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.

JEDEC is expected to announce a next-gen low-power RAM memory (LPDDR) standard specification by the third quarter of this year. Earlier today, smartphone technology watcher—Revegnus—highlighted insider information disclosed within an ETnews article. The International Semiconductor Standards Organization (JEDEC) has recently concluded negotiations regarding "next-generation mobile RAM standards"—the report posits that: "more than 60 people from memory, system semiconductor, and design asset (IP) companies participated" in a Lisbon, Portugal-situated meeting. A quoted participant stated (to ETnews): "We have held various discussions to confirm the LPDDR6 standard specification...(Details) will be released in the third quarter of this year."

The current generation LPDDR5 standard was secured back in February 2019—noted improvements included 50% performance and 30% power efficiency jumps over LPDDR4. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are in the process of mass-producing incremental improvements—in the form of LPDDR5X and LPDDR5T. A second source stated: "Technology development and standard discussions are taking place in a way to minimize power consumption, which increases along with the increase in data processing." A full-fledged successor is tasked with further enhancing data processing performance. Industry figures anticipate that LPDDR6 will greatly assist in an industry-wide push for "on-device AI" processing. They reckon that "large-scale AI calculations" will become the norm on smartphones, laptops, and tablet PCs. Revegnus has heard (fanciful) whispers about a potential 2024 rollout: "support may be available starting with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, expected to be released as early as the second half of this year." Sensible predictions point to possible commercialization in late 2025, or early 2026.

ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA today announced the release of StarCoder2, a family of open-access large language models for code generation that sets new standards for performance, transparency, and cost-effectiveness. StarCoder2 was developed in partnership with the BigCode Community, managed by ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, and Hugging Face, the most-used open-source platform, where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications. Trained on 619 programming languages, StarCoder2 can be further trained and embedded in enterprise applications to perform specialized tasks such as application source code generation, workflow generation, text summarization, and more. Developers can use its code completion, advanced code summarization, code snippets retrieval, and other capabilities to accelerate innovation and improve productivity.

StarCoder2 offers three model sizes: a 3-billion-parameter model trained by ServiceNow; a 7-billion-parameter model trained by Hugging Face; and a 15-billion-parameter model built by NVIDIA with NVIDIA NeMo and trained on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure. The smaller variants provide powerful performance while saving on compute costs, as fewer parameters require less computing during inference. In fact, the new 3-billion-parameter model matches the performance of the original StarCoder 15-billion-parameter model. "StarCoder2 stands as a testament to the combined power of open scientific collaboration and responsible AI practices with an ethical data supply chain," emphasized Harm de Vries, lead of ServiceNow's StarCoder2 development team and co-lead of BigCode. "The state-of-the-art open-access model improves on prior generative AI performance to increase developer productivity and provides developers equal access to the benefits of code generation AI, which in turn enables organizations of any size to more easily meet their full business potential."

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel Corporation, has outlined future performance expectations for the company's Core range of processors. In a recent fourth quarter 2023 earnings call he declared: "The Core Ultra platform delivers leadership AI performance today with our next-generation platforms launching later this year, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake tripling our AI performance. In 2025 with Panther Lake, we will grow AI performance up to an additional 2x." Team Blue's Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" mobile processors arrived right at the tail end of last year, as a somewhat delayed answer to AMD's Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APU series—both leveraging their own AI-crunching NPU technologies. Gelsinger believes that the launch of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Core product lines will bring significant (3x) AI processing improvements over Meteor Lake. He seemed to confident in a delay-free release schedule for the new year and beyond: "We are first in the industry to have incorporated both gate-all-around and backside power delivery in a single process node, the latter unexpected two years ahead of our competition. Arrow Lake, our lead Intel 20A vehicle will launch this year."

He proceeded to gush about their next node advancement: "Intel 18A is expected to achieve manufacturing readiness in second half 2024, completing our five nodes in four year journey and bringing us back to process leadership. I am pleased to say that Clearwater Forest, our first Intel 18A part for servers has already gone into fab and Panther Lake for clients will be heading into Fab shortly." Industry experts posit that Core "Panther Lake" parts could borrow elements from the next generation Xeon "Clearwater Forest" efficiency-focused family—possibly the latter's "Darkmont" E-cores, to accompany "Cougar Cove" P-cores. The Intel CEO is quite excited about the manufacturing outlay for 2025: "I'll just say, hey, we look at this every single day and we're scrutinizing carefully our progress on 18A. And obviously the great news that we just described those Clearwater Forest taping out, that gives us a lot of confidence that 18A is healthy. That's a major product for us. Panther Lake following that shortly."

