NVIDIA today announced an extensive collaboration with Tata Group to deliver AI computing infrastructure and platforms for developing AI solutions. The collaboration will bring state-of-the-art AI capabilities within reach to thousands of organizations, businesses and AI researchers, and hundreds of startups in India. The companies will work together to build an AI supercomputer powered by the next-generation NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip to achieve performance that is best in class.

"The global generative AI race is in full steam," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Data centers worldwide are shifting to GPU computing to build energy-efficient infrastructure to support the exponential demand for generative AI.

In a major step to support India's industrial sector, NVIDIA and Reliance Industries today announced a collaboration to develop India's own foundation large language model trained on the nation's diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the world's most populous nation. The companies will work together to build AI infrastructure that is over an order of magnitude more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today. NVIDIA will provide access to the most advanced NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud. GH200 marks a fundamental shift in computing architecture that provides exceptional performance and massive memory bandwidth.

The NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure is the foundation of the new frontier into AI for Reliance Jio Infocomm, Reliance Industries' telecom arm. The global AI revolution is transforming industries and daily life. To serve India's vast potential in AI, Reliance will create AI applications and services for their 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India.

Google Cloud Next—Google Cloud and NVIDIA today announced new AI infrastructure and software for customers to build and deploy massive models for generative AI and speed data science workloads.

In a fireside chat at Google Cloud Next, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang discussed how the partnership is bringing end-to-end machine learning services to some of the largest AI customers in the world—including by making it easy to run AI supercomputers with Google Cloud offerings built on NVIDIA technologies. The new hardware and software integrations utilize the same NVIDIA technologies employed over the past two years by Google DeepMind and Google research teams.

NVIDIA joined Pixar, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk today to found the Alliance for OpenUSD, a major leap toward unlocking the next era of 3D graphics, design and simulation. The group will standardize and extend OpenUSD, the open-source Universal Scene Description framework that's the foundation of interoperable 3D applications and projects ranging from visual effects to industrial digital twins.

Several leading companies in the 3D ecosystem already signed on as the alliance's first general members—Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, SideFX and Unity. Standardizing OpenUSD will accelerate its adoption, creating a foundational technology that will help today's 2D internet evolve into a 3D web. Many companies are already working with NVIDIA to pioneer this future.

Samsung Electronics today announced the first step in a plan to reimagine mobile device security for business customers in partnership with Microsoft. This collaboration has led to the industry's first on-device, mobile hardware-backed device attestation solution that works equally well on both company and personally owned devices.

Device attestation can help ensure a device's identity and health, verifying that it has not been compromised. On-device, mobile hardware-backed device attestation—available on Samsung Galaxy devices and combined with protection from Microsoft Intune—now adds enhanced security and flexibility. For enterprises, this is an extra layer of protection against compromised devices falsely claiming to be known and healthy, gaining access to sensitive corporate data. Additionally, organizations can now enable employees to bring their own device (BYOD) to work with the confidence that they are protected with the same level of security as company owned devices. For employees, this means added flexibility for their personal Galaxy devices to safely access their work environment.

Microsoft and Xbox leaders have declared that the Call of Duty series will remain on PlayStation systems for the next ten years, following a possible successful acquisition of the (current owners of the IP) Activision Blizzard video game holding company. Phil Spencer, the outspoken head of Xbox stated via Twitter: "We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games."

His superior, Brad Smith (vice chair and president of Microsoft) added: "From Day One of this acquisition, we've been committed to addressing the concerns of regulators, platform and game developers, and consumers. Even after we cross the finish line for this deal's approval, we will remain focused on ensuring that Call of Duty remains available on more platforms and for more consumers than ever before." The silence on Sony/PlayStation's part is very telling, they are perhaps resigned to the merger becoming concrete this summer. Fans of the series (who favor Sony systems) will be relieved to know that PlayStation 5 and its possible successor are covered for another decade—it will be interesting to see how Sony's planned cloud gaming service will operate with the CoD franchise in mind. Microsoft has been presenting ten-year deals to a variety of rivals over the past year, with Sony and Nintendo courted alongside a number of different organizations. NVIDIA and Nintendo agreed on 10-year partnerships with Xbox earlier this year.

Intel has informed ecosystem partners about the cessation of direct investment in its Next Unit of Compute (NUC) business—ServeTheHome was the first outlet to report on this development earlier today, following industry rumors cropping up on Monday. Intel has been pulling back on non-core business operations—back in April its server building operation was sold to MiTAC. Today's announcement signals Team Blue's exit from the PC building industry—their (internally manufactured) NUC products included SFF computers, kits, laptop reference systems and boards.

Intel sent an official statement to HardwareLuxx (translated from German): "We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth. This decision will not impact the remainder of Intel's Client Computing Group (CCG) or Network and Edge Computing (NEX) businesses. Furthermore, we are working with our partners and customers to ensure a smooth transition and fulfillment of all our current commitments."

