Singapore cybersecurity firm Flexxon on Monday launched the world's first solid-state drive (SSD) embedded with artificial intelligence (AI) data security. As the "last line of defence" to protect data at the hardware level, the SSD is able to guard against both remote and physical attacks, boasting a range of features including temperature sensors to detect unusual movements that occur. In the event of such an incursion, the device - also known as X-PHY - will alert the user via email and lock itself to prevent any physical tampering. Users may then unlock the device via a dynamic authentication process. For clients with high security needs, such as the military, data may be automatically wiped should the device fall into the wrong hands.

Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-charge of Singapore's Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan said that the innovation was a "breakthrough" and a significant step in increasing security and safety for end users, having put AI into the firmware layer of an SSD. Congratulating Flexxon on its new product, Dr Balakrishnan - who was the guest-of-honour at the launch - also called on similar companies to include research institutes, universities and the private sector to enhance local research and development efforts in AI.

IBM today unveiled a breakthrough in semiconductor design and process with the development of the world's first chip announced with 2 nanometer (nm) nanosheet technology. Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure.

Demand for increased chip performance and energy efficiency continues to rise, especially in the era of hybrid cloud, AI, and the Internet of Things. IBM's new 2 nm chip technology helps advance the state-of-the-art in the semiconductor industry, addressing this growing demand. It is projected to achieve 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use, than today's most advanced 7 nm node chips.

Today, Lenovo in partnership with Intel has announced that Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is building a supercomputer powered by Intel's next-generation technologies. Specifically, the supercomputer will use Intel's Sapphire Rapids CPUs in combination with the highly-teased Ponte Vecchio GPUs to power the applications running at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Along with the various processors, the LRZ will also deploy Intel Optane persistent memory to process the huge amount of data the LRZ has and is producing. The integration of HPC and AI processing will be enabled by the expansion of LRZ's current supercomputer called SuperMUG-NG, which will receive an upgrade in 2022, which will feature both Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio.

Mr. Raja Koduri, Intel graphics guru, has on Twitter teased that this supercomputer installment will represent a combination of Sapphire Rapids, Ponte Vecchio, Optane, and One API all in one machine. The system will use over one petabyte of Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) based on the Optane technologies. Then, Mr. Koduri has teased some Ponte Vecchio eye candy, which is a GIF of tiles combining to form a GPU, which you can check out here. You can also see some pictures of Ponte Vecchio below.

IBASE Technology Inc. (TPEx: 8050), IBASE, a leading provider of industrial motherboards and embedded systems, launches its latest 3.5" SBC IB953 powered by 11th Gen Intel Core processors (codenamed Tiger Lake). Measuring 146 x 102 mm in a compact footprint, the single board computer offers impressive I/O and computing performance, making it an ideal platform for a broad range of demanding applications in factory automation, machine vision, healthcare, as well as retail environments.

The IB953 features a 5G compatible M.2 3052 socket and the latest 11th Gen. Intel Core and Celeron processors built on 10 nm SuperFin process, delivering up to 25% faster performance and greater AI acceleration. With the Intel Core i7-1185G7 (IBASE model IB953AF-I7) comes the new Iris Xe (Xe-LP) graphics architecture supporting 96 EUs (Execution Units) which equals 768 cores and runs at 1.35 GHz, an increase of 250 MHz over the previous 11-gen graphics to provide up to twice the performance and improved power efficiency. The graphics engine's hardware acceleration can drive up to four simultaneous 4K HDR displays (via 2x DisplayPort + eDP and LVDS).

AAEON, an industry leader in embedded AI Edge systems, announces new software support for the BOXER-8200 series of embedded PCs featuring NVIDIA Jetson System on Modules (SOM). AAEON has officially signed an agreement with Canonical to provide customers with the NVIDIA Ubuntu operating system pre-installed on new BOXER-8200 systems. Systems with the NVIDIA Ubuntu OS will also ship with the Jetpack 4.5 drivers and toolkit package preinstalled. Additionally, AAEON announces a new customization services to provide Secureboot to clients in addition to other customization options.

AAEON is dedicated to delivering the most comprehensive platform solutions powered by NVIDIA Jetson SOMs. To meet the needs of their clients, AAEON has signed an agreement with Canonical to provide the official NVIDIA Ubuntu OS image on the entire range of BOXER-8200 series systems. Developers and customers who purchase new BOXER-8200 series systems can receive the system with the OS preinstalled, with no need to flash the image before starting the system up for the first time. The BOXER-8200 series includes the BOXER-822x platforms with Jetson Nano, BOXER-8240AI with Jetson AGX Xavier, BOXER-825x platforms with Jetson Xavier NX, and BOXER-823x platforms with Jetson TX2 NX (currently under development).

