TSMC today announced the new 3Dblox 2.0 open standard and major achievements of its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) 3DFabric Alliance at the TSMC 2023 OIP Ecosystem Forum. The 3Dblox 2.0 features early 3D IC design capability that aims to significantly boost design efficiency, while the 3DFabric Alliance continues to drive memory, substrate, testing, manufacturing, and packaging integration. TSMC continues to push the envelope of 3D IC innovation, making its comprehensive 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technologies more accessible to every customer.

"As the industry shifted toward embracing 3D IC and system-level innovation, the need for industry-wide collaboration has become even more essential than it was when we launched OIP 15 years ago," said Dr. L.C. Lu, TSMC fellow and vice president of Design and Technology Platform. "As our sustained collaboration with OIP ecosystem partners continues to flourish, we're enabling customers to harness TSMC's leading process and 3DFabric technologies to reach an entirely new level of performance and power efficiency for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and mobile applications."

Winbond Electronics Corporation, a leading global supplier of semiconductor memory solutions, has unveiled a powerful enabling technology for affordable Edge AI computing in mainstream use cases. The Company's new customized ultra-bandwidth elements (CUBE) enable memory technology to be optimized for seamless performance running generative AI on hybrid edge/cloud applications.

CUBE enhances the performance of front-end 3D structures such as chip on wafer (CoW) and wafer on wafer (WoW), as well as back-end 2.5D/3D chip on Si-interposer on substrate and fan-out solutions. Designed to meet the growing demands of edge AI computing devices, it is compatible with memory density from 256 Mb to 8 Gb with a single die, and it can also be 3D stacked to enhance bandwidth while reducing data transfer power consumption.

Symantec, a division of Broadcom Inc., is partnering with Google Cloud to embed generative AI (gen AI) into the Symantec Security platform in a phased rollout that will give customers a significant technical edge for detecting, understanding, and remediating sophisticated cyber attacks.

Symantec is leveraging the Google Cloud Security AI Workbench and security-specific large language model (LLM)--Sec-PaLM 2-across its portfolio to enable natural language interfaces and generate more comprehensive and easy-to-understand threat analyses. With Security AI Workbench-powered summarization of complex incidents and alignment to MITRE ATT&CK context, security operations center (SOC) analysts of all levels can better understand threats and be able to respond faster. That, in turn, translates into greater security and higher SOC productivity.

Useful Sensors, an AI-focused start-up, today launched the world's first low-cost, off-the-shelf AI module to enable intuitive, natural language interaction with electronic devices, locally and privately, with no need for an account or internet connection. The new AI-In-A-Box module can answer queries and solve problems in a way similar to well-known AI tools based on a large language model (LLM). But thanks to compression and acceleration technologies developed by Useful Sensors, the module hosts its LLM file locally, enabling its low-cost microprocessor to understand and respond instantly to spoken natural language queries or commands without reference to a data center.

Disconnected from the internet, the AI-In-A-Box module definitively eliminates user concerns about privacy, snooping, or dependence on third-party cloud services that are prevalent with conventional LLM-based AI products and services marketed by large technology companies. The AI-In-A-Box module is available to buy now at CrowdSupply, priced at $299.

Tesla first revealed plans for its Dojo D1 training chip back in 2021, with hopes of it powering self-driving technology in the near future. The automative division has relied mostly on NVIDIA over the ensuing years, but is seemingly keen to move onto proprietary solutions. Media reports from two years ago suggest that 5760 NVIDIA A100 GPUs were in play to develop Tesla's advanced driver-assistance system (Autopilot ADAS). Tom's Hardware believed that a $300 Million AI supercomputer cluster—comprised of roughly 10,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs—was powered on last month. Recent reports emerging from Taiwan suggest that Tesla is doubling Dojo D1 supercomputer chip orders with TSMC.

An Economic Daily report posits that 10,000 Dojo D1 are in a production queue for the next year, with insiders believing that Tesla is quietly expressing confidence in its custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). An upcoming order count could increase for the next batch (in 2025). The article hints that TSMC's "HPC-related order momentum has increased thanks to Tesla." Both organizations have not publicly commented on these developments, but insider sources have disclosed some technical details—most notably that the finalized Dojo design: "mainly uses TSMC's 7 nm family process and combines it with InFO-level system-on-wafer (SoW) advanced packaging."

