Microsoft Xbox Series X/S, their hardware refreshes, and variants, will reportedly be the company's mainstay all the way up until 2028, the company disclosed in its documents filed as part of its anti-trust lawsuit with the FTC. In a presentation slide titled "From "Zero Microsoft" to "Full Microsoft," the company explains how its next gen Xbox, scheduled for calendar year (CY) 2028, will see a full convergence of Microsoft co-developed hardware, software, and cloud compute services, into a powerful entertainment system. It elaborates on this in another slide, titled "Cohesive Hybrid Compute," where it states the company's vision to be the development of "a next generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences."

From the looks of it, Microsoft fully understands the creator economy that has been built over the gaming industry, and wants to develop its next-gen console to target exactly this—a single device from which people can play, stream, and create content from—something that's traditionally reserved for gaming desktop PCs. Game streamers playing on consoles usually have an entire creator PC setup handling the production and streaming side of things. Keeping this exact use-case in mind, Microsoft plans to "enable new levels of performance beyond the capabilities of the client hardware alone," by which it means that not only will the console rely on its own hardware—which could be jaw-dropping powerful as you'll see—but also leverage cloud compute services from Microsoft.

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the next generation of two AWS-designed chip families—AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2—delivering advancements in price performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of customer workloads, including machine learning (ML) training and generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Graviton4 and Trainium2 mark the latest innovations in chip design from AWS. With each successive generation of chip, AWS delivers better price performance and energy efficiency, giving customers even more options—in addition to chip/instance combinations featuring the latest chips from third parties like AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA—to run virtually any application or workload on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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.

Ansys has collaborated with TSMC and Microsoft to validate a joint solution for analyzing mechanical stresses in multi-die 3D-IC systems manufactured with TSMC's 3DFabric advanced packaging technologies. This collaborative solution gives customers added confidence to address novel multiphysics requirements that improve the functional reliability of advanced designs using TSMC's 3DFabric, a comprehensive family of 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technologies.

Ansys Mechanical is the industry-leading finite element analysis software used to simulate mechanical stresses caused by thermal gradients in 3D-ICs. The solution flow has been proven to run efficiently on Microsoft Azure, helping to ensure fast turn-around times with today's very large and complex 2.5D/3D-IC systems.

During its Ignite conference, Microsoft introduced a duo of custom-designed silicon made to accelerate AI and excel in cloud workloads. First of the two is Microsoft's Azure Cobalt 100 CPU, a 128-core design that features a 64-bit Armv9 instruction set, implemented in a cloud-native design that is set to become a part of Microsoft's offerings. While there aren't many details regarding the configuration, the company claims that the performance target is up to 40% when compared to the current generation of Arm servers running on Azure cloud. The SoC has used Arm's Neoverse CSS platform customized for Microsoft, with presumably Arm Neoverse N2 cores.

The next and hottest topic in the server space is AI acceleration, which is needed for running today's large language models. Microsoft hosts OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and many other AI services. To help make them run as fast as possible, Microsoft's project Athena now has the name of Maia 100 AI accelerator, which is manufactured on TSMC's 5 nm process. It features 105 billion transistors and supports various MX data formats, even those smaller than 8-bit bit, for maximum performance. Currently tested on GPT 3.5 Turbo, we have yet to see performance figures and comparisons with competing hardware from NVIDIA, like H100/H200 and AMD, with MI300X. The Maia 100 has an aggregate bandwidth of 4.8 Terabits per accelerator, which uses a custom Ethernet-based networking protocol for scaling. These chips are expected to appear in Microsoft data centers early next year, and we hope to get some performance numbers soon.

The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.

Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s - unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

Jabil Inc., a global leader in design, manufacturing, and supply chain solutions, today announced it will take over the manufacture and sale of Intel's current Silicon Photonics-based pluggable optical transceiver ("module") product lines and the development of future generations of such modules.

"This deal better positions Jabil to cater to the needs of our valued customers in the data center industry, including hyperscale, next-wave clouds, and AI cloud data centers. These complex environments present unique challenges, and we are committed to tackling them head-on and delivering innovative solutions to support the evolving demands of the data center ecosystem," stated Matt Crowley, Senior Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure at Jabil. "This deal enables Jabil to expand its presence in the data center value chain."

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2023. Total consolidated revenue was KRW 67.40 trillion, a 12% increase from the previous quarter, mainly due to new smartphone releases and higher sales of premium display products. Operating profit rose sequentially to KRW 2.43 trillion based on strong sales of flagship models in mobile and strong demand for displays, as losses at the Device Solutions (DS) Division narrowed.

