Oracle today announced the addition of generative AI-powered capabilities within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). Supported by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) generative AI service, the new capabilities are embedded in existing HR processes to drive faster business value, improve productivity, enhance the candidate and employee experience, and streamline HR processes.

"Generative AI is boosting productivity and unlocking a new world of skills, ideas, and creativity that can have an immediate impact in the workplace," said Chris Leone, executive vice president, applications development, Oracle Cloud HCM. "With the ability to summarize, author, and recommend content, generative AI helps to reduce friction as employees complete important HR functions. For example, with the new embedded generative AI capabilities in Oracle Cloud HCM, our customers will be able to take advantage of large language models to drastically reduce the time required to complete tasks, improve the employee experience, enhance the accuracy of workforce insights, and ultimately increase business value."

Whether you're a seasoned VR gamer or new to the medium, it can be hard to know where to start when exploring the Meta Quest catalog. Luckily, we're combining curation and convenience to make things a little easier. Now you can browse less and play more with Meta Quest+, your new VR subscription service.

For just $7.99 USD per month or $59.99 USD annually (a savings of over 37%), you'll get access to two hand-picked VR titles every month. And when you sign up now through July 31, you'll get your first month for $1 USD. With a combination of VR's biggest hits, hidden gems, and back-catalog classics, this is the most affordable way to grow your library with killer content.

A BioWare Austin developer is openly discussing the transfer of their long-running "Star Wars: The Old Republic" MMORPG to an external studio—games news sites picked up on insider information earlier this month alleging that the studio and its parent company (EA) were holding meetings with Broadsword Online Games. An EA spokesperson responded to the leak (at the time) and explained: "We're evaluating how we give the game and the team the best opportunity to grow and evolve, which includes conversations with Broadsword, a boutique studio that specializes in delivering online, community-driven experiences. Our goal is to do what is best for the game and its players." It seems that the involved parties have agreed upon terms for "handing off" responsibilities, according to a developer's recent declarations.

Keith Kanneg - the Executive producer for Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) - has this week provided a comprehensive update about future plans on the game's discussion board: "Appreciate your patience with us as we continue to navigate the future shift of SWTOR's development team to a third party studio. We're working through the changes right now so I'll share with you the details I have. With 7.3 now live, our priority is continuing to prepare for Game Updates 7.3.1 and 7.4 along with planning for 2024 and 2025 with a focus on content and continued modernization initiatives." It is interesting that Broadsword is not named or directly referred to.

Supermicro Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is introducing a new server that gives IT and data center owners a high performance and scalable solution to meet the needs for E-commerce, cloud gaming, code development, content creation, and virtual private servers. The new systems are designed to use AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors optimized for server usage, based on the latest "Zen 4" core architecture, which has a max boost speed of up to 5.7 GHz, including PCIe 5.0 support, DDR5-5200 MHz, and up to 16 cores (32 threads) per CPU. The new Supermicro MicroCloud is designed to use the latest system technology for a wide range of applications, including web hosting, cloud gaming, and virtual desktop applications.

"We are expanding our application optimized server product lines to include the latest AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors," said Michael McNerney, VP of Marketing and Security, Supermicro. "These new servers from Supermicro will give IT administrators a compact and high-performance option in order to offer more services with lower latencies to their internal or external customers. By working closely with AMD to optimize the Ryzen 7000 Series firmware for server usage, we can bring a range of solutions with new technologies with PCIe 5.0, DDR5 memory, and very high clock rates to market faster, which allows organizations to reduce costs and offer advanced solutions to their clients."

ASUS today announced ESC N8-E11, its most advanced HGX H100 eight-GPU AI server, along with a comprehensive PCI Express (PCIe) GPU server portfolio—the ESC8000 and ESC4000 series empowered by Intel and AMD platforms to support higher CPU and GPU TDPs to accelerate the development of AI and data science.

ASUS is one of the few HPC solution providers with its own all-dimensional resources that consist of the ASUS server business unit, Taiwan Web Service (TWS) and ASUS Cloud—all part of the ASUS group. This uniquely positions ASUS to deliver in-house AI server design, data-center infrastructure, and AI software-development capabilities, plus a diverse ecosystem of industrial hardware and software partners.

