A new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that enterprises will invest nearly $16 billion worldwide on GenAI solutions in 2023. This spending, which includes GenAI software as well as related infrastructure hardware and IT/business services, is expected to reach $143 billion in 2027 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 73.3% over the 2023-2027 forecast period. This is more than twice the rate of growth in overall AI spending and almost 13 times greater than the CAGR for worldwide IT spending over the same period.

"Generative AI is more than a fleeting trend or mere hype. It is a transformative technology with far-reaching implications and business impact," says Ritu Jyoti, group vice president, Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation market research and advisory services at IDC. "With ethical and responsible implementation, GenAI is poised to reshape industries, changing the way we work, play, and interact with the world."

Dell Technologies expands its Dell Generative AI Solutions portfolio, helping businesses transform how they work along every step of their generative AI (GenAI) journeys. "To maximize AI efforts and support workloads across public clouds, on-premises environments and at the edge, companies need a robust data foundation with the right infrastructure, software and services," said Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer, Dell Technologies. "That's what we are building with our expanded validated designs, professional services, modern data lakehouse and the world's broadest GenAI solutions portfolio."

Customizing GenAI models to maximize proprietary data
The Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA for Model Customization offers pre-trained models that extract intelligence from data without building models from scratch. This solution provides best practices for customizing and fine-tuning GenAI models based on desired outcomes while helping keep information secure and on-premises. With a scalable blueprint for customization, organizations now have multiple ways to tailor GenAI models to accomplish specific tasks with their proprietary data. Its modular and flexible design supports a wide range of computational requirements and use cases, spanning training diffusion, transfer learning and prompt tuning.

Pierre Ferragu, the Global Technology Infrastructure chief at New Street Research, has predicted a very positive 2025 financial outcome for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC). A global slowdown in consumer purchasing of personal computers and smartphones has affected a number of companies including the likes of NVIDIA and AMD—their financial reports have projected a 10% annual revenue drop for 2023. TSMC has similarly forecast that its full year revenue for 2023 will settle at $68.31 billion, after an approximate 10% fall. Ferragu did not contest these figures—via his team's analysis—TSMC is expected to pull in $68 billion in net sales for this financial year.

The rumor mill has TSMC revising its revenue guidance for a third time this year—but company leadership has denied that this will occur. New Street Research estimates that conditions will improve next year, with an uptick in client orders placed at TSMC's foundries. Ferragu reckons that TSMC could hit an all-time revenue high of $100 billion by 2025. His hunch is based on the upcoming spending habits of VIP foundry patrons encompassing: "a bottom-up perspective, looking at how TSMC's top customers, which we all know very well, will contribute to such growth." The Taiwanese foundry's order books are reported to be filling up for next year, with Apple and NVIDIA seizing the moment to stand firmly at the front of the 3 nm process queue.

The Platform for Digital and Quantum Innovation of Quebec (PINQ²), a non-profit organization (NPO) founded by the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy of Quebec (MEIE - ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et de l'Énergie du Québec) and the Université de Sherbrooke, along with IBM, are proud to announce the historic inauguration of an IBM Quantum System One at IBM Bromont. This event marks a major turning point in the field of information technology and all sectors of innovation in Quebec, making PINQ² the sole administrator to inaugurate and operate an IBM Quantum System One in Canada. To date, this is one of the most advanced quantum computers in IBM's global fleet of quantum computers.

This new quantum computer in Quebec reinforces Quebec's and Canada's position as a force in the rapidly advancing field of quantum computing, opening new prospects for the technological future of the province and the country. Access to this technology is a considerable asset not only for the ecosystem of DistriQ, the quantum innovation zone for Quebec, but also for the Technum Québec innovation zone, the new "Energy Transition Valley" innovation zone and other strategic sectors for Quebec.

Taiwan's Economic Daily reckons that a freshly formed partnership between TSMC, Broadcom, and NVIDIA will result in the development of cutting-edge silicon photonics. The likes of IBM, Intel and various academic institutes are already deep into their own research and development processes, but the alleged new alliance is said to focus on advancing AI computer hardware. The report cites a significant allocation of—roughly 200—TSMC staffers onto R&D involving the integration of silicon photonic technologies into high performance computing (HPC) solutions. They are very likely hoping that the usage of optical interconnects (on a silicon medium) will result in greater data transfer rates between and within microchips. Other benefits include longer transmission distances and a lower consumption of power.

TSMC vice president Yu Zhenhua has placed emphasis on innovation, in a similar fashion to his boss, within the development process (industry-wide): "If we can provide a good silicon photonics integrated system, we can solve the two key issues of energy efficiency and AI computing power. This will be a new one...Paradigm shift. We may be at the beginning of a new era." The firm is facing unprecedented demand from its clients—it hopes to further expand its advanced chip packaging capacity to address these issues by late 2024. A shift away from the limitations of "conventional electric" data transmissions could bring next generation AI compute GPUs onto the market by 2025.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research (JPR), unit shipments in the add-in board (AIB) market increased in Q2'23 from last quarter, while AMD gained market share. Quarter to quarter, graphics AIB shipments increased modestly, by 2.9%; however, shipments decreased by -36% year to year.

