Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter 2019 financial results. "Results for the first quarter were slightly higher than our January expectations. We shipped a strong mix of high performance products and continued spending discipline while ramping 10nm and managing a challenging NAND pricing environment. Looking ahead, we're taking a more cautious view of the year, although we expect market conditions to improve in the second half," said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. "Our team is focused on expanding our market opportunity, accelerating our innovation and improving execution while evolving our culture. We aim to capitalize on key technology inflections that set us up to play a larger role in our customers' success, while improving returns for our owners."

In the first quarter, the company generated approximately $5.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.4 billion and used $2.5 billion to repurchase 49 million shares of stock. In the first quarter, Intel achieved 4 percent growth in the PC-centric business while data-centric revenue declined 5 percent.

Tesla held an investor panel in the USA yesterday (April 22) with the entire event, focusing on autonomous vehicles, also streamed on YouTube (replay here). There were many things promised in the course of the event, many of which are outside the scope of this website, but the announcement of Tesla's first full self-driving hardware module made the news in more ways than one as reported right here on TechPowerUp. We had noted how Tesla had traditionally relied on NVIDIA (and then Intel) microcontroller units, as well as NVIDIA self-driving modules in the past, but the new in-house built module had stepped away from the green camp in favor of more control over the feature set.

NVIDIA was quick to respond to this, saying Tesla was incorrect in their comparisons, in that the NVIDIA Drive Xavier at 21 TOPS was not the right comparison, and rather it should have been against NVIDIA's own full self-driving hardware the Drive AGX Pegasus capable of 320 TOPS. Oh, and NVIDIA also claimed Tesla erroneously reported Drive Xavier's performance was 21 TOPS instead of 30 TOPS. It is interesting how one company was quick to recognize itself as the unmarked competition, especially at a time when Intel, via their Mobileye division, have also given them a hard time recently. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come in that self-driving cars, and AI computing in general, is getting too big a market to be left to third-party manufacturing, with larger companies opting for in-house hardware itself. This move does hurt NVIDIA's focus in this field, as market speculation is ongoing that they may end up losing other customers following Tesla's departure.

Western Digital Corp. today unveiled the new Western Digital WD Purple SC QD312 Extreme Endurance microSD card for designers and manufacturers of AI-enabled security cameras, smart video surveillance and advanced edge devices that capture and store video at higher bit rates than mainstream cameras. According to IHS Markit, global shipments of professional video surveillance cameras are expected to grow from 127 million to over 200 million between 2017 and 2022, and those with on-board storage are expected to grow by an average of approximately 19 percent per year.

With the migration to 4K and higher video resolutions, and the introduction of more smart cameras with built-in AI and improved local processing capabilities, surveillance cameras need to be able to store both video and raw data to facilitate these AI capabilities. As a result, storage with higher capacity, more intelligence and greater durability is increasingly required.

Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) announced today that the 2019 COMPUTEX International Press Conference will be held with a Keynote by AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. The 2019 COMPUTEX International Press Conference & CEO Keynote is scheduled for Monday, May 27 at 10:00 AM in Room 201 of the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC) in Taipei, Taiwan with the keynote topic "The Next Generation of High-Performance Computing".

"COMPUTEX, as one of the global leading technology tradeshows, has continued to advance with the times for more than 30 years. This year, for the first time, a keynote speech will be held at the pre-show international press conference," said Mr. Walter Yeh, President & CEO, TAITRA, "Dr. Lisa Su received a special invitation to share insights about the next generation of high-performance computing. We look forward to her participation attracting more companies to participate in COMPUTEX, bringing the latest industry insights, and jointly sharing the infinite possibilities of the technology ecosystem on this global stage."

Late January it was reported that Intel is looking to buy out Israeli networking hardware maker Mellanox Technology, in what looked like a cakewalk USD $6 billion deal at the time, which was a 35 percent premium over the valuation of Mellanox. Turns out, Intel hasn't closed the deal, and there are other big tech players in the foray for Mellanox, the most notable being NVIDIA. The GPU giant has reportedly offered Mellanox a competitive bid of $7 billion.