Samsung Electronics today announced a new collaboration with AMD to advance 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN) for network transformation. This collaboration represents Samsung's ongoing commitment to enriching vRAN and Open RAN ecosystems to help operators build and modernize mobile networks with unmatched flexibility and optimized performance. The two companies have completed several rounds of tests at Samsung's lab to verify high-capacity and telco-grade performance using FDD bands and TDD Massive MIMO wide-bands, while significantly reducing power consumption. In this joint collaboration, Samsung used its versatile vRAN software integrated with the new AMD EPYC 8004 processors, focused on telco and intelligent edge. During technical verification, the EPYC 8004 processors combined with Samsung's vRAN solutions delivered optimized cell capacity per server as well as high power efficiency.

"This technical collaboration demonstrates Samsung's commitment to delivering network flexibility and high performance for service providers by building a larger vRAN and Open RAN ecosystem," said Henrik Jansson, Vice President and Head of SI Business Group, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. "Samsung has been at the forefront of unleashing the full potential of 5G vRAN technology to meet rising demands, and we look forward to collaborating with industry leaders like AMD to provide operators the capabilities to transform their networks."

Today, we're announcing that Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry. Our frontier safety research and products, together with Amazon Web Services' (AWS) expertise in running secure, reliable infrastructure, will make Anthropic's safe and steerable AI widely accessible to AWS customers.

AWS will become Anthropic's primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment. Together, we'll combine our respective expertise to collaborate on the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.

Industry-leading designer and manufacturer of edge AI solutions, AAEON, has released the BOXER-8651AI, a compact fanless embedded AI System powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX module. Consequently, the BOXER-8651AI takes advantage of the module's NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU, featuring 1024 CUDA and 32 Tensor Cores, along with support for NVIDIA JetPack 5.0 and above to provide users with accelerated graphics, data processing, and image classification.

With a fanless chassis measuring just 105 mm x 90 mm x 52 mm, the BOXER-8651AI is an extremely small solution that houses a dense range of interfaces, including DB-9 and DB-15 ports for RS-232 (Rx/Tx/CTS/RTS)/RS-485, CANBus, and DIO functions. Additionally, the device provides HDMI 2.1 display output, GbE LAN, and a variety of USB Type-A ports, supporting both USB 3.2 Gen 2 and USB 2.0 functionality.

The BOXER-8651AI, despite containing such powerful AI performance for its size, is built to operate in rugged conditions, boasting a -5°F to 131°F (-15°C to 55°C) temperature range alongside anti-shock and vibration resistance features. Consequently, the PC is ideally suited for wall mounted deployment across a range of environments.

Generative AI is no longer just for tech giants. With GeForce, it's already at your fingertips. Gone are the days when AI was the domain of sprawling data centers or elite researchers. For GeForce RTX users, AI is now running on your PC. It's personal, enhancing every keystroke, every frame and every moment. Gamers are already enjoying the benefits of AI in over 300 RTX games. Meanwhile, content creators have access to over 100 RTX creative and design apps, with AI enhancing everything from video and photo editing to asset generation. And for GeForce enthusiasts, it's just the beginning. RTX is the platform for today and the accelerator that will power the AI of tomorrow.

How Did AI and Gaming Converge?
NVIDIA pioneered the integration of AI and gaming with DLSS, a technique that uses AI to generate pixels in video games automatically and which has increased frame rates by up to 4x. And with the recent introduction of DLSS 3.5, NVIDIA has enhanced the visual quality in some of the world's top titles, setting a new standard for visually richer and more immersive gameplay. But NVIDIA's AI integration doesn't stop there. Tools like RTX Remix empower game modders to remaster classic content using high-quality textures and materials generated by AI.

The NVIDIA Studio laptop lineup is expanding with the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2, powered by GeForce RTX 4060, GeForce RTX 4050 or NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPUs, providing powerful performance and versatility for creators.