Since Q1 2000, over 2.10 billion graphics cards, worth about $476 billion, have been sold. The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter, as AMD's market share increased from last quarter and Nvidia's share increased from last year. Intel, which entered the AIB market in Q3'22 with the Arc A770 and A750, will start to increase market share in 2024.

Jon Peddie Research reports the growth of the global PC-based graphics processor unit (GPU) market reached 61.6 million units in Q2'23 and PC CPU shipments decreased by -23% year over year. Overall, GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of 3.70% during 2022-2026 and reach an installed base of 2,998 million units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of discrete GPUs (dGPUs) in the PC will grow to reach a level of 32%.

Year to year, total GPU shipments, which include all platforms and all types of GPUs, decreased by -27%, desktop graphics decreased by -36%, and notebooks decreased by -23%.

Jon Peddie Research reports the growth of the global PC client-based CPU units market reached 53.6 million units in Q2'23, up 17%, and iGPU shipments increased by 14% to 49 million units. Year over year, iGPUs declined -29%.

Integrated GPUs will have a compound annual growth rate of 2.5% during 2022-2026 and reach an installed base of 4.8 billion units at the end of the forecast period. Over the next five years, the penetration of iGPUs in the PC will grow to reach a level of 98%.

PCI-SIG today announced the formation of a new workgroup to deliver PCI Express (PCIe) technology over optical connections. The PCI-SIG Optical Workgroup intends to be optical technology-agnostic, supporting a wide range of optical technologies, while potentially developing technology-specific form factors.

"Optical connections will be an important advancement for PCIe architecture as they will allow for higher performance, lower power consumption, extended reach and reduced latency," said Nathan Brookwood, Research Fellow at Insight 64. "Many data-demanding markets and applications such as Cloud and Quantum Computing, Hyperscale Data Centers and High-Performance Computing will benefit from PCIe architecture leveraging optical connections."

TSMC today held an inauguration ceremony for its global Research and Development Center in Hsinchu, Taiwan, celebrating the Company's newest hub for bringing the next generations of semiconductor technology into reality with customers, R&D partners in industry and academia, design ecosystem partners, and senior government leaders.

The R&D Center will serve as the new home for TSMC's R&D Organization, including the researchers who will develop TSMC's leading-edge process technology at the 2-nanometer generation and beyond, as well as scientists and scholars blazing the trail with exploratory research into fields such as novel materials and transistor structures. With R&D employees already relocating to their workplaces in the new building, it will be ready for its full complement of more than 7,000 staff by September 2023.

IBM has launched a new tool to help enterprises track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across cloud services and advance their sustainability performance throughout their hybrid, multicloud journeys. Now generally available, the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator - an AI-informed dashboard - can help clients access emissions data across a variety of IBM Cloud workloads such as AI, high performance computing (HPC) and financial services.

Across industries, enterprises are embracing modernization by leveraging hybrid cloud and AI to digitally transform with resiliency, performance, security, and compliance at the forefront, all while remaining focused on delivering value and driving more sustainable business practices. According to a recent study by IBM, 42% of CEOs surveyed pinpoint environmental sustainability as their top challenge over the next three years. At the same time, the study reports that CEOs are facing pressure to adopt generative AI while also weighing the data management needs to make AI successful. The increase in data processing required for AI workloads can present new challenges for organizations that are looking to reduce their GHG emissions. With more than 43% of CEOs surveyed already using generative AI to inform strategic decisions, organizations should prepare to balance executing high performance workloads with sustainability.

When PlayStation VR2 released earlier this year, it offered players a chance to experience virtual game worlds bristling with detail and immersive features. PS VR2 was the culmination of several years of development, which included multiple prototypes and testing approaches. To learn more, we asked PS VR2's Product Manager Yasuo Takahashi about the development process of the innovative headset and PlayStation VR2 Sense Controller, and also gained insight into the various prototypes that were created as part of this process.

PlayStation Blog: When did development for the PS VR2 headset start?
Yasuo Takahashi: Research on future VR technology was being conducted even prior to the launch of the original PlayStation VR as part of our R&D efforts. After PS VR's launch in 2016, discussion around what the next generation of VR would look like began in earnest. We went back and reviewed those R&D findings and we started prototyping various technologies at the beginning of 2017. Early that same year, we began detailed conversations on what features should be implemented in the new product, and which specific technologies we should explore further.