NVIDIA eyes a slice of the data-center networking hardware pie since the company has invested heavily in GPU-based AI accelerators and its own high-bandwidth interconnect dubbed NVLink, and now needs to complete its hardware ecosystem with NICs and switches under its own brand. Founded in 1999 in Yoqneam, Israel, Mellanox designs high performance network processors and fully-built NICs in a wide range of data-center relevant interconnects. Intel is by far the biggest tech company operating in Israel, with not just R&D centers, but also manufacturing sites, in stark contrast to NVIDIA, which opened its first R&D office in 2017 with a few hundred employees.

Update: NVIDIA's bid for Mellanox stands at $7 billion.

Since the release of HoloLens in 2016 we have seen mixed reality transform the way work gets done. We have unlocked super-powers for hundreds of thousands of people who go to work every day. From construction sites to factory floors, from operating rooms to classrooms, HoloLens is changing how we work, learn, communicate and get things done.

We are entering a new era of computing, one in which the digital world goes beyond two-dimensional screens and enters the three-dimensional world. This new collaborative computing era will empower us all to achieve more, break boundaries and work together with greater ease and immediacy in 3D. Today, we are proud to introduce the world to Microsoft HoloLens 2. Our customers asked us to focus on three key areas to make HoloLens even better. They wanted HoloLens 2 to be even more immersive and more comfortable, and to accelerate the time-to-value.

During the next year and a half, the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC) will be purchasing a new supercomputer in two phases. The first phase consists of Atos' air-cooled BullSequana X400 cluster which makes use of Intel's Cascade Lake Xeon processors along with Mellanox HDR InfiniBand for a theoretical performance of 2 petaflops. Meanwhile, system memory per node will range from 96 GB up to 1.5 TB with the entire system receiving a 4.9 PB Lustre parallel file system as well from DDN. Furthermore, a separate partition of phase one will be used for AI research and will feature 320 NVIDIA V100 NVLinked GPUs configured in 4-GPU nodes. It is expected that peak performance will reach 2.5 petaflops. Phase one will be brought online at some point in the summer of 2019.

Where things get interesting is in phase two, which is set for completion during the spring of 2020. Atos' will be building CSC a liquid-cooled HDR-connected BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer that will be configured with 200,000 AMD EPYC "Rome" CPU cores which for the mathematicians out there works out to 3,125 64 core AMD EPYC processors. Of course, all that x86 muscle will require a great deal of system memory, as such, each node will be equipped with 256 GB for good measure. Storage will consist of an 8 PB Lustre parallel file system that is to be provided by DDN. Overall phase two will increase computing capacity by 6.4 petaflops (peak). With deals like this already being signed it would appear AMD's next-generation EPYC processors are shaping up nicely considering Intel had this market cornered for nearly a decade.

Intel today unveiled its first clean-slate CPU core micro-architecture since "Nehalem," codenamed "Sunny Cove." Over the past decade, the 9-odd generations of Core processors were based on incrementally refined descendants of "Nehalem," running all the way down to "Coffee Lake." Intel now wants a clean-slate core design, much like AMD "Zen" is a clean-slate compared to "Stars" or to a large extent even "Bulldozer." This allows Intel to introduce significant gains in IPC (single-thread performance) over the current generation. Intel's IPC growth curve over the past three micro-architectures has remained flat, and only grew single-digit percentages over the generations prior.

It's important to note here, that "Sunny Cove" is the codename for the core design. Intel's earlier codenaming was all-encompassing, covering not just cores, but also uncore, and entire dies. It's up to Intel's future chip-designers to design dies with many of these cores, a future-generation iGPU such as Gen11, and a next-generation uncore that probably integrates PCIe gen 4.0 and DDR5 memory. Intel details "Sunny Cove" as far as mentioning IPC gains, a new ISA (new instruction sets and hardware capabilities, including AVX-512), and improved scalability (ability to increase core-counts without running into latency problems).

Intel is hosting its first artificial intelligence (AI) developer conference in Beijing on Nov. 14 and 15. The company kicked off the event with the introduction of the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (Intel NCS 2) designed to build smarter AI algorithms and for prototyping computer vision at the network edge. Based on the Intel Movidius Myriad X vision processing unit (VPU) and supported by the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit, the Intel NCS 2 affordably speeds the development of deep neural networks inference applications while delivering a performance boost over the previous generation neural compute stick. The Intel NCS 2 enables deep neural network testing, tuning and prototyping, so developers can go from prototyping into production leveraging a range of Intel vision accelerator form factors in real-world applications.

