be called the Pstar P3 and has the model name P3-01105. Luckily the clock frequency of the CPU, which is 3.7 GHz, is also printed on the chip.

However, a closer look at the picture would have most people that are interested in tech scratching their heads, as it appears to be an Intel CPU using the LGA-1200 socket. Even the model name and what is supposedly the spec ID of the CPU, follows Intel's style of naming its CPUs. The comments on IT Home and elsewhere, all suggest that this is simply a re-branded Intel Core i3-10105 CPU, although it's entirely possible this is a chip that only looks like an Intel CPU. It's entirely possible that this is some kind of unannounced licensing deal by Intel, but if so, it would be the first such licensing deal Intel has done since the 286 days, to our knowledge. PowerLeader claims that the CPU is specifically designed for desktop computers and the company is expecting to sell 1.5 million units per year.

AMD Could be Resurrecting Ryzen 3000G APU Series

AMD is reported to be reissuing its old Zen+ (12 nm) tech in order to meet demand for cheaper, lower-end systems in China, according to information released by Board Channels this week. The insider source claims that a new production order has been placed for Ryzen 3000G series APUs (requesting up to 30,000 units) and these processors are likely to be sold as part of hardware bundles with (similar vintage) low-end AM4-based motherboards - for example the B450 and A320 series, these older boards are still popular budget choices in China and readily available. The leak does not mention whether AMD is choosing to issue completely new hardware or if it is simply reproducing its 2019-era SKUs.

AMD released two Ryzen 3000G models back in 2019 - the 3400G and 3200G, both are quad-core Picasso APUs although the latter is lacking in simultaneous multithreading. It is not clear whether the super low budget AMD Athlon 3000G model will be included as part of the alleged 30K unit order. The 3000G series' onboard iGPUs (based on AMD's first generation Vega architecture) are likely preferred by the budget-conscious buyer since a discrete graphics card is not an essential part of builds intended for an office setting or a simple/functional home computer setup.

SK Hynix to Expand Wuxi Fab Legacy Production Capacity, Consumer DRAM Prices Struggle to Recover

Last October, the US Department of Commerce imposed semiconductor restrictions on Chinese imports of equipment for processes of 18 nm and below. SK hynix's Wuxi fab was granted a one-year production license, but geopolitical risks and weak demand prompted the company to reduce wafer starts by about 30% per month in 2Q23, according to TrendForce's latest research.

TrendForce reports that SK hynix had planned to transition its Wuxi fab's mainstream process from 1Y nm to 1Z nm, decreasing the output of legacy processes. However, due to limitations imposed by the US ban, the company instead opted to increase the share of its 21 nm production lines, focus-ing on DDR3 and DDR4 4Gb products. SK hynix's long-term strategy involves shifting its capacity expansion back to South Korea, while the Wuxi fab caters to domestic demand in China and the legacy-process consumer DRAM market.

AMD Ryzen 7040HS and 7040H "Phoenix" Laptop CPUs Get Tested

AMD is late in releasing its Phoenix Zen 4 lineup of mobile APUs - the original April launch has been missed, and laptops bearing Ryzen 7000HS & H-series are expected to arrive at some point this month. Preview hardware has made its way into the hands of testers, and one particular outlet - Golden Pig Upgrade, a content creator on the Chinese Bilibili video site - has performed benchmark tests. He seems to be the first reviewer to get hands-on time with AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APUs, and his findings point to class leading performance results in terms of graphical capabilities - the 7840HS (packing a Radeon 780M RDNA3 iGPU) is compared to the Rembrandt-based 7735H, as well as a pair of Intel Raptor Lake CPUs - the 13700H and 13500H models.

AMD's newest Phoenix APU is the group leader in GPU performance stakes, but the jump up from the last-gen Rembrandt (RDNA2 iGPU) chip is not all that significant. VideoCardz reckons that the Radeon 780M integrated GPU is roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce MX550 dGPU and not far off from a GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q graphics card (in terms of benchmark performance). According to AMD's internal documentation the RDNA 3 core architecture utilized in Phoenix APUs is referred to as "2.5" so this perhaps explains why the 780M is not doing laps around its older silbing(s).

NetEase Not Taking Blizzard to Court, One Man Seeking $43.5 Million Settlement

According to a recent news article released by Chinese news group Sina Technology, NetEase has filed a lawsuit against its former publishing partner Blizzard Entertainment, to the tune of (around) $43.5 Million. The Chinese Internet technology company is seeking compensation, in the form of a very large refund, following Blizzard's total exit from the nation's online gaming sector - its server infrastructure in China was shut down in January of this year. The closing of Blizzard-related services represented a very abrupt end to a 14-year long relationship between the two online gaming specialists - press coverage at the time presented a tense situation involving many major disagreements - the partnership was broken because of unfavorable terms on Blizzard's part.

