AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2024 of $5.5 billion, gross margin of 47%, operating income of $36 million, net income of $123 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.07. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 52%, operating income was $1.1 billion, net income was $1.0 billion and diluted earnings per share was $0.62.

"We delivered strong first quarter results with our Data Center and Client segments each growing more than 80% year-over-year driven by the ramp of MI300 AI accelerator shipments and the adoption of our Ryzen and EPYC processors," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "This is an incredibly exciting time for the industry as widespread deployment of AI is driving demand for significantly more compute across a broad range of markets. We are executing very well as we ramp our data center business and enable AI capabilities across our product portfolio."

Leaked Samsung PBSSD presentation material popped up online a couple of days prior to the kick-off day of NVIDIA's GTC 2024 conference (March 18)—reports (at the time) jumped on the potential introduction of a "petabyte (PB)-level SSD solution," alongside an enterprise subscription service for the US market. Tom's Hardware took the time to investigate this matter—in-person—on the showroom floor up in San Jose, California. It turns out that interpretations of pre-event information were slightly off—according to on-site investigations: "despite the name, PBSSD is not a petabyte-scale solid-state drive (Samsung's highest-capacity drive can store circa 240 TB), but rather a 'petascale' storage system that can scale-out all-flash storage capacity to petabytes."

Samsung showcased a Supermicro Petascale server design, but a lone unit is nowhere near capable of providing a petabyte of storage—the Tom's Hardware reporter found out that the demonstration model housed: "sixteen 15.36 TB SSDs, so for now the whole 1U unit can only pack up to 245.76 TB of 3D NAND storage (which is pretty far from a petabyte), so four of such units will be needed to store a petabyte of data." Company representatives also had another Supermicro product at their booth: "(an) H13 all-flash petascale system with CXL support that can house eight E3.S SSDs (with) four front-loading E3.S CXL bays for memory expansion."

Imagine a world where you can whisper your digital wishes into your device, and poof, it happens. That world may be coming sooner than you think. But if you're worried about AI doing your thinking for you, you might be waiting for a while. In a fireside chat Wednesday (March 20) at NVIDIA GTC, the global AI conference, Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue, and Bryan Catanzaro, VP of applied deep learning research at NVIDIA, challenged many of the clichés that have long dominated conversations about AI. Launched in October 2022, Imbue made headlines with its Series B fundraiser last year, raising over $200 million at a $1 billion valuation.

The Future of Personal Computing
Qiu and Catanzaro discussed the role that virtual worlds will play in this, and how they could serve as interfaces for human-technology interaction. "I think it's pretty clear that AI is going to help build virtual worlds," said Catanzaro. "I think the maybe more controversial part is virtual worlds are going to be necessary for humans to interact with AI." People have an almost primal fear of being displaced, Catanzaro said, but what's much more likely is that our capabilities will be amplified as the technology fades into the background. Catanzaro compared it to the adoption of electricity. A century ago, people talked a lot about electricity. Now that it's ubiquitous, it's no longer the focus of broader conversations, even as it makes our day-to-day lives better.

Jensen Huang has been talking to media outlets following the conclusion of his keynote presentation at NVIDIA's GTC 2024 conference—an NBC TV "exclusive" interview with the Team Green boss has caused a stir in tech circles. Jim Cramer's long-running "Squawk on the Street" trade segment hosted Huang for just under five minutes—NBC's presenter labelled the latest edition of GTC the "Woodstock of AI." NVIDIA's leader reckoned that around $1 trillion of industry was in attendance at this year's event—folks turned up to witness the unveiling of "Blackwell" B200 and GB200 AI GPUs. In the interview, Huang estimated that his company had invested around $10 billion into the research and development of its latest architecture: "we had to invent some new technology to make it possible."

Industry watchdogs have seized on a major revelation—as disclosed during the televised NBC report—Huang revealed that his next-gen AI GPUs "will cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit." NVIDIA (and its rivals) are not known to publicly announce price ranges for AI and HPC chips—leaks from hardware partners and individuals within industry supply chains are the "usual" sources. An investment banking company has already delved into alleged Blackwell production costs—as shared by Tae Kim/firstadopter: "Raymond James estimates it will cost NVIDIA more than $6000 to make a B200 and they will price the GPU at a 50-60% premium to H100...(the bank) estimates it costs NVIDIA $3320 to make the H100, which is then sold to customers for $25,000 to $30,000." Huang's disclosure should be treated as an approximation, since his company (normally) deals with the supply of basic building blocks.