Backed by the NVIDIA Studio platform, the Surface Laptop Studio 2, announced yesterday, offers maximum stability with preinstalled Studio Drivers, plus exclusive tools to accelerate professional and creative workflows. NVIDIA also launched DLSS 3.5, adding Ray Reconstruction to the suite of AI-powered DLSS technologies. The latest feature puts a powerful new AI neural network at the fingertips of creators on RTX PCs, producing higher-quality, lifelike ray-traced images in real time before generating a full render.

Fueled by an AI-driven inventory stocking frenzy across the supply chain, TrendForce reveals that Q2 revenue for the top 10 global IC design powerhouses soared to US $38.1 billion, marking a 12.5% quarterly increase. In this rising tide, NVIDIA seized the crown, officially dethroning Qualcomm as the world's premier IC design house, while the remainder of the leaderboard remained stable.

AI charges ahead, buoying IC design performance amid a seasonal stocking slump
NVIDIA is reaping the rewards of a global transformation. Bolstered by the global demand from CSPs, internet behemoths, and enterprises diving into generative AI and large language models, NVIDIA's data center revenue skyrocketed by a whopping 105%. A deluge of shipments, including the likes of their advanced Hopper and Ampere architecture HGX systems and the high-performing InfinBand, played a pivotal role. Beyond that, both gaming and professional visualization sectors thrived under the allure of fresh product launches. Clocking a Q2 revenue of US$11.33 billion (a 68.3% surge), NVIDIA has vaulted over both Qualcomm and Broadcom to seize the IC design throne.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will highlight the newest in generative AI and cloud computing at the NVIDIA AI Summit in Tel Aviv from Oct. 15-16. The two-day summit is set to attract more than 2,500 developers, researchers and decision-makers from across one of the world's most vibrant technology hubs. With over 6,000 startups, Israel consistently ranks among the world's top countries for VC investments per capita. The 2023 Global Startup Ecosystem report places Tel Aviv among the top 5 cities globally for startups.

The summit features more than 60 live sessions led by experts from NVIDIA and the region's tech leaders, who will dive deep into topics like accelerated computing, robotics, cybersecurity and climate science. Attendees will be able to network and gain insights from some of NVIDIA's foremost experts, including Kimberly Powell, vice president and general manager of healthcare; Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of embedded and edge computing; Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of networking and HPC; and Gal Chechik, senior director and head of the Israel AI Research Center.

Amazon today introduced a range of new Echo devices designed for even more personalized, proactive, and intuitive Alexa experiences at home and on-the-go—the next-generation Echo Show 8, all-new Echo Hub, and new Echo Frames. In addition, Amazon collaborated with Safilo, one of the world's leading eyewear manufacturers, to blend the power of Alexa with iconic Carrera designs.

"Engagement with Echo devices is at an all-time high," said Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV. "Customers rely on Alexa for so much, including managing their smart homes, keeping up with the latest news, setting birthday reminders, and keeping their homes stocked with essentials. These new Echo devices give customers more ways to experience the world's best personal AI—and the growing generative AI capabilities that will be coming to Alexa soon—at home and on the go."

According to TechNews.tw, TSMC could postpone its 2 nm semiconductor manufacturing node for 2026. If the rumors about TSMC's delayed 2 nm production schedule are accurate, the implications could reverberate throughout the semiconductor industry. TSMC's alleged hesitancy could be driven by multiple factors, including the architectural shift from FinFET to Gate-All-Around (GAA) and potential challenges related to scaling down to 2 nm. The company is a crucial player in this space, and a delay could offer opportunities for competitors like Samsung, which has already transitioned to GAA transistor architecture for its 3 nm chips. Given the massive demand for advanced nodes due to the rise of AI, IoT, and other next-gen technologies, it is surprising to hear "sluggish" demand reports.

However, it's also possible that it's too early for customers to make firm commitments for 2025 and beyond. TSMC has dismissed these rumors, stating that construction is progressing according to plan, which includes having 2 nm pilot run in 2024, and mass production in the second half of 2025.. Despite this, any delay in TSMC's roadmap could serve as a catalyst for shifts in market dynamics. Companies that rely heavily on TSMC's advanced nodes might need to reassess their timelines and strategies. Moreover, if Samsung can capitalize on this opportunity, it could somewhat level the playing field. As of now, though, it's essential to approach these rumors with caution until more concrete information becomes available.