"The first-generation Intel Neural Compute Stick sparked an entire community of AI developers into action with a form factor and price that didn't exist before. We're excited to see what the community creates next with the strong enhancement to compute power enabled with the new Intel Neural Compute Stick 2," said Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the AI Products Group.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced its latest premium application processor (AP), the Exynos 9 Series 9820, equipped for on-device Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. The Exynos 9820 features a fourth-generation custom CPU, 2.0-gigabits-per-second (Gbps) LTE Advanced Pro modem, and an enhanced neural processing unit (NPU) to bring new smart experiences to mobile devices.

"As AI-related services expand and their utilization diversify in mobile devices, their processors require higher computational capabilities and efficiency," said Ben Hur, vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics. "The AI capabilities in the Exynos 9 Series 9820 will provide a new dimension of performance in smart devices through an integrated NPU, high-performance fourth-generation custom CPU core, 2.0Gbps LTE modem and improved multimedia performance."

VIA Technologies, Inc today announces that it is partnering with AI vision startup Lucid, to deliver AI-based depth sensing capabilities to more dual- and multi-camera devices in the security, retail, robotics and autonomous vehicle space. With Lucid's proprietary 3D Fusion Technology embedded into the VIA Edge AI 3D Developer Kit, security and retail cameras, robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles will now be able to easily capture accurate depth and 3D with dual- or multi-camera setups while reducing the costs, power, and space consumption of previous hardware depth solutions. As VIA builds out its long-term Edge AI solutions roadmap, Lucid is adding camera- and machine-learning based depth capabilities on top of every platform.

The AI-enhanced 3D/depth solution developed by Lucid, known as 3D Fusion Technology, is currently deployed in many devices such as 3D cameras, security cameras, robots, and mobile phones, including the RED Hydrogen One which is launching in November without any additional emission or laser-based hardware components. In the VIA Edge AI 3D Developer Kit, the AI depth solution runs on the Qualcomm APQ8096SG embedded processor, which features the Qualcomm AI Engine along with support for multiple cameras to help Lucid provide superior performance compared to other hardware depth solutions and deliver an industry-leading and unique pure machine learning-based software solution.

Intel Corporation released model legislation designed to inform policymakers and spur discussion on personal data privacy. Prompted by the rapid rise of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Intel's model bill is open for review and comment from privacy experts and the public on an interactive website. The bill's language and comments received should provide useful insight for those interested in meaningful data privacy legislation.

"The collection of personal information is a growing concern. The US needs a privacy law that both protects consumer privacy and creates a framework in which important new industries can prosper. Our model bill is designed to spur discussion that helps inspire meaningful privacy legislation," said David Hoffman, Intel associate general counsel and global privacy officer.

Data are the lifeblood for many critical new industries, including precision medicine, automated driving, workplace safety, smart cities and others. But the growing amount of personal data collected, sometimes without consumers' awareness, raises serious privacy concerns.

So, this doesn't really concern hardware, but alas, all advances - and particularly AI-related ones - are powered by the little silicon chips that could. This time, and in a move that really does bode towards the future of news coverage, Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, unveiled the "world's first AI news anchor," which was created in collaboration with local search engine company Sogou. There are actually two independent versions of the same anchor - one for news coverage in English, and another for Mandarin.

The AI-infused anchors fuse the image and voice profiles of actual human anchors with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which powers their speech, lip movements, and facial expressions, alongside reading, absorbing, and curating content that's then posted as video snippets generated by the AI. There is some work to be done until the result is actually indistinguishable from that of actual humans - but do we ever want AI renditions that are indistinguishable from humans? There are a number of problems that could arise from such an achievement, after all. But maybe that's a conversation for another day.

NVIDIA today announced a GPU-acceleration platform for data science and machine learning, with broad adoption from industry leaders, that enables even the largest companies to analyze massive amounts of data and make accurate business predictions at unprecedented speed.