Seagate has recently published a preview of its next generation product hard drive lineup that utilize heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. A company roadmap indicates that the first commercial release of 32 TB capacity HAMR Mach 2 drives is penciled in for a Q3 2023 window, with a short hop to increased storage (40 TB) models predicted for launch in 2024. Seagate is also expected to release 24 TB and 28 TB capacity HDDs - based on the older perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology - at some point in the near future. Technology news outlets anticipate that these two product ranges will co-exist for a while, until Seagate decides to favor its more advanced thermal magnetic storage solution. A lucky data center client has been getting hands-on time with evaluation HAMR hardware, as reported in late April. Seagate has since supplied other enterprise customers with unspecified HAMR HDD models.

Executives at Seagate have been openly discussing their HAMR products - destined to sit in new Corvault server equipment. Gianluca Romano, the company's chief financial officer, mentioned several models during a presentation at the Bank of America 2023 Global Technology conference: "When you go to HAMR, our 32-terabyte (model) is based on 10 disks and 20 heads. So same number of disks and head of the current 20-terabyte PMR...So all the increase is coming through areal density. The following one, 40-terabyte, still (has) the same 10 disks and 20 heads. And also the 50 (TB model), we said at our earnings release, in our lab, we are already running individual disk at 5 terabytes."

NVIDIA and VMware are helping professionals elevate extended reality (XR) by streaming from the cloud with Workspace ONE XR Hub, which includes an integration of NVIDIA CloudXR. Now available, Workspace ONE XR Hub enhances the user experience for VR headsets through advanced authentication and customization options. Combined with the cutting-edge streaming capabilities of CloudXR, Workspace ONE XR Hub enables more professionals, design teams and developers to quickly and securely access complex immersive environments using all-in-one headsets.

Many organizations across industries use XR technologies to boost productivity and enhance creativity. However, teams often come across challenges when it comes to integrating XR into their workflows. That's why NVIDIA and VMware are working together to make it easier for enterprises to adopt augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Whether it's running immersive training sessions or conducting virtual design reviews, professionals can achieve the highest fidelity experience with greater mobility through Workspace ONE XR Hub and CloudXR.

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."

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.

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."

Today at Commercialising Quantum Global 2023, IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), an industry leader in quantum computing, announced the availability of IonQ Aria on Amazon Braket, AWS's quantum computing service. This expands upon IonQ's existing presence on Amazon Braket, following the debut of IonQ's Harmony system on the platform in 2020. With broader access to IonQ Aria, IonQ's flagship system with 25 algorithmic qubits (#AQ)—more than 65,000 times more powerful than IonQ Harmony—users can now explore, design, and run more complex quantum algorithms to tackle some of the most challenging problems of today.

"We are excited for IonQ Aria to become available on Amazon Braket, as we expand the ways users can access our leading quantum computer on the most broadly adopted cloud service provider," said Peter Chapman, CEO and President, IonQ. "Amazon Braket has been instrumental in commercializing quantum, and we look forward to seeing what new approaches will come from the brightest, most curious, minds in the space."

ASUS today announced that TWS, Taiwan's leading AI company, showcased its Formosa Foundation Model at AIHPCcon Taiwan AI Supercomputing Conference. The TWS Formosa Foundation Model is powered by the Taiwania 2 supercomputer and boasts an impressive scale of 176 billion parameters. The theme of this year's annual technology event, held on May 17th, was AI 2.0, Supercomputing, and the New Ecosystem. Numerous startups and AI 2.0 partners were invited to showcase their AI intelligence applications.

The Formosa Foundation Model combines the ability to comprehend and generate text with traditional Chinese semantics, offering enterprise-level generative AI solutions through a novel business model. These solutions provide flexibility, security, and rapid optimization tailored to industry applications while leveraging ecosystem partnerships, creating trusted AI 2.0 opportunities, and driving AI intelligence application innovation to capture the trends and opportunities in AI digital business.

Logitech G, a brand of Logitech and leading innovator of gaming technologies and gear, announced the long awaited launch of the award-winning Logitech G CLOUD Gaming Handheld in Europe starting on 22 May 2023. In addition to North America and Taiwan, Logitech G Cloud will now be available in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, available on LogitechG.com, Amazon, Currys, Fnac, and MSH Electronics for a suggested retail price of $349.99 / €359 / £329.