Oracle has announced their next generation Ampere A2 Compute Instances based on the latest AmpereOne processor, with availability starting later this year. According to Oracle, the new instances will deliver up to 44% more price-performance compared to x86 offerings and are ideal for AI inference, databases, web services, media transcoding workloads and run-time language support, such as GO and Java.

In related news, several new customers including industry leading real-time video service companies 8x8 and Phenix, along with AI startups like Wallaroo, said they are migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Ampere as more and more companies seek to maximize price, performance and energy efficiency.

Intel at the 2023 InnovatiON event surprised audiences with a live demo of a reference notebook powered by a Core "Lunar Lake" processor. What's surprising about this is that "Lunar Lake" won't come out until 2025 (at least), and succeeds not just the upcoming "Meteor Lake" architecture, but also its succeeding "Arrow Lake," which debuts in 2024. Intel is expected to debut "Meteor Lake" some time later this year. What's also surprising is that Intel has proven that the Intel 18A foundry node works. The Compute tile of "Lunar Lake" is expected to be based on Intel 18A, which is four generations ahead of the current Intel 7, which will be succeeded by Intel 4, Intel 3, and Intel 20A along the way.

The demo focused on the generative AI capabilities of Intel's third generation NPU, the hardware backend of AI Boost. Using a local session of a tool similar to Stable Diffusion, the processor was made to generate the image of a giraffe wearing a hat; and a GPT program was made to pen the lyrics of a song in the genre of Taylor Swift from scratch. Both tasks were completed on stage using the chip's NPU, and in timeframes you'd normally expect from discrete AI accelerators or cloud-based services.

Large language model development is about to reach supersonic speed thanks to a collaboration between NVIDIA and Anyscale. At its annual Ray Summit developers conference, Anyscale—the company behind the fast growing open-source unified compute framework for scalable computing—announced today that it is bringing NVIDIA AI to Ray open source and the Anyscale Platform. It will also be integrated into Anyscale Endpoints, a new service announced today that makes it easy for application developers to cost-effectively embed LLMs in their applications using the most popular open source models.

These integrations can dramatically speed generative AI development and efficiency while boosting security for production AI, from proprietary LLMs to open models such as Code Llama, Falcon, Llama 2, SDXL and more. Developers will have the flexibility to deploy open-source NVIDIA software with Ray or opt for NVIDIA AI Enterprise software running on the Anyscale Platform for a fully supported and secure production deployment. Ray and the Anyscale Platform are widely used by developers building advanced LLMs for generative AI applications capable of powering intelligent chatbots, coding copilots and powerful search and summarization tools.

Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing the AMD based Supermicro H13 generation of WIO Servers, optimized to deliver strong performance and energy efficiency for edge and telco datacenters powered by the new AMD EPYC 8004 Series processors. The new Supermicro H13 WIO and short-depth front I/O systems deliver energy-efficient single socket servers that lower operating costs for enterprise, telco, and edge applications. These systems are designed with a dense form factor and flexible I/O options for storage and networking, making the new servers ideal for deploying in edge networks.

"We are excited to expand our AMD EPYC-based server offerings optimized to deliver excellent TCO and energy efficiency for data center networking and edge computing," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Adding to our already industry leading edge-to-cloud rack scale IT solutions, the new Supermicro H13 WIO systems with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5-4800 MHz memory show tremendous performance for edge applications."

What's New: Intel today announced one of the industry's first glass substrates for next-generation advanced packaging, planned for the latter part of this decade. This breakthrough achievement will enable the continued scaling of transistors in a package and advance Moore's Law to deliver data-centric applications.

"After a decade of research, Intel has achieved industry-leading glass substrates for advanced packaging. We look forward to delivering these cutting-edge technologies that will benefit our key players and foundry customers for decades to come."
-Babak Sabi, Intel senior vice president and general manager of Assembly and Test Development

SK hynix unveiled and demonstrated a prototype of AiMX (Accelerator-in-Memory based Accelerator), a generative AI accelerator card based on GDDR6-AiM, at the AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit 2023 held September 12-14 at the Santa Clara Marriott, California.Hosted annually by the UK marketing firm Kisaco Research, the AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit brings together global IT companies and high-profile startups to share their developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is SK hynix's third time participating in the summit.