EdgeCortix, the Japan-based fabless semiconductor company focused on energy-efficient AI processing, predicts that 2024 is set to be a watershed moment for Edge AI. Through its predictions for the year, EdgeCortix believes that Edge AI landscape will be transformed during this exciting year for the industry. Next-gen AI chips, hybrid edge-cloud architectures, software supremacy and the rise of new generative-AI applications "at the edge," will revolutionize the world of business as we know it.

1. Next-Gen efficient Edge AI Chips will break barriers:
Prepare for a hardware uprising! EdgeCortix foresees next-gen energy-efficient AI chips that not only break the barriers of processing power but redefine them. These chips are not just powerful; they are customized for multi-modal generative AI and efficient language models, enabling cutting-edge AI capabilities at low power for a whole new spectrum of applications.

An anonymous industry source has divulged a grim set of near-future circumstances to Tom's Hardware—they believe that "NAND packages consisting of four and eight NAND devices are already in short supply," thus causing an expected "skyrocketing" of prices within higher-capacity consumer SSD product lines. This sharp climb could happen within the first quarter of 2024, and the article outlines early warning signs—"price upticks are starting to show in retail already" as documented in graphs generated by CamelCamelCamel for a sampling consisting of three 2 TB NVMe models (Samsung 990 Pro, CORSAIR MP600 PRO LPX & Team Group MP44). Their analysis of this situation continued: "A single-sided SSD in an M.2-2280 form factor can carry four 3D NAND packages. Modern 2 TB and 4 TB drives in this form factor tend to use packages consisting of four or eight 3D NAND devices to ensure high performance. There is already a shortage of these packages today as SSD makers are struggling to find adequate supply."

Late summer going into the autumn of 2023 presented a great time to pick up SSD bargains, since manufacturers had flooded the market with far too much stock (following an oversupply of NAND units). The unnamed source believes that it could take two to three months for early 2024 NAND shortages to cause large ripple effects within consumer and enterprise markets. A January 9-dated TrendForce report proposes that NAND Flash contract prices are set to rise by 15 to 20% in Q1Y24, although Tom's Hardware reckons that this "acceptance of new rates is more likely among notebook makers." TrendForce anticipates enterprise SSD contract pricing to increase by roughly 18% - 23% within the first quarter of 2024.

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today announced the company's predictions for 2024 trends in NAND flash infrastructure deployment. The company predicts that rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will continue apace, with PCIe 5.0-based infrastructure providing high-performance, sustainable support for AI workload consistency as adoption rapidly expands. PCIe 5.0 NAND flash solutions will be at the core of a well-balanced hardware ecosystem, with private AI deployments such as on-premise large language models (LLMs) driving significant growth in both everyday AI and the infrastructure required to support it.

"We are moving past initial excitement over AI toward wider everyday deployment of the technology. In these configurations, high-quality AI output must be achieved by infrastructure designed to be secure, while also being affordable. The organizations that leverage AI to boost productivity will be incredibly successful," said Sebastien Jean, CTO, Phison US. "Building on the widespread proliferation of AI applications, infrastructure providers will be responsible for making certain that AI models do not run up against the limitations of memory - and NAND flash will become central to how we configure data center architectures to support today's developing AI market while laying the foundation for success in our fast-evolving digital future."

Pierre Ferragu, the Global Technology Infrastructure chief at New Street Research, has predicted a very positive 2025 financial outcome for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC). A global slowdown in consumer purchasing of personal computers and smartphones has affected a number of companies including the likes of NVIDIA and AMD—their financial reports have projected a 10% annual revenue drop for 2023. TSMC has similarly forecast that its full year revenue for 2023 will settle at $68.31 billion, after an approximate 10% fall. Ferragu did not contest these figures—via his team's analysis—TSMC is expected to pull in $68 billion in net sales for this financial year.

The rumor mill has TSMC revising its revenue guidance for a third time this year—but company leadership has denied that this will occur. New Street Research estimates that conditions will improve next year, with an uptick in client orders placed at TSMC's foundries. Ferragu reckons that TSMC could hit an all-time revenue high of $100 billion by 2025. His hunch is based on the upcoming spending habits of VIP foundry patrons encompassing: "a bottom-up perspective, looking at how TSMC's top customers, which we all know very well, will contribute to such growth." The Taiwanese foundry's order books are reported to be filling up for next year, with Apple and NVIDIA seizing the moment to stand firmly at the front of the 3 nm process queue.

