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

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

We are constantly improving our safety measures and bringing more systems and tools in place that empower players to respectfully interact with one another - because everyone deserves a place to comfortably be themselves online, free from harassment and bullying. One of the most common questions we get from players through feedback, posts, and appeals is how repeated enforcements impact their gameplay, how they escalate, what they escalate to, and how they know when their account is back in good standing. To help address this, we are introducing a new enforcement strike system.

The new system attaches strikes to every enforcement, ranging in severity based on inappropriate activity. Each player will now have a view of their enforcement history including strikes and the overall impact these have on their player record. This revised system gives players a better understanding of enforcement severity and the cumulative effect of multiple enforcements. Enforcement transparency is about giving players clarity into how their behavior impacts their experience. Our content moderation efforts are not changing as a result of the new enforcement strike system.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2023 third quarter ended July 1, 2023. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $81.8 billion, down 1 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.26, up 5 percent year over year.

"We are happy to report that we had an all-time revenue record in Services during the June quarter, driven by over 1 billion paid subscriptions, and we saw continued strength in emerging markets thanks to robust sales of iPhone," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "From education to the environment, we are continuing to advance our values, while championing innovation that enriches the lives of our customers and leaves the world better than we found it."

A reference to an unreleased Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU specced with 16 GB of VRAM appeared on distributed computing platforms last month. The unusual GRE acronym was a little bit puzzling, but ITHome has recently discovered that this could be the successor to an older GME (Golden Mouse Edition) card. AMD's Radeon RX 590 GME design was released back in March of 2020 to celebrate the year of the Rat or Mouse.

The Chinese zodiac sign for 2023 is the rabbit, hence AMD preparing a Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) for that territory. ITHome proposes that this Radeon RX 7900 non-XT model could field a cut-down version of Team Red's Navi 31 GPU—with its Compute Unit count possibly reduced slightly below the standard 84 CUs, while an allocation of 16 GB of GDDR6 video memory gets coupled to a 256-bit interface (down from the XT's 20 GB and 320-bit). The short report does not provide any release date information or detailed specifications/features, but we can assume that the GRE is highly likely to arrive within the year it is intended to commemorate.

Players come to Xbox to build friendships, be competitive, and to experience incredible games - and they expect to be treated fairly, for interactions to be free of hate or harassment. Our investments in safety have helped players feel safer across text, video, and image - and our new voice reporting experience is the latest addition to our robust suite of family and online safety features.

Starting this week, we are releasing a new platform-wide voice reporting feature to Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead Xbox Insiders, that gives players the option to capture and report inappropriate in-game voice chats. More specifically, this feature equips Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One players with the ability to capture a 60-second video clip of an in-game voice incident that they believe violates our Community Standards and submit it as evidence to our Xbox Safety Team for review. This feature is purpose-built to support the broadest arena of in-game interactions between players and works across thousands of games that offer in-game multiplayer voice chat, including Xbox 360 backward-compatible titles.

NVIDIA could be adjusting its enterprise-grade GPU production strategies for the Chinese market, according to an article published by MyDriver—despite major sanctions placed on semiconductor imports, Team Green is doing plenty of business with tech firms operating in the region thanks to an uptick in AI-related activities. NVIDIA offers two market specific accelerator models that have been cut down to conform to rules and regulations—the more powerful and expensive (250K RMB/~$35K) H800 is an adaptation of the western H100 GPU, while the A800 is a legal market alternative to the older A100.

The report proposes that NVIDIA is considering plans to reduce factory output of the A800 (sold for 100K RMB/~$14K per unit), so clients will be semi-forced into purchasing the higher-end H800 model instead (if they require a significant number of GPUs). The A800 seems to be the more popular choice for the majority of companies at the moment, with the heavy hitters—Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Jitwei and ByteDance—flexing their spending muscles and splurging on mixed shipments of the two accelerators. By limiting supplies of the lesser A800, Team Green could be generating more profit by prioritizing the more expensive (and readily available) model.

Chinese tech tipster Golden Pig Upgrade has turned its attention to Intel's Meteor Lake processor series—they believe that hardware partners are putting qualification samples (QS) through the ringer. The short Bilibili social media post proposes that these laptop-oriented prototypes sport six high-performance Redwood Cove cores running at 4.80 GHz, eight energy-efficient Crestmont cores, as well as two low-power Crestmont cores. Apparently the unit's TDP can be adjusted—starting at 20 W, and going up to 65 W. Golden Pig Upgrade was also informed about a Core Ultra 9 model capable of hitting 5.0 GHz (or greater) maximum CPU clocks.