Gary McKay, General Manager at BioWare, states: "Hello, it's been a little while since I've checked in, and as you might have heard, there's a lot happening here at BioWare. Almost 12 years after launch, Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) remains a fantastic success, continuing to welcome new players to its vast galaxy and entertaining veteran players with its evolving content. It's the longest-running live service Star Wars game ever and we're enormously proud of the work the team has done in creating, expanding, and maintaining this incredible game. We're delighted to have grown such a dedicated and passionate community through all these years. The future of the game and the community continues to be very bright.

I've been working closely with Keith Kanneg, who leads the SWTOR team, to give the game and the team the best opportunity to grow and evolve. And so, while EA will remain SWTOR's publisher, development of the game will move to our partner and friends at Broadsword, a boutique studio with expertise in managing online games. Both the Broadsword studio and SWTOR team members will be joining forces and working tirelessly to support "every player, every day," ensuring that these worlds and these communities continue to thrive and grow. Their Founder and President, Rob Denton, even has direct experience with SWTOR, having helped lead the team during the development and launch of the game during his time at EA.

AMD and Bethesda have today revealed that Starfield will be best experienced on a Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics card-equipped PC. Team Red has been announced as the giant open world game's official graphics and GPU partner, but its Xbox Series hardware also gets a couple of friendly shout-outs. Todd Howard, director and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, stated in the video presentation: "We have AMD engineers in our code base working on FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) 2.0 image processing and upscaling and it looks incredible. You're going to get the benefits of that obviously on your PC but also on Xbox. We're super excited and can't wait to show everybody more."

Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of its Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, added: "Making this game even more special, is the close collaboration between Bethesda and AMD to unlock the full potential of Starfield. We have worked hand-in-hand with Bethesda Game Studios to optimize Starfield for both Xbox and PC with Ryzen 7000 series processors and Radeon 7000 series graphics. The optimizations both accelerate performance and enhance the quality of your gameplay using highly multi-threaded code that both Xbox and PC players will get to take advantage of."

In its recent Second Quarter of the Fiscal Year 2023 conference, Synopsys issued interesting information about the recent moves of chip developers and their usage of artificial intelligence. As the call notes, over 200+ chips have been taped out using Synopsys DSO.ai place-and-route (PnR) tool, making it a successful commercially proven AI chip design tool. The DSO.ai uses AI to optimize the placement and routing of the chip's transistors so that the layout is compact and efficient with regard to the strict timing constraints of the modern chip. According to Aart J. de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, "By the end of 2022, adoption, including 9 of the top 10 semiconductor vendors have moved forward at great speed with 100 AI-driven commercial tape-outs. Today, the tally is well over 200 and continues to increase at a very fast clip as the industry broadly adopts AI for design from Synopsys."

This is an interesting fact that means that customers are seeing the benefits of AI-assisted tools like DSO.ai. However, the company is not stopping there, and a whole suite of tools is getting an AI makeover. "We unveiled the industry's first full-stack AI-driven EDA suite, sydnopsys.ai," noted the CEO, adding that "Specifically, in parallel to second-generation advances in DSO.ai we announced VSO.ai, which stands for verification space optimization; and TSO.ai, test space optimization. In addition, we are extending AI across the design stack to include analog design and manufacturing." Synopsys' partners in this include NVIDIA, TSMC, MediaTek, Renesas, and IBM Research, all of which used AI-assisted tools for chip design efforts. A much wider range of industry players is expected to adopt these tools as chip design costs continue to soar as we scale the nodes down. With future 3 nm GPU costing an estimated $1.5 billion, 40% of that will account for software, and Synopsys plans to take a cut in that percentage.

MediaTek is rumored to have partnered up with NVIDIA in a new joint effort to create graphically powerful mobile chipsets. DigiTimes Asia reports that the two fabless companies are collaborating on a flagship-level smartphone SoC that could arrive in early 2024. MediaTek is hoping that this tech union will help advance its application processors with AI enhancements and greater gaming functionalities. Insider sources also claim that the partnership extends to the development of WOA (Windows on Arm) platform products for notebook applications.

DigiTimes believes that NVIDIA is seeking new market scope - outside of its normal staple of gaming and enterprise GPUs - opportunities within the smartphone and notebook market are part of an overall expansion strategy, including the teaming up with MediaTek. Arch rival AMD has been working with Samsung for a number of years on RDNA-based "Xclipse" iGPUs, as featured in several existing and upcoming flagship Exynos mobile chipsets, and Team Green is seemingly interested in doing something similar. MediaTek is keen to expand its processor presence in the notebook world - its current offerings only target the entry-level segment - and the alliance with NVIDIA could result in forthcoming mid-range and high-end WOA platform products.