The Memory Business reduced losses sequentially as sales of high valued-added products and average selling prices somewhat increased. Earnings in system semiconductors were impacted by a delay in demand recovery for major applications, but the Foundry Business posted a new quarterly high for new backlog from design wins. The mobile panel business reported a significant increase in earnings on the back of new flagship model releases by major customers, while the large panel business narrowed losses in the quarter. The Device eXperience (DX) Division achieved solid results due to robust sales of premium smartphones and TVs. Revenue at the Networks Business declined in major overseas markets as mobile operators scaled back investments.

Western Digital Corp. (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal first quarter 2024 financial results. "Western Digital's fiscal first quarter results exceeded our expectations as the team's efforts to bolster business agility and develop differentiated and innovative products across a broad range of end-markets have resulted in sequential margin improvement across flash and HDD businesses," said David Goeckeler, Western Digital CEO. "Our Consumer and Client end markets continue to perform well and we now expect our Cloud end market to grow going forward. Our improved cost structure positions Western Digital to capitalize on enhanced earnings power as market conditions continue to improve."

• First quarter revenue was $2.75 billion, up 3% sequentially (QoQ). Cloud revenue decreased 12% (QoQ), Client revenue increased 11% (QoQ) and Consumer revenue increased 14% (QoQ).
• First quarter GAAP earnings per share (EPS) was $(2.17) and Non-GAAP EPS was $(1.76), which includes $225 million of underutilization-related charges in Flash and HDD.
• Expect fiscal second quarter 2024 revenue to be in the range of $2.85 billion to $3.05 billion.
• Expect Non-GAAP EPS in the range of $(1.35) to $(1.05), which includes $110 to $130 million of underutilization-related charges in Flash and HDD.

Oxide Computer Company today unveiled the world's first commercial Cloud Computer, a true rack-scale system with fully unified hardware and software designed for on-premises cloud computing. The company also announced a $44 million Series A financing round led by Eclipse with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and Rally Ventures to accelerate production for Fortune 1000 enterprises. This brings the company's total financing raised to date to $78 million.

Despite the rapid rise of cloud computing, the vast majority of IT infrastructure today continues to live outside the public cloud in on-premises data centers, where enterprises are forced to cobble together a set of disjointed hardware and software components to run their businesses. Since its inception, Oxide's mission has been to solve this problem, developing the first unified product that delivers the developer experience and operational efficiencies of the public cloud to on-premises environments.

Baidu, Inc., a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, today hosted its annual flagship technology conference Baidu World 2023 in Beijing, marking the conference's return to an offline format after four years. With the theme "Prompt the World," this year's Baidu World conference saw Baidu launch ERNIE 4.0, Baidu's next-generation and most powerful foundation model offering drastically enhanced core AI capabilities. Baidu also showcased some of its most popular applications, solutions, and products re-built around the company's state-of-the-art generative AI.

"ERNIE 4.0 has achieved a full upgrade with drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory," Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, said at the event. "These four core capabilities form the foundation of AI-native applications and have now unleashed unlimited opportunities for new innovations."

GIGABYTE Technology, Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and an industry leader in high-performance servers, server motherboards, and workstations, today announced four new GIGABYTE R-series servers for AmpereOne Family of processors for cloud-native computing where high compute density per rack and power-efficiency matter.

For cloud-native computing, hyperscalers or cloud service providers (CSPs) rely on predictable high-performance, scalable infrastructure, and power efficient nodes. GIGABYTE servers running the AmpereOne Family platform achieve those expectations, but this is not the first time GIGABYTE has worked with Ampere Computing. The partnership first started in 2020 with the launch of the Ampere Altra platform. And this new family of AmpereOne processors will not supersede the Altra platform, rather it is an extension of what Arm architecture is capable of by Ampere Computing. For instance, the CPU core count goes beyond 128 cores in Altra to 136-192 cores in AmpereOne for new levels of performance and VM density. On top of that, the private L2 cache per core has doubled and there is support for DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5.

The recent development of AI models that are more capable than ever has led to a massive demand for hardware infrastructure that powers them. As the dominant player in the industry with its GPU and CPU-GPU solutions, NVIDIA has reportedly discussed leasing data center space to power its own cloud service for these AI applications. Called NVIDIA Cloud DGX, it will reportedly put the company right up against its clients, which are cloud service providers (CSPs) as well. Companies like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle actively acquire NVIDIA GPUs to power their GPU-accelerated cloud instances. According to the report, this has been developing for a few years.