RAPIDS open-source software gives data scientists a giant performance boost as they address highly complex business challenges, such as predicting credit card fraud, forecasting retail inventory and understanding customer buying behavior. Reflecting the growing consensus about the GPU's importance in data analytics, an array of companies is supporting RAPIDS - from pioneers in the open-source community, such as Databricks and Anaconda, to tech leaders like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Oracle.

NVIDIA today announced new GeForce experience features to be integrated and expanded in wake of its RTX platform push. The new features include increased number of Ansel-supporting titles (including already released Prey and Vampyr, as well as the upcoming Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider), as well as RTX-exclusive features that are being implemented into the company's gaming system companion.

There are also some features being implemented that gamers will be able to take advantage of without explicit Ansel SDK integration done by the games developer - which NVIDIA says will bring Ansel support (in any shape or form) to over 200 titles (150 more than the over 50 titles already supported via SDK). And capitalizing on Battlefield V's relevance to the gaming crowd, NVIDIA also announced support for Ansel and its Highlights feature for the upcoming title.

Using Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the OpenVINO toolkit, Intel and Philips tested two healthcare use cases for deep learning inference models: one on X-rays of bones for bone-age-prediction modeling, the other on CT scans of lungs for lung segmentation. In these tests, Intel and Philips achieved a speed improvement of 188 times for the bone-age-prediction model, and a 38 times speed improvement for the lung-segmentation model over the baseline measurements.

Intel Xeon Scalable processors appear to be the right solution for this type of AI workload. Our customers can use their existing hardware to its maximum potential, while still aiming to achieve quality output resolution at exceptional speeds," said Vijayananda J., chief architect and fellow, Data Science and AI at Philips HealthSuite Insights.

NVIDIA today reinvented computer graphics with the launch of the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture. The greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

These two engines - along with more powerful compute for simulation and enhanced rasterization - usher in a new generation of hybrid rendering to address the $250 billion visual effects industry. Hybrid rendering enables cinematic-quality interactive experiences, amazing new effects powered by neural networks and fluid interactivity on highly complex models.

It has been a long five years since Aliens: Colonial Marines launched as a hot mess. Being critically panned by gamers and critics alike. One of the reasons behind the negative reception was the game's poor AI. The Xenomorphs had a tendency to run straight into gunfire. Or worse yet, would stand around or group up making them easy targets. Suffice to say the Xenomorphs were far from scary. A typographical error has been discovered as the reason behind some of those issues.

As noted on the ResetERA forums, a post by jamesdickinson963 on the ACM Overhaul ModDB page traced the problem to a spelling error in a single line of code within the game's ini file. The code shown below has "teather" instead of the proper "tether". This simple mistake in theory, results in the "zone tether" failing to load the AI parameters attached to the broken bit of code.

(Editor's Note: NVIDIA continues to spread its wings in the AI and automotive markets, where it has rapidly become the de facto player. While the company's gaming products have certainly been the ones to project the company's image - and profits - that allowed it to come to be one of the world's leading tech companies, it's hard to argue that AI and datacenter accelerators has become one of the chief departments in raking in profits for the company. The company's vision for Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving and the future of our connected cities is an inspiring one, that came straight from yesterday's science fiction. Here's hoping the human mind, laws and city design efforts accompany these huge technological leaps -or at least don't strangle them too much.)

Press a button on your smartphone and go. Daimler, Bosch and NVIDIA have joined forces to bring fully automated and driverless vehicles to city streets, and the effects will be felt far beyond the way we drive. While the world's billion cars travel 10 trillion miles per year, most of the time these vehicles are sitting idle, taking up valuable real estate while parked. And when driven, they are often stuck on congested roadways. Mobility services will solve these issues plaguing urban areas, capture underutilized capacity and revolutionize the way we travel.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that its strategic foundry collaboration with Arm will be expanded to 7/5-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology to remain a step ahead in the era of high-performance computing. Based on Samsung Foundry's 7LPP (7nm Low Power Plus) and 5LPE (5nm Low Power Early) process technologies, the Arm Artisan physical IP platform will enable 3GHz+ computing performance for Arm's Cortex -A76 processor.

Samsung's 7LPP process technology will be ready for its initial production in the second half of 2018. The first extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography process technology, and its key IPs, are in development and expected to be completed by the first half of 2019. Samsung's 5LPE technology will allow greater area scaling and ultra-low power benefits due to the latest innovations in 7LPP process technology.