Apple announced a joint partnership with Google in submitting a new industry specification to curtail unwanted tracking via Bluetooth location-tracking devices currently on the market. The new standard would provide tracker detection across both iOS and Android, regardless of the brand of the tracker being used. The proposal addresses the concerns surrounding the ease in which a person can be tracked by a sneaky location-tracker stuck to their person, possession, or vehicle by bad-faith actors using the technology to stalk individuals. Apple has previous released updates to their Find My service which will alert the victim if they are being tracked by an unknown AirTag, but this tech relies on the person having an iPhone. Third party detection apps exist on Android, but they're far from perfect and aren't currently officially supported by any of the parent companies making Bluetooth location trackers.

The proposal has received industry wide support from other manufacturers such as Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee. Advocacy groups such as The National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Center for Democracy & Technology have also contributed to the specification draft. The draft has been submitted via the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with a three month review and comment period open to interested parties that would like to weigh in on the proposed specification. After this period Apple and Google will work to address concerns and feedback before putting the specification into production by the end of 2023, unifying a tracking alerts system on all future versions of iOS and Android.

Sparkle, a Taiwanese computer electronics maker, is again entering the GPU market after almost ten years of inactivity in the space. A while back, Sparkle was one of NVIDIA's original Add-In Board (AIB) partners and helped them launch the GeForce 7900 PCI GPU. The company continued to make NVIDIA-based GPUs until GTX 700 series in 2013. After a decade, Sparkle is back again with ambitions to be Intel's AIB partner and announced not one but three graphics cards to start. Called A750 Titan, A750 Orc, and A380 Elf, these cards feature triple-fan, dual-fan, and single-fan coolers, respectively.

The first in line is the Sparkle A750 Titan, a triple-fan, 2.5-slot design based on Intel Arc A750 GPU. Featuring 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, this top-end A750 SKU is clocked at 2300 MHz, up from the factory's 2050 MHz frequency. Titan's smaller brother is Sparkle A750 Orc, a dual-fan, "2.2"-slot (we assume smaller than two and a half and bigger than two slots) GPU with the same A750 GPU; however, it clocked slightly lower at 2200 MHz. Both models feature single HDMI 2.0 and 3x DisplayPort 2.0 output ports and require two 8-pin PCI power connectors. Lastly, we have the Sparkle A380 Elf, a half-length, ITX-sized GPU that fits in two slots and has a single-fan cooler. It is based on Intel Arc A380 and has identical specifications without factory overclocks applied. Pricing and availability are currently unknown.

NVIDIA's fresh faced GeForce RTX 4070 graphic card range has not been flying off shelves around the world, and Team Green could be pivoting their approach somewhat after receiving lower than expected sales figures via company reports. Their component suppliers have already mentioned that the entire GeForce RTX 40 family is on a comfortably steady production schedule - with no instructions received from HQ to up the ante. In the latest development this week, individuals with insider knowledge of factory schedules in China have claimed that NVIDIA has informed board partners (AICs) that output for the GeForce RTX 4070 line is getting paused for a month. The temporary cutoff in factory output will allow, they hope, for the currently sitting stock to get cleared out. A substantial surplus of GeForce RTX 4070 cards could disrupt distribution networks and overstock warehouses.

Industry watchdogs have theorized that NVIDIA's board partners are having a difficult time offloading their premium tier RTX 4070 custom cards onto paying customers. The Founders Edition and closer-to-reference models have sold quite respectable numbers according to early analyses, but more expensive options are considered to be too expensive by the customer base. There is apparent crossover in pricing with the fancier GeForce RTX 4070 Ti range, and a savvy buyer will tend toward superior silicon rather than a shiny cooling solution combined with a factory-issued overclock. A computer hardware retailer in the UK, Novatech, has chosen to cut the price of a Palit RTX 4070 Dual model by £40/$50, as reported yesterday. The asking price has since returned closer to RRP - at the time of writing it stands at £579.98.

Two of NVIDIA's providers of Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) services are of the opinion that Team Green is happy to stay the course with its Ada Lovelace GPU production schedule. The backend providers Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) and King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) have not been given any new instructions with regard to shifts (up or down) in component assembly output. It is theorized that NVIDIA is aiming to clear any stock backlogs of graphics card models featuring previous generation architecture - namely the second gen GeForce RTX 30-series, built on Ampere.

The retail demand for the newly released GeForce RTX 4070 cards has been mild, to say the least - with plenty of inventory remaining on the shelves in the States. Critical reception of the midweight GeForce RTX GPU has also been middling - many have advised that budget conscience buyers should potentially look elsewhere. The market for discrete graphics card is in a fairly healthy state at the moment, with major production issues and fractured supply chains becoming lesser concerns for electronics manufacturers. NVIDIA has the advantage of being a market leader, and seems to be quite content with proceedings - but their analysts are very likely keeping an eye on the RTX 4070 sales figures. Its products are out and readily available - no need to change direction too sharply.