Silicon Motion's product manager, Liu Yaoren, has predicted that the first notebook models to feature PCIe 5.0 SSD storage will hit retail around late 2024. This information was disclosed during the company's key note presentation at 2023's Flash Memory Summit Conference and Exhibition, but only picked up on by media outlets in recent days. The American-Taiwanese company showcased their SM2508 controller on the showroom floor—this is advertised as their answer to Phison's E26. The upcoming Silicon Motion-designed controller "promises to deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 14 GB/s. Random performance is rated at 2.5 million IOPS read and 2.4 million IOPS write." NAND flash speeds of up to 3600 MT/s provide some future proofing.

ITHome has reported on further technical details released by Huirong Technology/Silicon Motion—their flagship SM2508 IC also uses the more advanced TSMC 6 nm process technology, (and) has a built-in dual-core Cortex R8 processor." The memory controller's operational TDP is rated at around 3.5 W—the firm believes that their product shows the "ultimate potential of PCIe Gen 5 performance" with ultra-low power consumption, although no thermal figures were disclosed to attendees. MSI premiered its PCIe Gen 5 SSD compatible laptop series earlier this year, but aftermarket parts with sizable heatsinks are proving to be a tricky fit.

Intel's leadership has announced the hastened expansion of 20 A and 18 A-capable fabrication facilities in Arizona, in order to meet next year's anticipated manufacturing demand from Foundry Services clients. Team Blue's native efforts are possibly not enough in the eyes of an investment bank—Taiwan's Commercial Times has managed to take a look at industry analysis conducted by Goldman Sachs Securities. Intel is predicted to broaden its outsourcing to TSMC in 2024 and 2025—although a part of said report proposes the hypothetically bizarre scenario where Intel outsources all of its products at a cost of $18.6 billion in 2024, and $19.4 billion in 2025 (in terms of total addressable market). A more down-to-earth synopsis outlines TSMC winning Intel outsourcing contracts worth $5.6 billion in 2024, and $9.7 billion for 2025.

According to Trendforce's report this would approximately account: "for 6.4% and 9.4% of TSMC's overall revenue in the corresponding years." Industry analyst Andrew Lu was contacted for comment on the conjectural conditions: "(this) explains that Intel's wafer chip manufacturing division competes with TSMC, rather than its design division. The design division is striving for survival in the high-speed computing semiconductor sector, and it is currently hopeful for close collaboration with TSMC. Lu even predicts that Intel's wafer manufacturing and design divisions will inevitably be further separated into two companies several years down the line."

NVIDIA has been raking in lots of cash this year and hit a major milestone back in late May, with a trillion dollar valuation—its stock price doubled thanks to upward trends in the artificial intelligence market, with growing global demand for AI-hardware. Business Insider believes that Team Green will continue to do very well for itself over the next couple of years: "Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh has given NVIDIA's stock price another 20% upside to run—and even this new target of $530 is "conservative," according to a Sunday client note seen by Insider. Rakesh's previous price target for NVIDIA was $400. NVIDIA shares closed 0.7% higher at $446.12 apiece on Monday. The stock has surged 205% so far this year."

Despite the emergence of competing hardware from the likes of AMD and Intel, Rakesh predicts that NVIDIA will maintain a dominant position in the AI chip market until at least 2027: "With demand for generative AI accelerating, we see significant opportunities for hardware suppliers powering the higher compute needs for large-language models, particularly AI powerhouse NVIDIA. Insider reports that the company: "could generate around $300 billion in AI-specific revenue by 2027 with a 75% market share of AI server units...That's 10 times his projection of $25 billion to $30 billion in AI revenues this year." Rakesh has reportedly stuck with a $140 buy rating and price target for AMD shares.

A tipster/YouTuber familiar with goings-on at Spanish development studios believes that next generation Nintendo development kits have arrived in the southern European country. Nash Weedle is reported to have a good track record with their predictions—most notably outing Madrid-based MercurySteam as a contract developer on the high profile Metroid Dread project. Weedle did not implicate this particular team with his social media declaration, but it is the only organization in the region that has assisted Nintendo EPD on multiple first-party titles.