Samsung Electronics is all set to discuss the future of AI, alongside Jensen Huang, at NVIDIA's upcoming GTC 2024 conference. South Korean insiders have leaked the company's intentions, only days before the event's March 18 kickoff time. Their recently unveiled 36 GB HBM3E 12H DRAM product is expected to be the main focus of official presentations—additionally, a new storage subscription service is marked down for a possible live introduction. An overall "Redefining AI Infrastructure" presentation could include—according to BusinessKorea—a planned launch of: "petabyte (PB)-level SSD solution, dubbed 'PBSSD,' along with a subscription service in the US market within the second quarter (of 2024) to address the era of ultra-high-capacity data."

A Samsung statement—likely sourced from leaked material—summarized this business model: "the subscription service will help reduce initial investment costs in storage infrastructure for our customers and cut down on maintenance expenses." Under agreed upon conditions, customers are not required to purchasing ultra-high-capacity SSD solutions outright: "enterprises using the service can flexibly utilize SSD storage without the need to build separate infrastructure, while simultaneously receiving various services from Samsung Electronics related to storage management, security, and upgrades." A special session—"The Value of Storage as a Service for AI/ML and Data Analysis"—is alleged to be on the company's GTC schedule.

San Francisco's annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) returns next week, bringing game devs together to share stories, experiences, and advice on everything from lighting scenes to writing resumes. Electronic Arts speakers will be participating in more than 25 in-person sessions this year, including multiple talks touching on innovative technologies driving the creation of next-gen games at EA.

This year's tech-focused sessions dig into the details of several successes, including Frostbite's non-interruptive expansion to new gaming platforms, SEED's work generating photorealistic facial rigs, and techniques for high-fidelity cloth simulation in Frostbite for EA SPORTS FC 24. There's also a fantastic talk from Respawn's Christopher Pierse and Samy Duc that explores the evolution of matchmaking techniques in Apex Legends, going all the way back to 2019.

NVIDIA's GTC 2024 AI conference will set the stage for another leap forward in AI. At the heart of this highly anticipated event: the opening keynote by Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's visionary founder and CEO, who speaks on Monday, March 18, at 1 p.m. Pacific, at the SAP Center in San Jose, California.

Planning Your GTC Experience
There are two ways to watch. Register to attend GTC in person to secure a spot for an immersive experience at the SAP Center. The center is a short walk from the San Jose Convention Center, where the rest of the conference takes place. Doors open at 11 a.m., and badge pickup starts at 10:30 a.m. The keynote will also be livestreamed at www.nvidia.com/gtc/keynote/.

Optoma, a world-leading manufacturer of large display solutions and the No.1 4K UHD brand and the No.1 DLP brand worldwide and in the Americas, announces its new N-Series Professional Displays with intuitive, user-friendly software for business professionals to connect, present, and collaborate globally, both in-person and remotely. Featuring portrait and landscape orientation, Optoma's N-Series is built for use in corporate lobbies, reception areas, conference rooms, lecture halls, digital signage, and other professional environments.

In response to the growing demand for commercial display solutions, Optoma designed the N-Series Professional Displays to enhance the current conferencing setups of corporate and education settings and accommodate hybrid work and distance-learning scenarios. Engineered for simplified connectivity and heightened engagement.

NVIDIA is offering a new professional certification in generative AI to enable developers to establish technical credibility in this important domain. Generative AI is revolutionizing industries worldwide, yet there's a critical skills gap and need to uplevel employees to more fully harness the technology. Available for the first time from NVIDIA, this new professional certification enables developers, career professionals, and others to validate and showcase their generative AI skills and expertise. Our new professional certification program introduces two associate-level generative AI certifications, focusing on proficiency in large language models and multimodal workflow skills.

"Generative AI has moved to center stage as governments, industries and organizations everywhere look to harness its transformative capabilities," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently said. The certification will become available starting at GTC, where in-person attendees can also access recommended training to prepare for a certification exam. "Organizations in every industry need to increase their expertise in this transformative technology," said Greg Estes, VP of developer programs at NVIDIA. "Our goals are to assist in upskilling workforces, sharpen the skills of qualified professionals, and enable individuals to demonstrate their proficiency in order to gain a competitive advantage in the job market."

