The US government is investigating the potential national security risks associated with China's involvement in the development of open-source RISC-V chip technology. According to a letter obtained by Reuters, the Department of Commerce has informed US lawmakers that it is actively reviewing the implications of China's work in this area. RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture (ISA) created in 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley, offers an alternative to proprietary and licensed ISAs like those developed by Arm. This open-source ISA can be utilized in a wide range of applications, from AI chips and general-purpose CPUs to high-performance computing applications. Major Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba and Huawei, have already embraced RISC-V, positioning it as a new battleground in the ongoing technological rivalry between the United States and China over cutting-edge semiconductor capabilities.

In November, a group of 18 US lawmakers from both chambers of Congress urged the Biden administration to outline its strategy for preventing China from gaining a dominant position in RISC-V technology, expressing concerns about the potential impact on US national and economic security. While acknowledging the need to address potential risks, the Commerce Department noted in its letter that it must proceed cautiously to avoid unintentionally harming American companies actively participating in international RISC-V development groups. Previous attempts to restrict the transfer of 5G technology to China have created obstacles for US firms involved in global standards bodies where China is also a participant, potentially jeopardizing American leadership in the field. As the review process continues, the Commerce Department faces the delicate task of balancing national security interests with the need to maintain the competitiveness of US companies in the rapidly evolving landscape of open-source chip technologies.

Embracer Group has entered (as of March 28) into an agreement to divest Gearbox Entertainment, for a consideration of USD 460 million (SEK 4.9 billion) to Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. ("Take-Two"). The proceeds from the deal will, upon closing, significantly reduce net debt, earnout obligations and capex. Embracer retains selected companies, including Gearbox Publishing San Francisco (to be renamed), with the publishing rights to the Remnant franchise, the upcoming Hyper Light Breaker and other notable unannounced game releases.

"Yesterday's announcement marks the result of the final structured divestment process and is an important step in transforming Embracer into the future with notably lower net debt and improved free cash flow. Through the transaction, we lower business risk and improve profitability as we transition to becoming a leaner and more focused company. After evaluating several options for Gearbox, I am happy that we have reached a solution that is in the best interest of all stakeholders. Randy and the team have been great team members throughout the past years, and I would like to thank them all for that. As one of the world's greatest games developers, I am confident that Gearbox will continue to innovate and thrive in their new home within Take-Two," says Lars Wingefors, co-founder and CEO of Embracer.

Denuvo by Irdeto, the leading provider of security solutions for the gaming industry, is excited to announce the launch of its groundbreaking product, TraceMark for Gaming, during the prestigious Game Developers Conference (GDC). This pioneering watermarking solution, part of the Irdeto anti-piracy suite and the first of its kind to be tailored specifically for the gaming industry, leverages the core invisible watermark technology trusted by Hollywood studios, sports leagues, and pay-TV operators.

TraceMark for Gaming uniquely addresses the challenge of content leakage, especially during the sensitive pre-release phase of game development. It introduces a deterrent effect by enabling the precise tracing of leaked content back to its source. This capability makes potential leakers think twice, knowing that any unauthorized distribution can be directly linked to them. As a platform-agnostic tool, TraceMark effortlessly integrates into various stages of the game's lifecycle, providing a consistent layer of protection. Its adaptability ensures that, irrespective of the development phase or platform, TraceMark serves as an effective measure to discourage leaks by holding individuals accountable, thereby contributing to the overall integrity of the content distribution process.

Yesterday, Remedy Entertainment Plc ("Remedy") and 505 Games S.p.A. ("505 Games") announce a transaction upon which all publishing, distribution, marketing and other rights to Control, codename Condor, Control 2, and all future Control products will revert to Remedy. The Control franchise is in the core of Remedy. Having acquired the full rights to Control, Condor and Control 2, Remedy is now in a position to make the right product and business decisions focusing on long-term franchise growth.

The transaction has no immediate effect on the income statement, while we see attractive growth opportunities arising in the mid-to-long term. This transaction will enable us to negotiate better deals for current and future Control games. We can now weigh up the options between self-publishing and a new publishing partner for Condor and Control 2. At the same time, we are in a better negotiating position than before as Control is an established brand and Alan Wake 2 has been successful. We are confident that these factors combined will enable us to get the right partner, deal structure and risk-reward profile that benefit Remedy and are the best fit for the Control franchise. We will evaluate and negotiate with potential future partners over the coming months.