AAEON, an industry leader of AI and IOT solutions, is excited to celebrate the launch of Intel's latest scalable platform, the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (formerly Ice Lake-SP). As an associate member of the Intel IoT Solutions Alliance, AAEON is excited to bring this new technology to market with the ARES-WHI0 industrial ATX server board and other future products.

The 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors deliver the next generation of high-end computing performance and support for vital data integrity and security technologies. This new generation of Xeon SP brings higher processing speeds and Intel's Deep Learning Boost technology, allowing for greater acceleration and more efficient processing for AI server applications.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced that Tenstorrent, an AI semiconductor and software start-up developing next-generation computers, will license the new SiFive Intelligence X280 processor in its AI training and inference processor. SiFive will deliver more details of its SiFive Intelligence initiative including the SiFive Intelligence X280 processor at the Linley Spring Processor Conference on April 23rd.

Tenstorrent's novel approach to inference and training effectively and efficiently accommodates the exponential growth in the size of machine learning models while offering best-in-class performance.

NVIDIA has recently announced the company's first standalone Grace CPU that will come out as a product in 2023. NVIDIA has designed Grace on Arm ISA, likely ARM v9, to represent a new way that data centers are built and deliver a whole new level of HPC and AI performance. However, the CPU competition in a data center space is considered one of the hardest markets to enter. Usually, the market is a duopoly between Intel and AMD, which supply x86 processors to server vendors. In the past few years, there have been few Arm CPUs that managed to enter the data canter space, however, NVIDIA is aiming to deliver much more performance and grab a bigger piece of the market.

As a self-proclaimed leader in AI, Intel is facing hard competition from NVIDIA in the coming years. In an interview with Fortune, Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger has talked about NVIDIA and how the company sees the competition between the two. Mr. Gelsinger is claiming that Intel is a leader in CPUs that feature AI acceleration built in the chip and that they are not playing defense, but rather offense against NVIDIA. You can check out the whole quote from the interview below.

OpenFive, a leading provider of customizable, silicon-focused solutions with differentiated IP, today announced the successful tape out of a high-performance SoC on TSMC's N5 process, with integrated IP solutions targeted for cutting edge High Performance Computing (HPC)/AI, networking, and storage solutions.

The SoC features an OpenFive High Bandwidth Memory (HBM3) IP subsystem and D2D I/Os, as well as a SiFive E76 32-bit CPU core. The HBM3 interface supports 7.2 Gbps speeds allowing high throughput memories to feed domain-specific accelerators in compute-intensive applications including HPC, AI, Networking, and Storage. OpenFive's low-power, low-latency, and highly scalable D2D interface technology allows for expanding compute performance by connecting multiple dice together using an organic substrate or a silicon interposer in a 2.5D package.

Enterprise demand for cloud services has been rising steady in the past two years owing to the rapidly changing global markets and uncertainties brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. TrendForce's investigations find that most enterprises have been prioritizing cloud service adoption across applications ranging from AI to other emerging technologies as cloud services have relatively flexible costs. Case in point, demand from clients in the hyperscale data center segment constituted more than 40% of total demand for servers in 4Q20, while this figure may potentially approach 45% for 2021. For 2021, TrendForce expects global server shipment to increase by more than 5% YoY and ODM Direct server shipment to increase by more than 15% YoY.

Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced it is partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to the edge at scale.

Today's applications use AI for a variety of tasks from translating text on webpages to object recognition in images, making machine learning models a critical part of application development. Users expect this functionality to be fast and reliable, while developers want to keep proprietary machine learning models reliable and secure. Cloudflare is seamlessly solving for their security, performance, and reliability needs while NVIDIA provides developers with a broad range of AI-powered application frameworks including Jarvis for natural language processing, Clara for healthcare and life sciences, and Morpheus for cybersecurity.

The combination of NVIDIA accelerated computing technology and Cloudflare's edge network will create a massive platform on which developers can deploy applications that use pre-trained or custom machine learning models in seconds. By leveraging the TensorFlow platform developers can use familiar tools to build and test machine learning models, and then deploy them globally onto Cloudflare's edge network.

NVIDIA today introduced a new class of NVIDIA-Certified Systems, bringing AI within reach for organizations that run their applications on industry-standard enterprise data center infrastructure. These include high-volume enterprise servers from top manufacturers, which were announced in January and are now certified to run the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite—which is exclusively certified for VMware vSphere 7, the world's most widely used compute virtualization platform.