Additionally, it is worth noting that NVIDIA already owns parts for its potential data center infrastructure. This includes NVIDIA DGX and HGX units, which can just be interconnected in a data center, with cloud provisioning so developers can access NVIDIA's instances. A great benefit that would attract the end-user is that NVIDIA could potentially lower the price point of its offerings, as they are acquiring GPUs for much less compared to the CSPs that receive them with a profit margin that NVIDIA imposes. This can attract potential customers, leaving hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google without a moat in the cloud game. Of course, until this project is official, we should take this information with a grain of salt.

Solidigm today announced the D7-5810, an enterprise SSD for extremely intensity write workloads. Such a drive would be capable of write endurance in the neighborhood of 50 DWPD. For reference, the company's D7-P5620, a write-centric/mixed workload drive for data-logging, and AI ingest/preparation, offers around 3 DWPD of endurance, depending on the variant; and the read-intensive drive meant for CDNs, the D5-P5336, offers around 0.5 DWPD. Use cases for the new D7-P5810 include high performance caching for flash arrays dealing with "cooler" data; high-frequency trading, and HPC.

Solidigm D7-P5810 uses SK hynix 144-layer 3D NAND flash that's made to operate in a pure SLC configuration. The drive comes in 800 GB and 1.6 TB capacities, and offers 50 DWPD over an endurance period of 5 years (4K random writes). More specifically, both models offer 73 PBW (petabytes written) of endurance. The drive comes in enterprise-relevant 15 mm-thick U.2 form-factor, with PCIe Gen 4 x4 interface, with NVMe 1.3c and NVMe MI 1.1 protocols.

Oracle has announced their next generation Ampere A2 Compute Instances based on the latest AmpereOne processor, with availability starting later this year. According to Oracle, the new instances will deliver up to 44% more price-performance compared to x86 offerings and are ideal for AI inference, databases, web services, media transcoding workloads and run-time language support, such as GO and Java.

In related news, several new customers including industry leading real-time video service companies 8x8 and Phenix, along with AI startups like Wallaroo, said they are migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Ampere as more and more companies seek to maximize price, performance and energy efficiency.

As the world experiences a generational shift to artificial intelligence, each of us is participating in a new era of global expansion enabled by silicon. It's the "Siliconomy," where systems powered by AI are imbued with autonomy and agency, assisting us across both knowledge-based and physical-based tasks as part of our everyday environments.

At Intel Innovation, the company unveiled technologies to bring AI everywhere and to make it more accessible across all workloads - from client and edge to network and cloud. These include easy access to AI solutions in the cloud, better price performance for Intel data center AI accelerators than the competition offers, tens of millions of new AI-enabled Intel PCs shipping in 2024 and tools for securely powering AI deployments at the edge.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a subsidiary of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation, today announced availability of new single-socket server platforms supporting AMD EPYC 8004 Series processors. These platforms are purpose built for cloud services and intelligent edge deployments while offering lower operating costs and delivering impressive energy efficiency.

"The AMD EPYC 8004 Series CPUs deliver a great combination of impressive performance and streamlined platform componentry which enables us to develop business-relevant server configurations for our customers," said Eric Kuo, Vice President of the Server Infrastructure Business Unit at MiTAC Computing Technology. "TYAN's innovative server platform, fueled by EPYC 8004 Series CPUs, empowers us to provide our customers with cost-effective solutions while also expanding into new markets."

Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing the AMD based Supermicro H13 generation of WIO Servers, optimized to deliver strong performance and energy efficiency for edge and telco datacenters powered by the new AMD EPYC 8004 Series processors. The new Supermicro H13 WIO and short-depth front I/O systems deliver energy-efficient single socket servers that lower operating costs for enterprise, telco, and edge applications. These systems are designed with a dense form factor and flexible I/O options for storage and networking, making the new servers ideal for deploying in edge networks.

"We are excited to expand our AMD EPYC-based server offerings optimized to deliver excellent TCO and energy efficiency for data center networking and edge computing," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Adding to our already industry leading edge-to-cloud rack scale IT solutions, the new Supermicro H13 WIO systems with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5-4800 MHz memory show tremendous performance for edge applications."

Intel Innovation 2023 - September 13, 2023 - MiTAC Computing Technology, a professional IT solution provider and a subsidiary of MiTAC Holdings Corporation, will showcase its DSG (Datacenter Solutions Group) product lineup powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors for enterprise, cloud and AI workloads at Intel Innovation 2023, booth #H216 in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, USA, from September 19-20.