NVIDIA has joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology's new U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium as part of the company's effort to advance safe, secure and trustworthy AI. AISIC will work to create tools, methodologies and standards to promote the safe and trustworthy development and deployment of AI. As a member, NVIDIA will work with NIST—an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce—and fellow consortium members to advance the consortium's mandate. NVIDIA's participation builds on a record of working with governments, researchers and industries of all sizes to help ensure AI is developed and deployed safely and responsibly.

Through a broad range of development initiatives, including NeMo Guardrails, open-source software for ensuring large language model responses are accurate, appropriate, on topic and secure, NVIDIA actively works to make AI safety a reality. In 2023, NVIDIA endorsed the Biden Administration's voluntary AI safety commitments. Last month, the company announced a $30 million contribution to the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource pilot program, which aims to broaden access to the tools needed to power responsible AI discovery and innovation.

NVIDIA's most recent FY3Q24 financial reports reveal record-high revenue coming from its data center segment, driven by escalating demand for AI servers from major North American CSPs. However, TrendForce points out that recent US government sanctions targeting China have impacted NVIDIA's business in the region. Despite strong shipments of NVIDIA's high-end GPUs—and the rapid introduction of compliant products such as the H20, L20, and L2—Chinese cloud operators are still in the testing phase, making substantial revenue contributions to NVIDIA unlikely in Q4. Gradual shipments increases are expected from the first quarter of 2024.

The US ban continues to influence China's foundry market as Chinese CSPs' high-end AI server shipments potentially drop below 4% next year
TrendForce reports that North American CSPs like Microsoft, Google, and AWS will remain key drivers of high-end AI servers (including those with NVIDIA, AMD, or other high-end ASIC chips) from 2023 to 2024. Their estimated shipments are expected to be 24%, 18.6%, and 16.3%, respectively, for 2024. Chinese CSPs such as ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BBAT) are projected to have a combined shipment share of approximately 6.3% in 2023. However, this could decrease to less than 4% in 2024, considering the current and potential future impacts of the ban.

A new global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that nearly half of CEOs surveyed identify productivity as their highest business priority—up from sixth place in 2022. They recognize technology modernization is key to achieving their productivity goals, ranking it as second highest priority. Yet, CEOs can face key barriers as they race to modernize and adopt new technologies like generative AI.

The annual CEO study, CEO decision-making in the age of AI, Act with intention, found three-quarters of CEO respondents believe that competitive advantage will depend on who has the most advanced generative AI. However, executives are also weighing potential risks or barriers of the technology such as bias, ethics and security. More than half (57%) of CEOs surveyed are concerned about data security and 48% worry about bias or data accuracy.

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

According to TrendForce's research, the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries rose by 6% QoQ to US$35.21 billion for 3Q22 as the release of the new iPhone series during the second half of the year generated significant stock-up activities across Apple's supply chain. However, the global economy shows weak performances, and factors such as China's policy on containing COVID-19 outbreaks and high inflation continue to impact consumer confidence. As a result, peak-season demand in the second half of the year has been underwhelming, and inventory consumption is proceeding slower than anticipated. This situation has led to substantial downward corrections to foundry orders as well. For 4Q22, TrendForce forecasts that the total revenue of the global top 10 foundries will register a QoQ decline, thereby terminating the boom of the past two years—when there was an uninterrupted trend of QoQ revenue growth.

Regarding individual foundries' performances in 3Q22, the group of the top five was led by TSMC, followed by Samsung, UMC, GlobalFoundries, and SMIC. Their collective global market share (in revenue terms) came to 89.6%. Most foundries were directly impacted by clients slowing down their stock-up activities or significantly correcting down their orders. Only TSMC was able to make a notable gain due to Apple's strong stock-up demand for the SoCs deployed in this year's new iPhone models. TSMC saw its revenue rise by 11.1% QoQ to US$20.16 billion, and the corresponding market share expanded to 56.1%. The growth was mainly attributed to the ≤7 nm nodes, whose share in the foundry's revenue had kept climbing and reached 54% in the third quarter. Conversely, Samsung actually experienced a slight QoQ drop of 0.1% in foundry revenue even though it had also benefited from the component demand related to the new iPhone series. Partially impacted by the weakening of the Korean won, Samsung's market share fell to 15.5%.