Further expanding the NVIDIA-Certified servers ecosystem is a new wave of systems featuring the NVIDIA A30 GPU for mainstream AI and data analytics and the NVIDIA A10 GPU for AI-enabled graphics, virtual workstations and mixed compute and graphics workloads, also announced today.

NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU, its next-generation data processing unit, to deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities available for data centers.

The first DPU built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField-3 lets every enterprise deliver applications at any scale with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimized for multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at data-center scale.

NVIDIA today announced its first data center CPU, an Arm-based processor that will deliver 10x the performance of today's fastest servers on the most complex AI and high performance computing workloads.

The result of more than 10,000 engineering years of work, the NVIDIA Grace CPU is designed to address the computing requirements for the world's most advanced applications—including natural language processing, recommender systems and AI supercomputing—that analyze enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory. It combines energy-efficient Arm CPU cores with an innovative low-power memory subsystem to deliver high performance with great efficiency.

NVIDIA today unveiled the world's first cloud-native, multi-tenant AI supercomputer—the next-generation NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD featuring NVIDIA BlueField -2 DPUs. Fortifying the DGX SuperPOD with BlueField-2 DPUs—data processing units that offload, accelerate and isolate users' data—provides customers with secure connections to their AI infrastructure.

The company also announced NVIDIA Base Command, which enables multiple users and IT teams to securely access, share and operate their DGX SuperPOD infrastructure. Base Command coordinates AI training and operations on DGX SuperPOD infrastructure to enable the work of teams of data scientists and developers located around the globe.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced the latest addition to its 7-series portfolio, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 780G 5G Mobile Platform. Snapdragon 780G is designed to deliver powerful AI performance and brilliant camera capture backed by the Qualcomm Spectra 570 triple ISP and 6th generation Qualcomm AI Engine, allowing users to capture, enhance, and share their favorite moments seamlessly. This platform enables a selection of premium-tier features for the first time in the 7-series, making next generation experiences more broadly accessible.

"Since introducing the Snapdragon 7-series three years ago, more than 350 devices have launched based on 7-series mobile platforms. Today, we are continuing this momentum by introducing the Snapdragon 780G 5G Mobile Platform," said Kedar Kondap, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "Snapdragon 780G was designed to bring in-demand, premium experiences to more users around the world."

Raja Koduri of Intel has today posted an interesting video on his Twitter account. Showing one of the greatest engineering marvels Intel has ever created, Mr. Koduri has teased what is to come when the company launches the Xe-HPC Ponte Vecchio graphics card designed for high-performance computing workloads. Showcased today was the "petaflops in your palm" chip, designed to run AI workloads with a petaflop of computing power. Having over 100 billion transistors, the chip uses as much as 47 tiles combined in the most advanced packaging technology ever created by Intel. They call them "magical tiles", and they bring logic, memory, and I/O controllers, all built using different semiconductor nodes.

Mr. Koduri also pointed out that the chip was born after only two years after the concept, which is an awesome achievement, given that the research of the new silicon takes years. The chip will be the heart of many systems that require massive computational power, especially the ones like AI. Claiming to have the capability to perform quadrillion floating-point operations per second (one petaflop), the chip will be a true monster. So far we don't know other details like the floating-point precision it runs at with one petaflop or the total power consumption of those 47 tiles, so we have to wait for more details.More pictures follow.

On March 22nd, the CEO of SK Hynix, Seok-Hee Lee, gave a keynote speech to the IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) and shared with experts a part of its plan for the future of SK Hynix products. The CEO took the stage and delivered some conceptual technologies that the company is working on right now. At the center of the show, two distinct products stood out - 3D NAND and DRAM. So far, the company has believed that its 3D NAND scaling was very limited and that it can push up to 500 layers sometime in the future before the limit is reached. However, according to the latest research, SK Hynix will be able to produce 600-layer 3D NAND technology in the distant future.

So far, the company has managed to manufacture and sample 512Gb 176-layer 3D NAND chips, so the 600-layer solutions are still far away. Nonetheless, it is a possibility that we are looking at. Before we reach that layer number, there are various problems needed to be solved so the technology can work. According to SK Hynix, "the company introduced the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technology to further improve the cell property of efficiently storing electric charges and exporting them when needed, while developing technology to maintain uniform electric charges over a certain amount through the innovation of dielectric materials. In addition to this, to solve film stress issues, the mechanical stress levels of films is controlled and the cell oxide-nitride (ON) material is being optimized. To deal with the interference phenomenon between cells and charge loss that occur when more cells are stacked at a limited height, SK Hynix developed the isolated-charge trap nitride (isolated-CTN) structure to enhance reliability."