The qualification sample's integrated graphics processing unit is reportedly based on the Xe-LPG architecture—some experts reckon that this could offer performance (4.5 FP32 TFLOPS) comparable to Arc A380 or A370M discrete solutions. The sampled iGPU could feature up to 128 execution units (so equivalent to 1024 stream processors, as well as 8 Xe clusters)—insider sources allege that units can boost to a maximum of 2.2 GHz. It will be interesting to observe how this will stack up against AMD's Radeon 780M iGPU—which is theoretically in a similar ballpark (4.3 FP32 TFLOPS).

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today announced results for its third quarter of fiscal 2023, which ended June 1, 2023.

"Micron delivered fiscal third quarter revenue, gross margin, and EPS all above the midpoint of the guidance range," said Micron Technology President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. "We believe that the memory industry has passed its trough in revenue, and we expect margins to improve as industry supply-demand balance is gradually restored. The recent Cyberspace Administration of China ("CAC") decision is a significant headwind that is impacting our outlook and slowing our recovery. Longer-term, Micron's technology leadership, product portfolio, and operational excellence continues to strengthen our competitive positioning across diverse growth markets, including AI and memory-centric computing."

TrendForce reports that the global top 10 foundries witnessed a significant 18.6% QoQ decline in revenue during the first quarter of 2023. This decline—amounting to approximately US$27.3 billion—can be attributed to sustained weak end-market demand and the compounded effects of the off-peak season. The rankings also underwent notable changes, with GlobalFoundries surpassing UMC to secure the third position, and Tower Semiconductor surpassing PSMC and VIS to claim the seventh spot.

Declining capacity utilization rate and shipment volume contribute to widened revenue decline
The revenue decline in Q1 was primarily influenced by declining capacity utilization rates and shipment volume across the top 10 foundries. For instance, TSMC generated US$16.74 billion in revenue—marking a 16.2% QoQ drop in revenue. Weakened demand for mainstream applications such as laptops and smartphones led to a significant decline in the utilization rates and revenue of the 7/6 nm and 5/4 nm processes, falling over 20% and 17%, respectively. While the second quarter may see temporary relief coming from rush orders, the persistently low capacity utilization rate indicates that revenue is likely to continue declining, albeit at a slower pace compared to Q1.

Mark Liu, the executive Chairman of TSMC, has responded to recent reports released by the North American media about supposedly challenging workplace conditions. Current and former employees of the company's U.S operation have taken anonymously to Glassdoor to complain about "brutal" treatment on behalf of TSMC leadership—resulting in a 27% overall approval rating, which sits unfavorably next to the scores of nearby competitors—for example Intel gets 85%, albeit from far more user submissions. Liu has made comments to a Taiwanese news outlet (Focus Taiwan) where he suggests that: "those who are unwilling to take shifts should not enter the industry, since this field isn't just about lucrative wages but rather a passion for (semiconductors)."

TSMC is trying to meet staffing targets for its Phoenix, Arizona operation, but early feedback and difficult residential living could stifle this recruitment drive. Liu thinks that his North American division will offer potential employees a workplace culture that is unlike the one set for crew back in Taiwan. He told the local reporter that American TSMC team members will have an easier time, relative to how things are run at the company's native facilities. He also states that leadership is open to discussions with NA workers, as long as company values are followed (to a tee).

According to the report from Reuters, Acer has apparently continued shipment of computer hardware to Russia, despite the firm supposedly suspending its operations in the country. With the war in Ukraine, on April 8 of, 2022, Acer published a statement: "Due to recent developments, Acer has decided to suspend its business in Russia." However, today Reuters reports that it has gained access to documents/data of customs that confirm that Acer has shipped computer hardware worth at least 70.4 million US Dollars between the period of April 8, 2022, and March 31, 2023.

Interestingly, Acer is a firm headquartered in Taiwan. However, Switzerland-based Acer Sales International SA entity shipped these units to Russia, thus not violating any Taiwanese sanctions to Russia that are in place. When asked about these shipments, Acer in Taiwan responded: "We strictly adhere to applicable international regulations and trade laws regarding exports to Russia." Additionally, the company stated that the Swiss subsidiary "had not shipped any laptops or desktops to Russia since April 8 last year." Still, instead, it had supplied a "limited number of displays and accessories to the Russian market for civilian daily use while ensuring compliance with international sanctions."