Morris Chang, TSMC's founder and semiconductor industry icon, was present at the opening ceremony of his company's new semiconductor fabrication plant in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. According to a Nikkei Asia article, Chang predicted that the nation will experience "a chip renaissance" during his February 24 commencement speech. The Japanese government also announced that it will supply an additional ¥732 billion ($4.86 billion) in subsidies for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to expand semiconductor operations on the island of Kyūshū. Economy Minister Ken Saito stated: "TSMC is the most important partner for Japan in realizing digital transformation, and its Kumamoto factory is an important contributor for us to stably procure cutting-edge logic chips that is extremely essential for the future of industries in Japan."

Chang disclosed some interesting insights during last weekend's conference segment—according to Nikkei's report, he revealed that unnamed TSMC customers had made some outlandish requests: "They are not talking about tens of thousands of wafers. They are talking about fabs, (saying): 'We need so many fabs. We need three fabs, five fabs, 10 fabs.' Well, I can hardly believe that one." The Taiwanese chip manufacturing giant reportedly has the resources to create a new "Gigafab" within reasonable timeframes, but demands for (up to) ten new plants are extremely fanciful. Chang set expectations at a reasonable level—he predicted that demand for AI processors would lie somewhere in the middle ground: "between tens of thousands of wafers and tens of fabs." Past insider reports suggested that OpenAI has been discussing the formation of a proprietary fabrication network, with proposed investments of roughly $5 to $7 trillion. OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, reportedly engaged in talks with notable contract chip manufacturers—The Wall Street Journal posited that TSMC would be an ideal partner.

Brett Simpson, Partner and Co-Founder of Arete Research, sat down with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster during the former's "Investor Webinar Conference." A transcript of the Arete + AMD question and answer session appeared online last week—the documented fireside chat concentrated mostly on "AI compute market" topics. Papermaster was asked about his company's competitive approach when taking on NVIDIA's very popular range of A100 and H100 AI GPUs, as well as the recently launched GH200 chip. The CTO did not reveal any specific pricing strategies—a "big picture" was painted instead: "I think what's important when you just step back is to look at total cost of ownership, not just one GPU, one accelerator, but total cost of ownership. But now when you also look at the macro, if there's not competition in the market, you're going to see not only a growth of the price of these devices due to the added content that they have, but you're -- without a check and balance, you're going to see very, very high margins, more than that could be sustained without a competitive environment."

Papermaster continued: "And what I think is very key with -- as AMD has brought competition market for these most powerful AI training and inference devices is you will see that check and balance. And we have a very innovative approach. We've been a leader in chiplet design. And so we have the right technology for the right purpose of the AI build-out that we do. We have, of course, a GPU accelerator. But there's many other circuitry associated with being able to scale and build out these large clusters, and we're very, very efficient in our design." Team Red started to ship its flagship accelerator, Instinct MI300X, to important customers at the start of 2024—Arete Research's Simpson asked about the possibility of follow-up models. In response, AMD's CTO referenced some recent history: "Well, I think the first thing that I'll highlight is what we did to arrive at this point, where we are a competitive force. We've been investing for years in building up our GPU road map to compete in both HPC and AI. We had a very, very strong harbor train that we've been on, but we had to build our muscle in the software enablement."

Make sure it's in your diaries: a new edition of NACON Connect will take place on 29 February at 19:00 CET. The French games publisher will use this conference as an opportunity to make some new announcements, and share with gamers from all over the globe new info on its two activities: video games and gaming accessories. This new edition is set to feature 30 minutes of all-new videos showcasing the company's accessories, as well as its action-adventure, sports and simulation games, including: Ravenswatch, Crown Wars: The Black Prince, GreedFall II: The Dying World, Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, the new game based on the world of Terminator, plus a few other announcements.

The conference is set to be followed by a post-show, during which the developers of will share some new info about the game on their Twitch page. Gamers can log in at the end of the conference on Steam to check out more gameplay from their favorite titles. Visit NACON's official channels on 29 February at 7:00 PM CET / 10 AM PST to follow the announcements and share your reactions live.