AAEON, an industry leader in AI Edge hardware solutions, announces the latest entry in their UP Bridge the Gap brand, the UP Squared Pro. The UP Squared Pro offers developers an updated platform based on the popular UP Squared platform, offering greater expandability and I/O features. With support for 5G modules and AI accelerators, the UP Squared Pro takes AI Edge computing to the Pro level.

The UP Squared Pro (UPN-APL) is an updated rebuild based on the popular UP Squared board. Powered by Intel Celeron N3350, Pentium N4200 and Atom E3950 processors (formerly known as Apollo Lake), the UP Squared Pro maintains the same familiar ecosystem allowing developers to easily migrate any projects built on the UP Squared platform. UP Squared Pro also features on-board physical TPM 2.0, to enhance data security. Altogether, the board offers the performance and efficiency to power a range of edge applications, including drones and autonomous robots.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, today introduced AMD EPYC 7003 Series Processor-based server platforms featuring efficiency and performance enhancements in hardware, security, and memory density for the modern data center.

"Big data has become capital today. Large amounts of data and faster answers drive better decisions. TYAN's industry-leading server platforms powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors enable businesses to make more accurate decisions with higher precision," said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure BU. "Moving the bar once more for workload performance, EPYC 7003 Series processors provide the performance needed in the heart of the enterprise to help IT professionals drive faster time to results," said Ram Peddibhotla, corporate vice president, EPYC product management, AMD. "Time is the new metric for efficiency and EPYC 7003 Series processors are the perfect choice for the most diverse workloads, helping provide more and better data to drive better business outcomes."

NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a comprehensive software suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks optimized, certified and supported by NVIDIA, exclusively with VMware vSphere 7 Update 2, separately announced today.

Through a first-of-its-kind industry collaboration to develop an AI-Ready Enterprise platform, NVIDIA teamed with VMware to virtualize AI workloads on VMware vSphere with NVIDIA AI Enterprise. The offering gives enterprises the software required to develop a broad range of AI solutions, such as advanced diagnostics in healthcare, smart factories for manufacturing, and fraud detection in financial services.

AAEON, a leading manufacturer of AI Edge computing solutions, announces the BOXER-8253AI, the latest in AAEON's lineup of compact rugged platforms powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX SoC. The BOXER-8253AI builds on the popular BOXER-825x Series to deliver a flexible platform designed to connect and power even more applications with HDMI input, PoE PSE ports, and flexible storage options.

The BOXER-8253AI features an I/O loadout designed to provide users and developers flexible deployment for any application. The BOXER-8253AI brings new capabilities to the platform with HDMI input, allowing developers and users to quickly add AI powered visual analysis to a broad range of applications from NVR surveillance systems to security checkpoint X-ray scanners and medical devices. Additionally, the BOXER-8253AI features two PoE PSE ports (802.3af) delivering up to 60 W total power to connect and power devices such as PoE cameras or even PoE PD devices.

Addressing the demands of the modern data center, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced a range of new data center products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.

Today's most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

AAEON, an industry leader in rugged AI Edge platforms, announces the BOXER-8521AI is now available on a mass market scale. Winner of the 2021 Taiwan Excellence Award, the BOXER-8521AI combines the flexibility of PoE PD deployment with the Google Edge TPU in a rugged, fanless system designed to bring AI Edge Computing to where it's needed.

Recently awarded the Taiwan Excellence Award for 2021, the BOXER-8521AI is focused on providing flexibility in deployment and connectivity. The BOXER-8521AI features a PoE PD port, allowing the system to be deployed further away from its power source, as well as enable internet connection and remote monitoring of the system over the same single cable, reducing the complexity of installation. Additionally, by utilizing both the PoE PD port and DC-input, the system can continue operating even if one power supply is cut off.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has developed the industry's first High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) processing power—the HBM-PIM. The new processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture brings powerful AI computing capabilities inside high-performance memory, to accelerate large-scale processing in data centers, high performance computing (HPC) systems and AI-enabled mobile applications.

Kwangil Park, senior vice president of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics stated, "Our groundbreaking HBM-PIM is the industry's first programmable PIM solution tailored for diverse AI-driven workloads such as HPC, training and inference. We plan to build upon this breakthrough by further collaborating with AI solution providers for even more advanced PIM-powered applications."