NetEase posits that it had to compensate its customer base through refunds from its own reserves, after the sudden shutdown of Blizzard's hugely popular MMO - World of Warcraft, and other online multiplayer game series including Overwatch, Hearthstone, Diablo and Starcraft. A significant chunk of the $43.5 million settlement is said to cover the company's cost in refunding part of its customer base - somewhere in the range of 1.12 million players - for discontinued games and services. NetEase is also reported to be seeking damages for broken license agreements, unsold merchandise inventory and the loss of access to future Blizzard intellectual properties.

Update Apr 25th: According to an article from PC Gamer, published today, NetEase is not taking Blizzard to court. It turns out that a serial litigator, Yang Jun, has included NetEase as an appellant in his filed legal documents - under another company name, The9, an apparently defunct former licensing partner. PC Gamer has been informed that Yang Jun has sued NetEase in the past, and that his latest batch of legal documents have been amended to reflect that he is the lone party in demanding a financial settlement from Blizzard.

YMTC Using Locally Sourced Equipment for Advanced 3D NAND Manufacturing

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) sources, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC) has been plotting to manufacture its advanced 3D NAND flash using locally sourced equipment. As the source notes, YMTC has placed big orders from local equipment makers in a secret project codenamed Wudangshan, named after the Taoist mountain in the company's home province of Hubei. Last year, YTMC announced significant progress towards creating 200+ layer 3D NAND flash before other 3D NAND makers like Micron and SK Hynix. Called X3-9070, the chip is a 232-layer 3D NAND based on the company's advanced Xtacking 3.0 architecture.

As the SCMP finds, YTMC has placed big orders at Beijing-based Naura Technology Group, maker of etching tools and competitor to Lam Research, to manufacture its advanced flash memory. Additionally, YTMC has reportedly asked all its tool suppliers to remove all logos and other marks from equipment to avoid additional US sanctions holding the development back. This significant order block comes after the state invested 7 billion US Dollars into YTMC to boost its production capacity, and we see the company utilizing those resources right away. However, few industry analysts have identified a few "choke points" in YTMC's path to independent manufacturing, as there are still no viable domestic alternatives to US-based tool makers in areas such as metrology tools, where KLA is the dominant player, and lithography tools, where ASML, Nikon, and Canon, are noteworthy. The Wuhan-based Wudangshan project remains secret about dealing with those choke points in the future.

U.S. Asks Samsung and SK Hynix Not to Support China's Ban on Micron Technology by Filling Shortfalls

Earlier this month, it was reported that the Chinese Government could retaliate to the U.S. ban on YMTC by banning Idaho-based Micron Technology from selling memory products to Chinese firms—something that can severely hit Micron's bottom-line if you consider the various smartphone brands and PC OEMs based out of China, not to mention foreign companies that manufacture the entire spectrum of consumer electronics in China.

While Beijing is still making up its mind on whether go ahead with this ban, Washington threw a wrench in the works, by "urging" South Korean memory giants Samsung and SK Hynix not to fill the shortfall in supply left by a ban on Micron. It stands to reason that a similar request has been made with Kioxia, which is majority-owned by Bain Capital. Therefore, if China were to ban Micron, it would have to do so only after scaling up production at YMTC to make up for the supply, or end up with a chip shortage that can hurt Chinese ICT and PC firms in the immediate aftermath of the ban.

Strict Restrictions Imposed by US CHIPS Act Will Lower Willingness of Multinational Suppliers to Invest

TrendForce reports that the US Department of Commerce recently released details regarding its CHIPS and Science Act, which stipulates that beneficiaries of the act will be restricted in their investment activities—for more advanced and mature processes—in China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia for the next ten years. The scope of restrictions in this updated legislation will be far more extensive than the previous export ban, further reducing the willingness of multinational semiconductor companies to invest in China for the next decade.

CHIPS Act will mainly impact TSMC; and as the decoupling of the supply chain continues, VIS and PSMC capture orders rerouted from Chinese foundries
In recent years, the US has banned semiconductor exports and passed the CHIPS Act, all to ensure supply chains decoupling from China. Initially, bans on exports were primarily focused on non-planar transistor architecture (16/14 nm and more advanced processes). However, Japan and the Netherlands have also announced that they intend to join the sanctions, which means key DUV immersion systems, used for producing both sub-16 nm and 40/28 nm mature processes, are likely to be included within the scope of the ban as well. These developments, in conjunction with the CHIPS Act, mean that the expansion of both Chinese foundries and multinational foundries in China will be suppressed to varying degrees—regardless of whether they are advanced or mature processes.