A translation of Weedle's tweet states: "The Switch 2 development kit has arrived in Spain. The fact that a Spanish studio already has the kit, given Nintendo's private/secrecy policy, is a boost in their relations and indicates that we are in the last stages before the console's presentation." The relationship between the two companies could sour following these emerging leaks—Nintendo is notorious for its extremely guarded approach to software and hardware reveals. Company president, Shuntaro Furukawa, told shareholders (two months ago) that a Switch successor is marked for a vague launch somewhere in FY2024 - 2025.

According to a newly published study, by market analysts at Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), TV OLED panel production costs are set to fall consistently over the next two years. Thanks to increased efficiency and improved yields at key manufacturing facilities, premium TV models could drop in price within a few months (maybe in time for Christmas) - according to FlatPanelsHD. The DSCC report indicates that production costs per 55-inch OLED panel are predicted to decrease by roughly 20% (when compared to data from 2022), with the same percentage reduction lined up for 2024. LG Display's "white OLED" panel is the given example here - it is featured on many 2023 TV ranges including LG's own C3 and G3 models, as well as units from competing brands: Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Hisense, etc.

Samsung's proprietary QD-OLED TV technology is also forecasted to become cheaper to produce - by 30% - according to the market analysts at DSCC. The Display division's South Korean factory lines are capable of pumping out 65-inch QD-OLED panels at greater efficiency this year - with a reported higher overall yield when compared to 2022's results (from 68% to 84%). Samsung's quantum dot panels are usually reserved for flagship level TV models, but lower production costs could lead to more mid-range televisions adopting the high-end display technology.

Analyst firm Yole Group has predicted that SSD sales revenues will grow to $67 billion in the year 2028, generated by 472 million unit sales - indicating a very healthy outlook in the long term. However, their predictions for market performance in 2023 appear to be less cheerful for manufacturers of NAND flash memory. The SSD market dynamic was positive in 2021 and the starting months of 2022, but demand has dropped sharply since then due to a number of factors including global inflation, geopolitical tensions, and inventory digestion at electronics manufacturers. Sales revenues in 2022 totaled $29 billion (352 million units), down from $34 billion (400 million units) in 2021 - demonstrating a 14% year-to-year decline.

The continued weakening of global demand in 2023 will have an effect on SSD sales revenues, and the Yole Group has foreseen troublesome outcomes for manufacturers. The average selling price of NAND memory and solid-state drive units has been on the decline in the recent quarters, caused by sluggish demand and a surplus of stock. Despite the grim outlook in the short term, the research body is predicting a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 15% between 2022 and 2028 for the overall size of the SSD market.

Industry analysts have been busy with reviews of the PlayStation VR2 headset's launch sales figures, and have concluded that the numbers are a big disappointment according to findings published in a Bloomberg article. The research firm IDC is predicting that the PS VR2 is unlikely to break above 270,000 unit sales - timed from its launch this year on February 22 to the end of March. This is a substantial shortfall when lined up against the expected sales figures - Sony was reported to have an estimate of 2 million units sold going into the next financial year, but it was cutback to 1.5 million in the recent past. Francisco Jeronimo, IDC's Vice President of data and analytics cites a number of factors for the sluggish start: "Consumers around the world are facing rising costs of living, rising interest rates and rising layoffs - VR headsets are not top of mind for most consumers under the current economic climate."

Gamers were surprised by the higher than expected pricing for the PlayStation VR2 headset - at an MSRP of $550 it exceeds the asking price of the PlayStation 5 - and the home console is a necessary component in hosting the VR2's functionality. The virtual reality device has been a critical darling, although reviewers have been quick to question the price tag. It has been praised for an impressive specification and feature set, which includes dual 2,000 x 2,040 OLED displays, class leading eye-tracking tech and innovative Move wand controllers. The analysts share similar views about the high MSRP - Jeronimo predicts that Sony will need to take drastic action in order to right its sales ship: "I suspect a price cut on the PS VR2 will be needed to avoid a complete disaster of their new product." A price cut would perhaps appeal to a more mainstream buyer, coupled with the PlayStation VR2 being part of an ultra familiar gaming brand, but VR headset manufacturers as a whole are experiencing a slowdown in sales. Gamers were slow to adopt the first iteration of Sony's virtual headset, and that pattern appears to be repeating for the new model.