A watershed moment on Nov. 22, 2022, was mostly virtual, yet it shook the foundations of nearly every industry on the planet. On that day, OpenAI released ChatGPT, the most advanced artificial intelligence chatbot ever developed. This set off demand for generative AI applications that help businesses become more efficient, from providing consumers with answers to their questions to accelerating the work of researchers as they seek scientific breakthroughs, and much, much more.

Businesses that previously dabbled in AI are now rushing to adopt and deploy the latest applications. Generative AI—the ability of algorithms to create new text, images, sounds, animations, 3D models and even computer code—is moving at warp speed, transforming the way people work and play. By employing large language models (LLMs) to handle queries, the technology can dramatically reduce the time people devote to manual tasks like searching for and compiling information.

Hello everyone! Today I'm happy to announce that we're putting the next update for Age of Wonders 4 into Open Beta! This previews some of the improvements that are part of the Watcher update, due later this summer. This coming update focuses on what we feel are the issues which are most important to you, and we'd love to get your feedback on what we've managed to do so far.

It's important to remember that this is a work in progress patch. This means that it may be unstable or imbalanced, and that the features we've added may not work entirely as we want them to. It also means that we may revert certain changes later if we feel that they aren't achieving what we want them to or if we're inspired to replace them with something better! Instructions, Patch Notes and F.A.Q. are provided below...

NVIDIA RTX is spinning new cycles for designs. Trek Bicycle is using GPUs to bring design concepts to life. The Wisconsin-based company, one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in the world, aims to create bikes with the highest-quality craftsmanship. With its new partner Lidl, an international retailer chain, Trek Bicycle also owns a cycling team, now called Lidl-Trek. The team is competing in the annual Tour de France stage race on Trek Bicycle's flagship lineup, which includes the Emonda, Madone and Speed Concept. Many of the team's accessories and equipment, such as the wheels and road race helmets, were also designed at Trek.

Bicycle design involves complex physics—and a key challenge is balancing aerodynamic efficiency with comfort and ride quality. To address this, the team at Trek is using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs to run high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, setting new benchmarks for aerodynamics in a bicycle that's also comfortable to ride and handles smoothly. The designers and engineers are further enhancing their workflows using NVIDIA RTX technology in Dell Precision workstations, including the NVIDIA RTX A5500 GPU, as well as a Dell Precision 7920 running dual RTX A6000 GPUs.

AI and accelerated computing will help climate researchers achieve the miracles they need to achieve breakthroughs in climate research, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote Monday at the Berlin Summit for the Earth Virtualization Engines initiative. "Richard Feynman once said that "what I can't create, I don't understand" and that's the reason why climate modeling is so important," Huang told 180 attendees at the Harnack House in Berlin, a storied gathering place for the region's scientific and research community. "And so the work that you do is vitally important to policymakers to researchers to the industry," he added.

To advance this work, the Berlin Summit brings together participants from around the globe to harness AI and high-performance computing for climate prediction. In his talk, Huang outlined three miracles that will have to happen for climate researchers to achieve their goals, and touched on NVIDIA's own efforts to collaborate with climate researchers and policymakers with its Earth-2 efforts. The first miracle required will be to simulate the climate fast enough, and with a high enough resolution - on the order of just a couple of square kilometers.

A group of researchers in China have used a new approach to AI to create a full RISC-V processor from scratch. The team set out to answer the question of whether an AI could design an entire processor on its own without human intervention. While AI design tools do already exist and are used for complex circuit design and validation today, they are generally limited in use and scope. The key improvements shown in this approach over traditional or AI assisted logic design are the automated capabilities, as well as its speed. The traditional assistive tools for designing circuits still require many hours of manual programming and validation to design a functional circuit. Even for such a simple processor as the one created by the AI, the team claims the design would have taken 1000x as long to be done by humans. The AI was trained by observing specific inputs and outputs of existing CPU designs, with the paper summarizing the approach as such:

(...) a new AI approach, which generates large-scale Boolean function with almost 100% validation accuracy (e.g., > 99.99999999999% as Intel) from only external input-output examples rather than formal programs written by the human. This approach generates the Boolean function represented by a graph structure called Binary Speculation Diagram (BSD), with a theoretical accuracy lower bound by using the Monte Carlo based expansion, and the distance of Boolean functions is used to tackle the intractability.

Today, it was announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will become the first university in the world to house an IBM Quantum System One. The IBM quantum computer, intended to be operational by January of 2024, will serve as the foundation of a new IBM Quantum Computational Center in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). By partnering, RPI's vision is to greatly enhance the educational experiences and research capabilities of students and researchers at RPI and other institutions, propel the Capital Region into a top location for talent, and accelerate New York's growth as a technology epicenter.