IGN has been informed by inside sources that Electronic Arts is in negotiations to "offload" ongoing development and support of BioWare's long running MMORPG "Star Wars: The Old Republic" to a third party studio. In a news article published yesterday speculation points to Broadsword Online Games being the prime candidate to takeover a franchise that has been kept alive since December 2011. Broadsword was established about a decade ago by Rob Denton - a former BioWare Vice President and co-founder of Mythic Entertainment - his team currently oversees the running of Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. The IGN news piece notes that Denton previously worked on Star Wars: The Old Republic during its incubation period.

Electronic Arts has since caught wind of IGN's report and provided the news site with their own statement today: "Almost 12 years after launch, Star Wars: The Old Republic remains a success and continues to grow its dedicated and passionate community. We're so proud of the work the team has done, and the future of the game and the community continues to be very bright. 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." The spokesperson's wording on the matter does not fully confirm that Broadsword is fully confirmed to takeover, but IGN's inside information posits that Electronic Arts will remain as the franchise publisher, while BioWare will concentrate on the development of its single-player intellectual properties (Dragon Age and Mass Effect).

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.

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2023. The Company posted KRW 63.75 trillion in consolidated revenue, a 10% decline from the previous quarter, as overall consumer spending slowed amid the uncertain global macroeconomic environment. Operating profit was KRW 0.64 trillion as the DS (Device Solutions) Division faced decreased demand, while profit in the DX (Device eXperience) Division increased.

The DS Division's profit declined from the previous quarter due to weak demand in the Memory Business, a decline in utilization rates in the Foundry Business and continued weak demand and inventory adjustments from customers. Samsung Display Corporation (SDC) saw earnings in the mobile panel business decline quarter-on-quarter amid a market contraction, while the large panel business slightly narrowed its losses. The DX Division's results improved on the back of strong sales of the premium Galaxy S23 series as well as an enhanced sales mix focusing on premium TVs.

Personal computers (PCs) based on Arm architecture will grow in popularity and their market share will almost double from 14% now to 25% by 2027, according to Counterpoint Research's latest projections. The ability of Arm-based hardware to run Mac OS has allowed Apple to capture 90% of the Arm-based notebook computer market. However, the full support of Windows and Office365 and the speed of native Arm-based app adoption are also critical factors in determining the Arm SoC penetration rate in PCs. Once these factors are addressed, Arm-based PCs will become a viable option for both daily users and businesses.

As more existing PC OEMs/ODMs and smartphone manufacturers enter the market, they will bring their expertise in Arm-based hardware and software, which will further boost the popularity of Arm-based PCs. The availability of more native Arm-based apps will also increase user comfort and familiarity with the platform. Overall, the trend towards Arm-based PCs is expected to continue and their market share will likely increase significantly in the coming years.

or the fifth consecutive month, International Data Corporation (IDC) has lowered its 2023 forecast for worldwide IT spending as technology investments continue to show the impact of a weakening economy. In its new monthly forecast for worldwide IT spending growth, IDC projects overall growth this year in constant currency of 4.4% to $3.25 trillion. This is slightly down from 4.5% in the previous month's forecast and represents a swing from a 6.0% growth forecast in October 2022.

"Since the fourth quarter of last year, we have seen clear and measurable signs of a moderate pullback in some areas of IT spending," said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC's Data & Analytics research group. "Tech spending remains resilient compared to historical economic downturns and other types of business spending, but rising interest rates are now impacting capital spending."

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.

Although NAND suppliers have continued to roll back production, there is still an oversupply of NAND Flash as demand for products such as servers, smartphones, and notebooks is still too weak. Therefore, TrendForce predicts that the ASP of NAND Flash will continue to fall in 2Q23, though that decline may shrink to 5~10%. The key to supply and demand returning to a market equilibrium lies in whether NAND suppliers can cut back on production even more. TrendForce believes if demand remains stable, then the ASP of NAND Flash will have an opportunity to rebound in 4Q23; if demand is weaker than expected, then ASP will take longer to recover.

Client SSD: Currently, PC OEM's have managed to liquidate most of their component inventory, and are now gearing up in preparation for mid-year sales events. Suppliers are cutting prices to clear out their inventories of PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, which are gradually being phased out. Meanwhile, prices of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs continue to face downward pressure due to a slow intake of new customer orders. The continuous decline of QLC products in 1Q23 has also dragged down the prices of TLC products, and there is relatively little room for prices to keep falling in 2Q23. While it still remains unclear whether or not demand will recover, TrendForce projects that the prices of PC client SSDs will drop 5~10% in 2Q23.