Logitech has announced that all video collaboration devices that run on the CollabOS operating system will now be manufactured with next-life plastics, helping enterprise customers support their sustainability objectives. Existing products- Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, Tap IP, Tap Scheduler, and Scribe- are being refreshed with materials that lower the carbon impact of each product. This provides organizations with a partner that in turn helps position them to better manage their carbon footprint. "By transitioning our portfolio of conference room devices to a lower product carbon footprint, we are helping other companies navigate their sustainability challenges," said Prakash Arunkundrum, Chief Operating Officer at Logitech. "We're not only designing and manufacturing new products with recycled plastic and other lower carbon materials, but refreshing existing products to provide IT leaders with a new way to evaluate their workplace technology investment in conference room systems—one that includes people and planet. We do this without increasing prices or compromising the highest quality and performance companies expect from Logitech."

"By transitioning our portfolio of conference room devices to a lower product carbon footprint, we are helping other companies navigate their sustainability challenges," said Prakash Arunkundrum, Chief Operating Officer at Logitech. "We're not only designing and manufacturing new products with recycled plastic and other lower carbon materials, but refreshing existing products to provide IT leaders with a new way to evaluate their workplace technology investment in conference room systems - one that includes people and planet. We do this without increasing prices or compromising the highest quality and performance companies expect from Logitech." Efforts to reduce negative environmental impact have rapidly become a business imperative. In a recent survey of IT professionals by analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, 65% say that becoming a leader in environmental, social, governance and sustainability practices is a critical or very important business objective in the coming year.

"This year, every industry will become a technology industry," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees last Wednesday during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. "You can now recognize and learn the language of almost anything with structure, and you can translate it to anything with structure—so text-protein, protein-text," Huang said in a fireside chat with Martin Chavez, partner and vice chairman of global investment firm Sixth Street Partners and board chair of Recursion, a biopharmaceutical company. "This is the generative AI revolution."

The conversation, which took place at the historic San Francisco Mint, followed a presentation at the J.P. Morgan conference Monday by Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's VP of healthcare. In her talk, Powell announced that Recursion is the first hosting partner to offer a foundation model through the NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud service, which is advancing into beta this month. She also said that Amgen, one of the first companies to employ BioNeMo, plans to advance drug discovery with generative AI and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD—and that BioNeMo is used by a growing number of techbio companies, pharmas, AI software vendors and systems integrators. Among them are Deloitte, Innophore, Insilico Medicine, OneAngstrom, Recursion and Terray Therapeutics.

During the recent IEDM conference, TSMC previewed its process roadmap for delivering next-generation chip packages packing over one trillion transistors by 2030. This aligns with similar long-term visions from Intel. Such enormous transistor counts will come through advanced 3D packaging of multiple chipsets. But TSMC also aims to push monolithic chip complexity higher, ultimately enabling 200 billion transistor designs on a single die. This requires steady enhancement of TSMC's planned N2, N2P, N1.4, and N1 nodes, which are slated to arrive between now and the end of the decade. While multi-chipset architectures are currently gaining favor, TSMC asserts both packaging density and raw transistor density must scale up in tandem. Some perspective on the magnitude of TSMC's goals include NVIDIA's 80 billion transistor GH100 GPU—among today's largest chips, excluding wafer-scale designs from Cerebras.

Yet TSMC's roadmap calls for more than doubling that, first with over 100 billion transistor monolithic designs, then eventually 200 billion. Of course, yields become more challenging as die sizes grow, which is where advanced packaging of smaller chiplets becomes crucial. Multi-chip module offerings like AMD's MI300X and Intel's Ponte Vecchio already integrate dozens of tiles, with PVC having 47 tiles. TSMC envisions this expansion to chip packages housing more than a trillion transistors via its CoWoS, InFO, 3D stacking, and many other technologies. While the scaling cadence has recently slowed, TSMC remains confident in achieving both packaging and process breakthroughs to meet future density demands. The foundry's continuous investment ensures progress in unlocking next-generation semiconductor capabilities. But physics ultimately dictates timelines, no matter how aggressive the roadmap.

The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.

Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s - unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

Cisco today unveiled the next milestone of its ongoing work with NVIDIA to deliver AI-powered meetings for hybrid workers. Cisco announced the launch of Room Kit EQX and the expansion of its Cinematic Meetings capabilities—both powered by NVIDIA's AI engine—with the goal of enhancing collaboration experiences with audio and video intelligence and enabling more equitable hybrid meetings.