Alibaba Developing an Equivalent to ChatGPT

Last Tuesday, Alibaba announced its intentions to put out its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot product called Tongyi Qianwen - another rival to take on OpenAI's pioneering ChatGPT natural language processing tool. The Chinese technology giant is hoping to retrofit the new chatbot system into several arms of its business operations. Alibaba had revealed initial plans for chatbot integration earlier this year, and mentioned that it was providing an alternative to the already well established ChatGPT tool. Alibaba's workplace messaging application - DingTalk - is slated to receive the first AI-powered update in the near future, although the company did not provide a firm timeline for Tongyi Qianwen's release window.

The product name "Tongyi Qianwen" loosely translates to "seeking an answer by asking a thousand questions" - Alibaba did not provide an official English language translation at last week's press conference. Their chatbot is reported to function in both Mandarin and English language modes. Advanced AI voice recognition is set for usage in the Tmall Genie range of smart speakers (similar in function to the Amazon Echo). Alibaba expects to expand Tongyi Qianwen's reach into applications relating to e-commerce and mapping services.

Chinese Loongson 3D5000 Features 32 Cores and is 4x Faster Than the Average Arm Chip

Amid the push for technology independence, Chinese companies are pushing out more products to satisfy the need for the rapidly soaring demand for domestic data processing silicon. Today, we have information that Chinese Loongson has launched a 3D5000 CPU with as many as 32 cores. Utilizing chiplet technology, the 3D5000 represents a combination of two 16-core 3C5000 processors based on LA464 cores, based on LoongArch ISA that follows the combination of RISC and MIPS ISA design principles. The new chip features 64 MB of L3 cache, supports eight-channel DDR4-3200 ECC memory achieving 50 GB/s, and has five HyperTransport (HT) 3.0 interfaces. The TDP configuration of the chip is officially 300 Watts; however, normal operation is usually at around 150 Watts, with LA464 cores running at 2 GHz.

Scaling of the new chip goes beyond the chiplet, and pours over into system, as 3D5000 supports 2P and 4P configurations, where a single motherboard can become a system of up to 128 cores. To connect them, Loongson uses a 7A2000 bridge chip that is reportedly 400% faster than the previous solution, although we have no information about the last chip bridge. Based on the LGA-4129 package, the chip size is 75.4x58.5×6.5 mm. Regarding performance, Loongson compares it to the average Arm chip that goes into smartphones and claims that its designs are up to four times faster. In SPEC2006, performance reaches 425 points, while maintaining a single TeraFLOP at dual-precision 64-bit format. On the other hand, the processor was built for security, as the chip has a custom hardware-baked security to prevent Spectre and Meltdown, has an on-package Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and has a secret China-made security algorithm with an embedded custom security module that does encryption and decryption at 5 Gbps.

NVIDIA Ramps Up Battle Against Makers of Unlicensed GeForce Cards

NVIDIA is stepping up to manufacturers of counterfeit graphics card in China according to an article published by MyDrivers - the hardware giant is partnering up with a number of the nation's major e-commerce companies in order to eliminate inventories of bogus GPUs. It is claimed that these online retail platforms, including JD.com and Douyin, are partway into removing a swathe of dodgy stock from their listings. NVIDIA is seeking to disassociate itself from the pool of unlicensed hardware and the brands responsible for flooding the domestic and foreign markets with so-called fake graphics cards. The company is reputed to be puzzled about the murky origins of this bootlegging of their patented designs.

The market became saturated with fake hardware during the Ethereum mining boom - little known cottage companies such as 51RSIC, Corn, Bingying and JieShuoMllse were pushing rebadged cheap OEM cards to domestic e-tail sites. The knock-off GPUs also crept outside of that sector, and import listings started to appear on international platforms including Ebay, AliExpress, Amazon and Newegg. NVIDIA is also fighting to stop the sale of refurbished cards - these are very likely to have been utilized in intensive cryptocurrency mining activities. A flood of these hit the market following an extreme downturn in crypto mining efforts, and many enthusiast communities have warned against acquiring pre-owned cards due to the high risk of component failure.

Compute and Storage Cloud Infrastructure Spending Stays Strong as Macroeconomic Headwinds Strengthen in the Fourth Quarter of 2022, According to IDC

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment, spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments, including dedicated and shared IT environments, increased 16.3% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2022 (4Q22) to $24.1 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment although the latter had strong growth in 4Q22 as well, increasing 9.4% year over year to $18.7 billion. For the full year, cloud infrastructure grew 19.4% to $87.7 billion, while non-cloud grew 13.6% to $66.7 billion. The market continues to benefit from high demand, large backlogs, rising prices, and an improving infrastructure supply chain.
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