To celebrate the European launch, Logitech G has worked with its partners to offer a special bundle that includes up to 6 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate which includes Xbox Cloud Gaming, 1 month of NVIDIA GeForce NOW Priority, and 1 month of Shadow PC. It will be available in select countries effective from 22 May to 22 June 2023 while bundle supplies last.

Following the recent block of the Activision-Blizzard merger with Microsoft by the UK regulatory body, Microsoft is partnering with cloud gaming services to bring extra assurance to regulators that the merger will not harm any segment. Today, Microsoft's Vice Chain and President, Brad Smith, published a Tweet that highlighted the latest deal with Nware, a Spanish company providing cloud PCs to gamers that can stream games from Steam, EGS, and Ubisoft Connect accounts. The Tweet noted that "Microsoft and European cloud gaming platform Nware have signed a 10-year agreement to stream PC games built by Xbox on its platform, as well as Activision Blizzard titles after the acquisition closes. While it's still early for the emerging cloud segment in gaming, this new partnership combined with our other recent commitments will make more popular games available on more cloud game streaming services than they are today."

Ericsson is boosting its Open RAN and Cloud RAN ecosystem commitment through an agreement with US-based global ICT industry leader AMD. The agreement - intended to strengthen the Open RAN ecosystem and vendor-agnostic Cloud RAN environment - aims to offer communications service providers (CSPs) a combination of high performance and additional flexibility for open architecture offerings.

The Ericsson-AMD collaboration will see additional processing technologies in the Ericsson Cloud RAN offering. The expanded offering aims to enhance the performance of Cloud RAN and secure high-capacity solutions. The collaboration will enable joint exploration of AMD EPYC processors and T2 Telco accelerator for utilization in Cloud RAN solutions, while also investigating future platform generations of these technologies.

NVIDIA's H100 has recently become available to use via Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to benchmark its performance and compare it to the previous generation's A100 GPU. Today, thanks to the benchmarks of MosaicML, a startup company led by the ex-CEO of Nervana and GM of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Intel, Naveen Rao, we have some comparison between these two GPUs with a fascinating insight about the cost factor. Firstly, MosaicML has taken Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models of various sizes and trained them using bfloat16 and FP8 Floating Point precision formats. All training occurred on CoreWeave cloud GPU instances.

Regarding performance, the NVIDIA H100 GPU achieved anywhere from 2.2x to 3.3x speedup. However, an interesting finding emerges when comparing the cost of running these GPUs in the cloud. CoreWeave prices the H100 SXM GPUs at $4.76/hr/GPU, while the A100 80 GB SXM gets $2.21/hr/GPU pricing. While the H100 is 2.2x more expensive, the performance makes it up, resulting in less time to train a model and a lower price for the training process. This inherently makes H100 more attractive for researchers and companies wanting to train Large Language Models (LLMs) and makes choosing the newer GPU more viable, despite the increased cost. Below, you can see tables of comparison between two GPUs in training time, speedup, and cost of training.

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 Ming-Chi Kuo, an industry analyst known for making accurate predictions about Apple, we have some new information regarding Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors. As Kuo notes, Intel's major Cloud Service Provider (CSP) client, Microsoft, has notified the supply chain that the company is cutting orders of Sapphire Rapids Xeons by 50-70% in the second half of 2023. Interestingly, Intel's supply chain has notified the company to cut chip orders by around 50% amidst weak server demand. This comes straight after Intel's plans to start shipping Sapphire Rapids processors in the second quarter of 2023 and deliver the highly anticipated lineup to customers.

Additionally, Kuo has stated that Intel isn't only competing for clients with AMD but also with Arm-based CPUs. Microsoft also plans to start buying Arm-based server processors made by Ampere Computing in the first half of 2024. This will reduce Microsoft's dependence on x86 architecture and induce higher competition in the market, especially if other CSPs follow.

AMD announced it has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program, a co-sell program for AWS Partners - like AMD - who provide integrated solutions on AWS. The program helps AWS Partners drive new business by directly connecting participating ISVs with the AWS Sales organization.

Through the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, AMD will receive focused co-selling support from AWS, including, access to further sales enablement resources, reduced AWS Marketplace listing fees, and incentives for AWS Sales teams. The program will also allow participating ISVs access to millions of active AWS customers globally.