"MiTAC has seamlessly and successfully managed the Intel DSG business since July. The datacenter solution product lineup enhances MiTAC's product portfolio and service offerings. Our customers can now enjoy a comprehensive one-stop service, ranging from motherboards and barebones servers to Intel Data Center blocks and complete rack integration for their datacenter infrastructure needs," said Eric Kuo, Vice President of the Server Infrastructure Business Unit at MiTAC Computing Technology.

IBM has announced the expansion of the their Cloud Security and Compliance Center, a suite of modernized cloud security and compliance solutions designed to help enterprises mitigate risk and protect data across their hybrid, multicloud environments and workloads. As clients look for ways to address new threats across the supply chain and manage evolving global regulations, the solution suite helps to support their resiliency, performance, security, and compliance needs while helping to minimize operational costs.

"IBM Cloud has a long history of working with clients in financial services and other highly regulated industries, especially when it comes to helping them to drive innovation while protecting their sensitive data," said Rohit Badlaney, General Manager, IBM Cloud Product and Industry Platform. "The expansion of the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center demonstrates our continued focus on industry-specific capabilities that help address real world business challenges for our clients. For example, clients have the ability to utilize the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services, which can help them address evolving rules, laws and regulations surrounding cloud risk. The new capabilities showcase our commitment to supporting clients on their hybrid cloud modernization journeys, designed for security, compliance, privacy, and trust at the forefront of our product roadmap."

Andes Technology, a leading supplier of high efficiency, low-power 32/64-bit RISC-V processor cores and Founding Premier member of RISC-V International, today proudly announces general availability of the high-performance AndesCore AX45MPV multicore vector processor IP. The AX45MPV is the third generation of the award winning AndesCore vector processor series. Equipped with powerful RISC-V vector processing and parallel execution capability, it targets the applications with large volumes of data such as ADAS, AI inference and training, AR/VR, multimedia, robotics, and signal processing.

Andes and Meta started collaboration on datacenter AI with RISC-V vector core from early 2019. Andes later unveiled the AndesCore NX27V, marking a significant milestone as the industry's first commercial RISC-V vector processor core with the capability of generating up to 4 512-bit vector (VLEN) results per cycle, at the end of 2019. It immediately attracted the attention of worldwide SoC design teams working on AI accelerators, and has landed over a dozen datacenter AI projects. Since then, the RISC-V vector processor cores have become the choice for ML and AI chip vendors.

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

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

NVIDIA's latest financial report for FY2Q24 reveals that its data center business reached US$10.32 billion—a QoQ growth of 141% and YoY increase of 171%. The company remains optimistic about its future growth. TrendForce believes that the primary driver behind NVIDIA's robust revenue growth stems from its data center's AI server-related solutions. Key products include AI-accelerated GPUs and AI server HGX reference architecture, which serve as the foundational AI infrastructure for large data centers.

TrendForce further anticipates that NVIDIA will integrate its software and hardware resources. Utilizing a refined approach, NVIDIA will align its high-end, mid-tier, and entry-level GPU AI accelerator chips with various ODMs and OEMs, establishing a collaborative system certification model. Beyond accelerating the deployment of CSP cloud AI server infrastructures, NVIDIA is also partnering with entities like VMware on solutions including the Private AI Foundation. This strategy extends NVIDIA's reach into the edge enterprise AI server market, underpinning steady growth in its data center business for the next two years.

Today, AMD announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded its 4th Gen AMD EPYC processor-based offerings with the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) M7a and Amazon EC2 Hpc7a instances, which offer next-generation performance and efficiency for applications that benefit from high performance, high throughput and tightly coupled HPC workloads, respectively.

"For customers with increasingly complex and compute-intensive workloads, 4th Gen EPYC processor-powered Amazon EC2 instances deliver a differentiated offering for customers," said David Brown, vice president of Amazon EC2 at AWS. "Combined with the power of the AWS Nitro System, both M7a and Hpc7a instances allow for fast and low-latency internode communications, advancing what our customers can achieve across our growing family of Amazon EC2 instances."

Lenovo Group today announced first quarter results, reporting Group revenue of US$12.9 billion and net income of US$191 million on a non-Hong Kong Financial Reporting Standards (HKFRS) basis. Revenue from the non-PC businesses accounted for 41% of Group revenue, with the service-led business achieving strong growth and sustained profitability - further demonstrating the effectiveness of Lenovo's intelligent transformation strategy.

The Group continues to take proactive actions to keep its Expenses-to-Revenue (E/R) ratio resilient and drive sustainable profitability, whilst also investing for growth and transformation. It remains committed to doubling investment in innovation in the mid-term, including an additional US$1 billion investment over three years to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployment for businesses around the world - specifically AI devices, AI infrastructure, and AI solutions.