Amid the US sanctions, Chinese technology giant Huawei has reportedly developed tools to create processors with 14 nm and above lithography. According to Chinese media Yicai, Huawei and its semiconductor partners have teamed up to create replacement tools in place of US chip toolmakers like Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor/Siemens. These three companies control all of the world's Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools used for every step of chip design, from architecture to placement and routing to the final physical layout. Many steps need to be taken before making a tapeout of a physical chip, and Huawei's newly developed EDA tools will help the Chinese industry with US sanctions which crippled Huawei for a long time.

Having no access to US-made chipmaking tools, Huawei has invested substantial time into making these EDA tools. However, with competing EDA makers supporting lithography way below 14 nm, Huawei's job still needs to be completed. Chinese semiconductor factories are currently capable of 7 nm chip production, and Huawei itself is working on making a sub-7 nm EUV scanner to aid manufacturing goals and compete with the latest from TSMC and other. If Huawei can create EUV scanners that can achieve transistor sizes smaller than 7 nm, we expect to see their EDA tools keep pace as well. It is only a matter of time before they announce adaptation for smaller nodes.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the global foundry market, electronics brands began adjusting their inventories in 2Q22, but foundries were unable to rapidly adapt to this development because they reside in the more upper portion of the supply chain. Moreover, revising procurement quantities of long-term foundry contracts takes time as well. Hence, only some tier-2 and -3 foundries were able to immediately respond to the changes in their clients' demand. Also, among them, 8-inch wafer foundries made a more pronounced reduction in their capacity utilization rates. As for the remaining foundries, the downward corrections that they made to their capacity utilization rates did not become noticeable until 4Q22. Hence, in 4Q22, the quarterly total revenue of the global top 10 foundries registered a QoQ decline for the first time after 13 consecutive quarters of positive growth. The quarterly total revenue of the top 10 foundries came to US$33,530 million, reflecting a drop of 4.7% from 3Q22. Moving into 1Q23, TrendForce projects that the quarterly total revenue of the top 10 will show an even steeper drop on account of seasonality and the uncertain macroeconomic situation.

GlobalFoundries Inc. (GF) (Nasdaq: GFS) today announced preliminary financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2022.

Key Fourth Quarter Financial Highlights
Revenue of $2,101 million, up 14% year-over-year.
Gross margin of 29.6% and adjusted gross margin of 30.1%.
Net income of $668 million.
Adjusted EBITDA of $821 million.
Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $3,346 million.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2023 first quarter ended December 31, 2022. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $117.2 billion, down 5 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.88.

"As we all continue to navigate a challenging environment, we are proud to have our best lineup of products and services ever, and as always, we remain focused on the long term and are leading with our values in everything we do," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "During the December quarter, we achieved a major milestone and are excited to report that we now have more than 2 billion active devices as part of our growing installed base."

Intel Corporation today reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 financial results. The company also announced that its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.365 per share on the company's common stock, which will be payable on March 1, 2023, to shareholders of record as of February 7, 2023.

"Despite the economic and market headwinds, we continued to make good progress on our strategic transformation in Q4, including advancing our product roadmap and improving our operational structure and processes to drive efficiencies while delivering at the low-end of our guided range," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "In 2023, we will continue to navigate the short-term challenges while striving to meet our long-term commitments, including delivering leadership products anchored on open and secure platforms, powered by at-scale manufacturing and supercharged by our incredible team."

Corsair Gaming, Inc. ("Corsair" or the "Company"), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators, today announced financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. Andy Paul, Chief Executive Officer of Corsair, stated, "We achieved 10% sequential revenue growth from Q2 2022 to Q3 2022, while significantly reducing our channel inventory in what remains a challenging environment. Sales out levels from our Channel to Consumers were significantly above pre-pandemic levels in almost all product lines and were above the year ago level in many of our product categories.

As we mentioned in previous quarters, the self-built PC market has been held back over the past 2 years, as high demand for GPU cards from crypto miners caused GPU prices to rise and in some cases double. Now that Crypto mining can no longer utilize graphics cards as they used to, GPU demand has since normalized resulting in a decline in prices back to standard MSRP or below. We are already seeing the positive effects of this on the market.

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2022 fourth quarter ended September 24, 2022. The Company posted a September quarter record revenue of $90.1 billion, up 8 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.29, up 4 percent year over year. Annual revenue was $394.3 billion, up 8 percent year over year, and annual earnings per diluted share were $6.11, up 9 percent year over year.

"This quarter's results reflect Apple's commitment to our customers, to the pursuit of innovation, and to leaving the world better than we found it," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "As we head into the holiday season with our most powerful lineup ever, we are leading with our values in every action we take and every decision we make. We are deeply committed to protecting the environment, to securing user privacy, to strengthening accessibility, and to creating products and services that can unlock humanity's full creative potential."