At the event, the company showcased the prototype of AiMX, an accelerator card that combines multiple GDDR6-AiMs to further enhance performance, along with the GDDR6-AIM itself under the slogan of "Boost Your AI: Discover the Power of PIM (Processing-In-Memory) with SK hynix's AiM (Accelerator in Memory)." As a low-power, high-speed memory solution capable of handling large amounts of data, AiMX is set to play a key role in the advancement of data-intensive generative AI systems. The performance of generative AI improves as it is trained on more data, highlighting the need for high-performance products which can be applied to an array of generative AI systems.

It's an exciting time in AI for business. As we apply the technology more widely across areas ranging from customer service to HR to code modernization, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping increasing numbers of us work smarter, not harder. And as we are just at the start of the AI for business revolution, the potential for improving productivity and creativity is vast. But AI today is an incredibly dynamic field, and AI platforms must reflect that dynamism, incorporating the latest advances to meet the demands of today and tomorrow. This is why we at IBM continue to add powerful new capabilities to IBM watsonx, our data and AI platform for business.

We have announced our latest addition: a new family of IBM-built foundation models which will be available in watsonx.ai, our studio for generative AI, foundation models and machine learning. Collectively named "Granite," these multi-size foundation models apply generative AI to both language and code. And just as granite is a strong, multipurpose material with many uses in construction and manufacturing, so we at IBM believe these Granite models will deliver enduring value to your business. But now let's take a look under the hood and explain a little about how we built them, and how they will help you take AI to the next level in your business.

In an event at the White House today, NVIDIA announced support for voluntary commitments that the Biden Administration developed to ensure advanced AI systems are safe, secure and trustworthy. The news came the same day NVIDIA's chief scientist, Bill Dally, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee seeking input on potential legislation covering generative AI. Separately, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will join other industry leaders in a closed-door meeting on AI Wednesday with the full Senate.

Seven companies including Adobe, IBM, Palantir and Salesforce joined NVIDIA in supporting the eight agreements the Biden-Harris administration released in July with support from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Intel Innovation 2023 - September 13, 2023 - MiTAC Computing Technology, a professional IT solution provider and a subsidiary of MiTAC Holdings Corporation, will showcase its DSG (Datacenter Solutions Group) product lineup powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors for enterprise, cloud and AI workloads at Intel Innovation 2023, booth #H216 in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, USA, from September 19-20.

"MiTAC has seamlessly and successfully managed the Intel DSG business since July. The datacenter solution product lineup enhances MiTAC's product portfolio and service offerings. Our customers can now enjoy a comprehensive one-stop service, ranging from motherboards and barebones servers to Intel Data Center blocks and complete rack integration for their datacenter infrastructure needs," said Eric Kuo, Vice President of the Server Infrastructure Business Unit at MiTAC Computing Technology.

UPMEM, a fabless semiconductor startup has raised €4.1 M equity from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and Venture Capitalists (Partech, Western Digital Capital, C4 Ventures…), and a €2.5M grant from the EIC. Founded by Fabrice Devaux and Gilles Hamou, the company is pioneering ultra-efficient Processing In Memory (PIM) accelerators to tackle the significant challenge of compute efficiency for AI and big data applications.

UPMEM's PIM solution, integrating UPMEM's first commercial-grade PIM chip on the market, is now available to cloud markets across the globe (US, Asia...) to provide the most cost-effective and energy-efficient solutions for AI and analytics applications in data centers and at the edge, such as large language models (LLM e.g. GPT), genomics, large analytics.

Today, MLCommons published results of its MLPerf Inference v3.1 performance benchmark for GPT-J, the 6 billion parameter large language model, as well as computer vision and natural language processing models. Intel submitted results for Habana Gaudi 2 accelerators, 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and Intel Xeon CPU Max Series. The results show Intel's competitive performance for AI inference and reinforce the company's commitment to making artificial intelligence more accessible at scale across the continuum of AI workloads - from client and edge to the network and cloud.

"As demonstrated through the recent MLCommons results, we have a strong, competitive AI product portfolio, designed to meet our customers' needs for high-performance, high-efficiency deep learning inference and training, for the complete spectrum of AI models - from the smallest to the largest - with leading price/performance." -Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group