At the NAB 2023 conference, Seagate Technology, a world leader in data storage infrastructure solutions, and QNAP Systems Inc., a leading network attached storage (NAS) vendor, announced their integrated portfolio of edge to cloud enterprise storage solutions. Developed to help small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) and content creators manage data from edge to cloud, the portfolio delivers a range of innovative enterprise-scale solutions that include Seagate's IronWolf Pro Hard Drives (HDD), QNAP's high-capacity NAS solutions with Exos E series JBOD systems and Seagate Lyve Cloud.

"Businesses that use data at the edge often rely on NAS devices to store their data. As that data capacity increases and requires optimal protection, businesses are faced with the challenge of backing up data off site," said BS Teh, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Seagate. "Seagate and QNAP have come together to address this challenge with an entire portfolio of secure mass capacity data solutions to help SMBs address pain points and address the rising costs of data storage and management."

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."

Today, I'm excited to share how we are expanding Windows 365—your Windows in the cloud—with Windows 365 Frontline. Now in public preview, Windows 365 Frontline helps organizations meet the needs of their entire workforce. We are also delivering Cloud PCs to more devices than ever, with new LG and Motorola integrations.

"Gartner estimates that there are 2.7 billion frontline workers—more than twice the number of desk-based workers." Organizations face unique challenges to meet their IT and workplace experience needs. Companies must scale technology faster and to a much larger population. Equipping all frontline employees with their own devices is not economically feasible for many organizations, particularly when many only require access while on the job. Frontline workers often share physical PCs or kiosks, which some CIOs have told us pose real security and identity challenges. This can inhibit productivity and put critical information like intellectual property or customer data at risk.

On Wednesday, the MLCommons team released the MLPerf 3.0 Inference numbers, and there was an exciting submission from NVIDIA. Reportedly, NVIDIA has used software optimization to improve the already staggering performance of its latest H100 GPU by up to 54%. For reference, NVIDIA's H100 GPU first appeared on MLPerf 2.1 back in September of 2022. In just six months, NVIDIA engineers worked on AI optimizations for the MLPerf 3.0 release to find that basic software optimization can catalyze performance increases anywhere from 7-54%. The workloads for measuring the inferencing speed suite included RNN-T speech recognition, 3D U-Net medical imaging, RetinaNet object detection, ResNet-50 object classification, DLRM recommendation, and BERT 99/99.9% natural language processing.

What is interesting is that NVIDIA's submission is a bit modified. There are open and closed categories that vendors have to compete in, where closed is the mathematical equivalent of a neural network. In contrast, the open category is flexible and allows vendors to submit results based on optimizations for their hardware. The closed submission aims to provide an "apples-to-apples" hardware comparison. Given that NVIDIA opted to use the closed category, performance optimization of other vendors such as Intel and Qualcomm are not accounted for here. Still, it is interesting that optimization can lead to a performance increase of up to 54% in NVIDIA's case with its H100 GPU. Another interesting takeaway is that some comparable hardware, like Qualcomm Cloud AI 100, Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+, and NeuChips's ReccAccel N3000, failed to finish all the workloads. This is shown as "X" on the slides made by NVIDIA, stressing the need for proper ML system software support, which is NVIDIA's strength and an extensive marketing claim.

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.

Amazon is today expanding its Luna cloud gaming service into three new territories - Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. This is the first sign of the online retail giant's goal to broaden the service beyond the initial launch base in the USA. The company is clearly excited to offer their cloud games library to a larger customer base: "Gamers in the U.S. have been enjoying Luna for the past year and we're thrilled to expand the service, giving more customers the opportunity to play high-quality, immersive games without expensive gaming hardware or lengthy downloads."

These new territories have been granted access to Luna's full package which now consists of Ubisoft+, Jackbox Games, and Luna+ subscription services. The Luna app can be launched on 'select devices', which means a wide range of modern bits of kit can run it: Fire TV, Fire Tablets, Windows PCs, Chromebooks, Macs, iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. Amazon confirmed that its Official Luna Wireless Controller is also being made available to customers in Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom - which is an exclusive item to the Amazon Store. It should be noted that you can run other compatible control devices via Bluetooth, including a wireless keyboard and mouse, as well as the Xbox One and PlayStation DualShock 4 gamepads.