RPI's advance into research of applications for quantum computing will represent a more than $150 million investment once fully realized, aided by philanthropic support from Curtis R. Priem '82, vice chair of RPI's Board of Trustees. The new quantum computer will be part of RPI's new Curtis Priem Quantum Constellation, a faculty endowed center for collaborative research, which will prioritize the hiring of additional faculty leaders who will leverage the quantum computing system.

A new global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that nearly half of CEOs surveyed identify productivity as their highest business priority—up from sixth place in 2022. They recognize technology modernization is key to achieving their productivity goals, ranking it as second highest priority. Yet, CEOs can face key barriers as they race to modernize and adopt new technologies like generative AI.

The annual CEO study, CEO decision-making in the age of AI, Act with intention, found three-quarters of CEO respondents believe that competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI. However, executives are also weighing potential risks or barriers of the technology such as bias, ethics and security. More than half (57%) of CEOs surveyed are concerned about data security and 48% worry about bias or data accuracy.

For weeks, researchers at IBM Quantum and UC Berkeley were taking turns running increasingly complex physical simulations. Youngseok Kim and Andrew Eddins, scientists with IBM Quantum, would test them on the 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle processor. UC Berkeley's Sajant Anand would attempt the same calculation using state-of-the-art classical approximation methods on supercomputers located at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Purdue University. They'd check each method against an exact brute-force classical calculation.

Eagle returned accurate answers every time. And watching how both computational paradigms performed as the simulations grew increasingly complex made both teams feel confident the quantum computer was still returning answers more accurate than the classical approximation methods, even in the regime beyond the capabilities of the brute force methods. "The level of agreement between the quantum and classical computations on such large problems was pretty surprising to me personally," said Eddins. "Hopefully it's impressive to everyone."

The newly established Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in the UK has recently released the UK's National Semiconductor Strategy. Dr. Shih-Chieh Chang, General Director of Electronic and Optoelectronic System Research Laboratories at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan had an initial exchange with DSIT. During the exchange, Dr. Chang suggested that Taiwan can become a trustable partner for the UK and that the partnership can leverage collective strengths to create mutually beneficial developments. According to the Strategy, the British government plans to invest 1 billion pounds over the next decade to support the semiconductor industry. This funding will improve access to infrastructure, power more research and development and facilitate greater international cooperation.

Dr. Chang stressed that ITRI looks forward to more collaboration with the UK on semiconductors to enhance the resilience of the supply chain. While the UK possesses cutting-edge capabilities in semiconductor IP design and compound semiconductor technology, ITRI has extensive expertise in semiconductor technology R&D and trial production. As a result, ITRI is well-positioned to offer consultation services for advanced packaging pilot lines, facilitate pre-production evaluation, and link British semiconductor IP design companies with Taiwan's semiconductor industry chain. "The expansion of British manufacturers' service capacity in Taiwan would create a mutually beneficial outcome for both Taiwan and the UK," said Dr. Chang.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments in the add-in board (AIB) market decreased in Q1 2023 by -12.6% and decreased by -38.2% year to year. Intel increased its add-in board market share by 2% during the first quarter.

The percentage of AIBs in desktop PCs is referred to as the attach rate. The attach rate grew from last quarter by 8% but was down -21% year to year. Approximately 6.3 million add-in boards shipped in Q1 2023. The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter, as AMD's market share remained flat from last quarter. Intel, which entered the AIB market in Q3'22 with the Arc A770 and A750, gained 2% in market share, while Nvidia retains its dominant position in the add-in board space with an 84% market share.

Scientific researchers need massive computational resources that can support exploration wherever it happens. Whether they're conducting groundbreaking pharmaceutical research, exploring alternative energy sources or discovering new ways to prevent financial fraud, accessible state-of-the-art AI computing resources are key to driving innovation. This new model of computing can solve the challenges of generative AI and power the next wave of innovation. Cambridge-1, a supercomputer NVIDIA launched in the U.K. during the pandemic, has powered discoveries from some of the country's top healthcare researchers. The system is now becoming part of NVIDIA DGX Cloud to accelerate the pace of scientific innovation and discovery - across almost every industry.

As a cloud-based resource, it will broaden access to AI supercomputing for researchers in climate science, autonomous machines, worker safety and other areas, delivered with the simplicity and speed of the cloud, ideally located for the U.K. and European access. DGX Cloud is a multinode AI training service that makes it possible for any enterprise to access leading-edge supercomputing resources from a browser. The original Cambridge-1 infrastructure included 80 NVIDIA DGX systems; now it will join with DGX Cloud, to allow customers access to world-class infrastructure.

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

RIKEN and Intel Corporation (hereafter referred to as Intel) have signed a memorandum of understanding on collaboration and cooperation to accelerate joint research in next-generation computing fields such as AI (artificial intelligence), high-performance computing, and quantum computers. The signing ceremony was concluded on May 18, 2023. As part of this MOU, RIKEN will work with Intel Foundry Services (IFS) to prototype these new solutions.