Baidu Inc. today announced Kunlun, China's first cloud-to-edge AI chip, built to accommodate high performance requirements of a wide variety of AI scenarios. The announcement includes training chip "818-300"and inference chip "818-100". Kunlun can be applied to both cloud and edge scenarios, such as data centers, public clouds and autonomous vehicles.

Kunlun is a high-performance and cost-effective solution for the high processing demands of AI. It leverages Baidu's AI ecosystem, which includes AI scenarios like search ranking and deep learning frameworks like PaddlePaddle. Baidu's years of experience in optimizing the performance of these AI services and frameworks afforded the company the expertise required to build a world class AI chip.

With tomorrow's opening bell, NVIDIA will join the Standard and Poors S&P 100 index, replacing Time Warner. The spot that NVIDIA is joining in has been freed up by the merger of Time Warner with AT&T. This marks a monumental moment for the company as membership in the S&P 100 is reserved for only the largest and most important corporations in the US. From the tech sector the list comprises illustrious names such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google Alphabet, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Oracle, Paypal, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.

NVIDIA's stock has seen massive gains over the last years, thanks to delivering record quarter after record quarter. Recent developments have transformed the company from a mostly gaming GPU manufacturer to a company that is leading in the fields of GPU compute, AI and machine learning. This of course inspires investors, so the NVIDIA stock has been highly sought after, now sitting above 265 USD, which brings the company's worth to over 160 billion USD. Congratulations!

ASUS, the leading IT Company in server systems, server motherboards, workstations and workstation motherboards, today announced support for the latest NVIDIA AI solutions with NVIDIA Tesla V100 Tensor Core 32GB GPUs and Tesla P4 on its accelerated computing servers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is translating data into meaningful insights, services and scientific breakthroughs. The size of the neural networks powering this AI revolution has grown tremendously. For instance, today's state of the art neural network model for language translation, Google's MOE model has 8 billion parameters compared to 100 million parameters of models from just two years ago.

To handle these massive models, NVIDIA Tesla V100 offers a 32GB memory configuration, which is double that of the previous generation. Providing 2X the memory improves deep learning training performance for next-generation AI models by up to 50 percent and improves developer productivity, allowing researchers to deliver more AI breakthroughs in less time. Increased memory allows HPC applications to run larger simulations more efficiently than ever before.

NGD Systems, Inc., the leader in computational storage, today announced the general availability (GA) of the 16 terabyte (TB) Catalina-2 U.2 NVMe solid state drive (SSD). The Catalina-2 is the first NVMe SSD with 16TB capacity that also makes available NGD's powerful "In-Situ Processing" capabilities. The Catalina-2 does this without impact to the reliability, quality of service (QoS) or power consumption, already available in the current shipping NGD Products.

The use of Arm multi-core processors in Catalina-2 provides users with a well-understood development environment and the combination of exceptional performance with low power consumption. The Arm-based In-Situ Processing platform allows NGD Systems to pack both high capacity and computational ability into the first 16TB 2.5-inch form factor package on the market. The NGD Catalina-2 U.2 NVMe SSD only consumes 12W (0.75W/TB) of power, compared to the 25W or more used by other NVMe solutions. This provides the highest energy efficiency in the industry.

Intel's Mobileye, the AI and self-driving feature the blue giant acquired last year for a cool $15.3 billion, has just announced, via an exclusive report to Reuters, that they've secured a contract to provide some 8 million self-driving systems to an European automaker. The deal is a future-focused one, and will see, by 2021, distribution for Intel's EyeQ5 chip, which is designed for fully autonomous driving - an upgrade to the EyeQ4 that will be rolled out in the coming weeks, Reuters reports, according to senior vice president for advanced development and strategy at Mobileye Erez Dagan.

Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's chief executive, said that "By the end of 2019, we expect over 100,000 Level 3 cars [where the car is self-driving but still allows for user intervention should the system be unable to progress for more than 10 seconds] with Mobileye installed." This deal is sure to make Intel even more of a player in the automotive space, where NVIDIA and a number of other high-profile companies have been making strides in recent years.