One of the electric vehicle driving forces in the car market, Tesla, has today announced that the company would have to issue a soft recall of a few select car models over an issue with overheating. The affected vehicles are Tesla Model 3 2022, Tesla Model S 2021-2022, Tesla Model X 2021-2022, and Tesla Model Y 2022. Tesla's infotainment system is powered by AMD Ryzen APUs, replacing the Intel Atom CPUs found in the previous models. With Ryzen APUs overheating, the infotainment system can lag or restart and sometimes cause it to get completely turned off. The problem is that the car's liquid cooling will prioritize cooling the batteries instead of the processor, causing it to overheat. Tesla issued a soft recall on these models, meaning that a regular firmware update will fix this issue.

TeslaTesla, Inc. (Tesla) is recalling certain 2021-2022 Model S, Model X, and 2022 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles operating certain firmware releases. The infotainment central processing unit (CPU) may overheat during the preparation or process of fast-charging, causing the CPU to lag or restart. A lagging or restarting CPU may prevent the center screen from displaying the rearview camera image, gear selection, windshield visibility control settings, and warning lights, increasing the risk of a crash. Tesla will perform an over-the-air (OTA) software update that will improve CPU temperature management, free of charge. Owner notification letters are expected to be mailed July 1, 2022. Owners may contact Tesla customer service at 1-877-798-3752. Tesla's number for this recall is SB-22-00-009.

If you own an Asus 802.11ac/WiFi 5 router, you might want to make sure your firmware is up-to-date, as several models are at risk of being infected by a Russian botnet malware. The group behind the worm, which goes under the name of Cyclops Blink, is Sandworm APT, the same group that created the VPNFilter botnet a few years ago. Cyclops Blink was detected by Trend Micro and although it seems it doesn't cause any direct harm to the network behind the router it infects at this point in time, it is a persistent malware and is believed to be a first of its kind. Unlike most malware that attack routers, the Cyclops Blink worm can save itself to the flash memory in the router, so even a factory reset won't wipe it off.

That said, a firmware flash will remove it and according to a security bulletin from Asus, the company advises all of its customers to install the latest firmware. On top of this, Asus also recommends to turn off remote management, if enabled and to change the admin login credentials and make sure to use a complex password. However, the company doesn't have an update that is guaranteed to prevent the malware from infecting their products, since at this point in time, it's unclear how the Cyclops Blink worm infects routers. Prior to the Asus routers listed below getting attacked, the malware was mainly going after WatchGuard Firebox devices, which are generally only used by businesses. Based on the information provided by Trend Micro, it looks like Asus is unlikely to be the only brand of routers that will be targeted by the malware, so even if you don't own an Asus router, it would be a good idea to make sure your firmware is up to date. Another option would be to install a third party firmware, although the Merlin firmwares for Asus are also likely to be affected, based on comments by the authour of the firmware over on the Small Net Builder forums.

AMD Ryzen 5000 series of processors feature the new Zen 3 core design, which uses many techniques to deliver the best possible performance. One of those techniques is called Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF). According to AMD, "PSF is a hardware-based micro-architectural optimization designed to improve the performance of code execution by predicting dependencies between loads and stores." That means that PSF is another "prediction" feature put in a microprocessor that could be exploited. Just like Spectre, the feature could be exploited and it could result in a vulnerability in the new processors. Speculative execution has been a part of much bigger problems in CPU microarchitecture design, showing that each design choice has its flaws.

AMD's CPU architects have discovered that the software that relies upon isolation aka "sandboxing", is highly at risk. PSF predictions can sometimes miss, and it is exactly these applications that are at risk. It is reported that a mispredicted dependency between load and store can lead to a vulnerability similar to Spectre v4. So what a solution to it would be? You could simply turn it off and be safe. Phoronix conducted a suite of tests on Linux and concluded that turning the feature off is taking between half a percent to one percent hit, which is very low. You can see more of that testing here, and read AMD's whitepaper describing PSF.

With NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30-series lineup of GPUs, laptop manufacturers are offered a wide variety of GPU SKUs that internally differ simply by having different Total Graphics Power (TGP), which in turn results in different clock speeds and thus different performance. ASUS uses NVIDIA's variant of GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU inside the company's ROG Zephyrus Duo (GX551QS) with a TGP of 115 Watts, and Dynamic Boost technology that can ramp up the card to 130 Watts. However, this doesn't represent the maximum for RTX 3080 mobile graphics card. The maximum TGP for RTX 3080 mobile goes up to 150 Watts, which is a big improvement that lets the GPU reach higher frequencies and more performance.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you manually applied vBIOS that allows the card to use more power? Well, Baidu forum users are reporting a successful experiment of transforming their 115 W RTX 3080 to 150 W TGP card. Using GPU vBIOS from MSI Leopard G76, which features a 150 W power limit, and applying it to the ROG's Zephyrus Duo power-limited RTX 3080 cards is giving results. Users have successfully used this vBIOS to squeeze out more performance from their laptops. As seen on the 3D Mark Time Spy rank list, the entries are now dominated solely by modified laptops. Performance improvement is, of course, present and it reaches up to a 20% increase.