"In order for people to want to come to the office, companies must fundamentally reimagine and reconfigure workspaces to provide seamless and immersive collaboration experience," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Security and Collaboration. "Our collaboration with NVIDIA helps make this possible as we expand our portfolio of AI-powered solutions that unlock the potential of hybrid workers."

In an extraordinary leap forward for the chiplet industry, the groundbreaking collaboration between the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) and JEDEC is set to usher in a new era of innovation. By merging the capabilities and open standards of OCP's Chiplet Data Extensible Markup Language (CDXML) and JEDEC's JEP30 PartModel Guidelines, this partnership, initiated in late 2022, promises to revolutionize chiplet design, manufacturing and integration. The result will be a unified structure that supports both chiplets and general electronic parts within the overarching purview of JEDEC.

In a significant development, the integration of OCP CDXML into JEP30 has reached a critical milestone, enabling chiplet builders to provide standardized chiplet part descriptions to their customers electronically. This advancement opens the door to automating System in Package (SiP) design and assembly using chiplets. The chiplet descriptions encompass crucial information for SiP builders, including thermal properties, physical and mechanical requirements, behavior specifications, power and signal integrity properties, testing in-package and security parameters.

According to sources close to The Information, Microsoft is supposed to unveil details about its upcoming custom silicon design for accelerating AI workloads. Allegedly, the incoming chip announcement is scheduled for November during Microsoft's annual Ignite conference. Held in Seattle from November 14 to 17, the conference is supposed to show all of the work that the company has been doing in the field of AI. The alleged launch of an AI chip will undoubtedly take center stage in the announcement, as the demand for AI accelerators has been so great that companies can't get their hands on GPUs. The sector is mainly dominated by NVIDIA, with its H100 and A100 GPUs powering most of the AI infrastructure worldwide.

With the launch of a custom AI chip codenamed Athena, Microsoft hopes to match or beat the performance of NVIDIA's offerings and reduce the cost of AI infrastructure. As the price of H100 GPU can get up to 30,000 US Dollars, building a data center filled with H100s can cost hundreds of millions. The cost could be winded down using homemade chips, and Microsoft could be less dependent on NVIDIA to provide the backbone of AI servers needed in the coming years. Nevertheless, we are excited to see what the company has prepared, and we will report on the Microsoft Ignite announcement in November.

TSMC Chairman Mark Liu was asked to comment on all things artificial intelligence-related at the SEMICON Taiwan 2023 industry event. According to a Nikkei Asia report, he foresees supply constraints lasting until the tail end of 2024: "It's not the shortage of AI chips. It's the shortage of our chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (COWOS) capacity...Currently, we can't fulfill 100% of our customers' needs, but we try to support about 80%. We think this is a temporary phenomenon. After our expansion of advanced chip packaging capacity, it should be alleviated in one and a half years." He cites a recent and very "sudden" spike in demand for COWOS, with numbers tripling within the span of a year. Market leader NVIDIA relies on TSMC's advanced packaging system—most notably with the production of highly-prized A100 and H100 series Tensor Core compute GPUs.

These issues are deemed a "temporary" problem—it could take around 18 months to eliminate production output "bottlenecks." TSMC is racing to bolster its native activities with new facilities—plans for a new $2.9 billion advanced chip packaging plant (in Miaoli County) were disclosed during summer time. Liu reckons that industry-wide innovation is necessary to meet growing demand through new methods to "connect, package and stack chips." Liu elaborated: "We are now putting together many chips into a tightly integrated massive interconnect system. This is a paradigm shift in semiconductor technology integration." The TSMC boss reckons that processing units fielding over one trillion transistors are viable within the next decade: "it's through packaging with multiple chips that this could be possible.".

FSP has declared that it intends to update its entire 2023 PSU product lineup to include the latest "12V-2x6" power connector (part of the ATX 3.0 standard)—harukaze5719 posted about this development earlier today, citing a Quasarzone article. We heard mid-summer about PCI-SIG plowing ahead on an all-new ATX 3.0 connector to replace the 16-pin (12+4) 12VHPWR plug. They hope to introduce some key improvements with their new design, mainly in the areas of ease-of-use and safety.