Arm Ltd., owned by Softbank, has a division specially tailored for China, called Arm China. That division used to operate in Shenzen and it cooperated with Chinese customers. Today in a surprising turn of events, we have information that UK-based Arm Ltd. accuses Arm China ex-CEO of blocking its business, as the Chinese division goes rogue. The Arm China division used to have Mr. Allen Wu as its CEO, who was fired back in June. However, Mr. Wu has refused to cooperate and refused to step down from his position, remaining in control of the business without the consent of UK-based headquarters.

The situation has escalated to a point where Mr. Wu is "propagating false information and creating a culture of fear and confusion among Arm China employees," says Arm in a statement for Bloomberg. "Allen's focus on his own self-preservation has also put China semiconductor innovation at risk as he has attempted to block the critical communication and support our China partners require from Arm for ongoing and future chip designs." It is also said that Mr. Wu has refused to hold an event meant to connect Chinese chipmakers to Arm Ltd. He has hired personal security so no Arm Ltd. representatives can get to him. It is a waiting game to see how well Arm Ltd. can manage this situation, so we have to wait and see.

NVIDIA has (not surprisingly) dismissed allegations that it had misled investors in regard to demand towards its GeForce graphics products circa 2017. The original allegation claimed that NVIDIA has wrongfully misrepresented GeForce division sales to investors by including crypto-focused sales on its bottom line. This, investors claim, painted a safer investment opportunity on NVIDIA stock than it actually was - the volatility of the crypto market and associated unpredictability in NVIDIA GeForce products' demand being the sore point for investors. Demand of GeForce products for gaming is considered to be less risk-averse and less elastic than crypto-focused sales.

NVIDIA says that investors cherry-picked corporate statements while ignoring others that, according to NVIDIA, showed transparency. The ammended class suit, which was amended in May 2020 from its original 2017 entry date, accuses Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Jeff Fisher, head of gaming, claiming they knew the rise in GeForce GPU sales was linked to the crypto mining boom and wasn't going to last in the long-term. NVIDIA says that executives didn't lie when they described crypto sales as a "small portion" of their revenue (which was disclosed at $6.9 billion for the year 2017). Another contention point from NVIDIA is that executives in the company (and the company itself) had no way of knowing ecactly what purpoze its sold GPUs were being put to.

Huawei's subsidiary, HiSilicon, which designs the processors used in Huawei's smartphones and telecommunications equipment, has reportedly moved its silicon orders from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), according to DigiTimes. Why Huawei decided to do is move all of the 14 nm orders from Taiwanese foundry to China's largest silicon manufacturing fab, is to give itself peace of mind if the plan of the US Government goes through to stop TSMC from supplying Huawei. At least for the mid-tier chips built using 14 nm node, Huawei would gain some peace as a Chinese fab is a safer choice given the current political situation.

When it comes to the high-end SoCs built on 7 nm, and 5 nm in the future, it is is still uncertain how will Huawei behave in this situation, meaning that if US cuts off TSMC's supply to Huawei, they will be forced to use SMIC's 7 nm-class N+1 node instead of anything from TSMC. Another option would be Samsung, but it is a question will Huawei put itself in risk to be dependant on another foreign company. The lack of 14 nm orders from Huawei will not be reflecting much on TSMC, because whenever someone decides to cut orders, another company takes up the manufacturing capactiy. For example, when Huawei cut its 5 nm orders, Apple absorbed by ordering more capacity. When Huawei also cut 7 nm orders, AMD and other big customers decided to order more, making the situation feel like there is a real fight for TSMC's capacity.

If you're one of those people who doesn't regularly update their graphics card drivers, and you're rocking an NVIDIA graphics card, you really should update your drivers to the latest WHQL version, 376.33. The release notes and a security bulletin issued by the company point towards the fixing of multiple detected kernel layer (nvlddmkm.sys) vulnerabilities in NVIDIA's previous driver releases, which could "Lead to a Denial of Service, Escalation of Privileges, or Both".

In total, there are seven reported vulnerabilities as having been fixed, with NVIDIA acknowledging contributions in the issues' detection from engineers with Google Project Zero and Cisco Talos.