TPU staffers had hands-on time with FSP's 2023 PSU product line at their Computex 2023 booth, showcased units were equipped with 16-pin 12VHPWR (at the time). Quasarzone's report (covering a recent press conference) has the following FSP power supply families listed with updates to the new "12V-2x6" standard: Hydro G PRO 1200 W ATX 3.0, Hydro PTM X PRO ATX 3.0 and Dagger PRO ATX 3.0.

Seagate has revealed that it has received revenue for Exos Corvault systems during a fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 conference call—the latest server range is equipped with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) hard drives. We heard about evaluation samples being sent out to an important data center client around Spring time, but fresh corporate announcements have revealed that the first commercial HAMR-based systems have been picked up by paying customers. Gianluca Romano, the firm's chief financial officer stated: "Importantly, we shipped our first HAMR-based CORVAULT system for revenue as planned during the June quarter. We expect broader availability of these CORVAULT systems by the end of calendar 2023."

Seagate's chief executive, Dave Mosley, also revealed that higher capacity HAMR-based nearline hard drives have been sent out for testing in the field. He boasts that this was achieved during corporate cost cutting initiatives: "We reduced production output by approximately 25% compared with peak volume in order to drive better supply/demand dynamics and enhance profitability as the markets recover. And all of these accomplishments were made while delivering on our 30 TB+ HAMR product development and qualification milestones with volume ramp on track to begin in early calendar 2024...Initial customer qualifications are progressing well. We are on track to begin volume ramp in early calendar 2024. We are also preparing qualifications with a broader number of customers, including testing for lower capacity drives targeting VIA and enterprise OEM workloads." He also outlined plans to keep PMR and SMR hard drive technologies alive for another generation: "Development efforts on what may be our last PMR product are nearing completion and will extend drive capacities into the mid- to upper 20 TB range." Clients who are reluctant to jump onto HAMR could be offered some alternatives—24 TB+ models based on PMR+TDMR and SMR+TDMR configurations are roadmapped for release by the end of the year.

Intel has responded to the high demand for advanced chips in mainland China by bringing its processor, the Gaudi2, to the market. This move comes as the country grapples with US export restrictions, leading to a thriving market for smuggled NVIDIA GPUs. At a press conference in Beijing, Intel presented the Gaudi2 processor as an alternative to NVIDIA's A100 GPU, widely used for training AI systems. Despite US export controls, Intel recognizes the importance of the Chinese market, with 27 percent of its 2022 revenue generated from China. NVIDIA has also tried to comply with restrictions by offering modified versions of its GPUs, but limited supplies have driven the demand for smuggled GPUs. Intel's Gaudi2 aims to provide Chinese companies with various hardware options and bolster their ability to deploy AI through cloud and smart-edge technologies. By partnering with Inspur Group, a major AI server manufacturer, Intel plans to build Gaudi2-powered machines tailored explicitly for the Chinese market.

China's AI ambitions face potential challenges as the US government considers restricting Chinese companies access to American cloud computing services. This move could impede the utilization of advanced AI chips by major players like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft for their Chinese clients. Additionally, there are reports of a potential expansion of the US export ban to include NVIDIA's A800 GPU. As China continues to push forward with its AI development projects, Intel's introduction of the Gaudi2 processor helps country's demand for advanced chips. Balancing export controls and technological requirements within this complex trade landscape remains a crucial task for both companies and governments involved in the Chinese AI industry.

Veeo, based in Las Vegas, NV, is proud to announce its first T-OLED-based display, named Veeo T30 at INFOCOMM 2023. Veeo's BDC system, centrally placed behind a 30" or 50" LG T-OLED display panel, captures images of users sitting on the opposite side with a perspective as if the camera is placed in the front center of the screen. When captured this way, video images are more aligned with the user's line of sight when looking at the display content. This contrasts the effect when a camera is placed on the top edge of a display, creating the erroneous impression that the user is lowering their eyes to avoid eye contact with people on the other end.

With Veeo T35, users in video conferences appear to be looking at one another, eye-to-eye, with the BDC aligned with the user's eye level. This brings us one step closer to recreating the in-person meeting experience where users can look at each other in the eye. "Veeo is a game-changer in the world of remote collaboration," says Bayley Pierson, Veeo's Director of Product Marketing. "It solves the two biggest problems of virtual communication, delivering a genuine face-to-face connection while allowing for seamless collaboration on digital content. Veeo is the future of video conferencing, and we're thrilled to be at the forefront of this revolution."

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."