Sony executive deputy president and CFO Hiroki Totoki made a number of declarations at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that took place on March 6, 2023. Totoki-san outlined corporate strategies for the Japanese technology and entertainment giant. During a discussion about Sony Group Corporation's investment budgets, he stated that 700 billion Yen has been allocated to spend strategically across several company divisions in 2023, this converts to just over 5 billion US dollars. This represents the remainder of a 2 trillion Yen budget that was announced back in 2021, as a three year long strategic investment plan.

NVIDIA's presence in high-performance computing has steadily increased, with various workloads benefiting from the company's AI and HPC accelerator GPUs. One of the important markets for the company is China, and export regulations are about to complicate NVIDIA's business dealing with the country. NVIDIA's major partners in the Asia Pacific region are Inspur and Huawei, which make servers powered by A100 and H100 GPU solutions. Amid the latest Biden Administration complications, the US is considering limiting more export of US-designed goods to Chinese entities. Back in 2019, the US blacklisted Huawei and restricted the sales of the latest GPU hardware to the company. Last week, the Biden Administration also blacklisted Inspur, the world's third-largest server maker.

In the Morgan Stanley conference, NVIDIA's Chief Financial Officer Colette Cress noted that: "Inspur is a partner for us, when we indicate a partner, they are helping us stand up computing for the end customers. As we work forward, we will probably be working with other partners, for them to stand-up compute within the Asia-Pac region or even other parts of the world. But again, our most important focus is focusing on the law and making sure that we follow export controls very closely. So in this case, we will look in terms of other partners to help us." This indicates that NVIDIA will lose millions of dollars in revenue due to the inability to sell its GPUs to partners like Inspur. As the company stated, complying with the export regulations is the most crucial focus.

TSMC is working on multiple N3 nodes, with at least N3, N3B and N3E currently being in development. N3 is scheduled for production in 2023, with the N3E node originally being scheduled for 2024, but it now looks like it will be ready ahead of schedule. The N3E node was meant to be an enhanced version of the N3 node, but it now seems to be more of an alternative node, based on fewer EUV layers, supposedly down from 25 to 21 layers, which would make it easier to manufacture. According to details via Morgan Stanley, the N3E node is said to be around eight percent less dense than the original N3 node, but still around 60 percent denser than the N5 node. For comparison, the N3 node was said to have 70 percent denser logic than the N5 node.

The report suggests that the N3E node might be finished by the end of this month, which means production could end up being pulled in by a whole quarter, from Q3'23 to Q2'23. The N3E node is said to "feature improved manufacturing process window with better performance, power and yield", so we might see the N3E node being used for future products by just about anyone that is looking at making high-performance silicon. The N3E node is also said to have higher yields than the N3B node, with N3B said to be an improved version of N3 for certain customers. Not much else is known about the N3B node at the moment.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for AMD to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction valued at $35 billion. The combination will create the industry's leading high performance computing company, significantly expanding the breadth of AMD's product portfolio and customer set across diverse growth markets where Xilinx is an established leader. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to AMD margins, EPS and free cash flow generation and deliver industry-leading growth.

The acquisition brings together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers. AMD will offer the industry's strongest portfolio of high performance processor technologies, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership computing platforms for cloud, edge and end devices. Together, the combined company will capitalize on opportunities spanning some of the industry's most important growth segments from the data center to gaming, PCs, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and defense.

In a bid to head off investor worries of a potential downturn, Samsung is looking to tighten their belts in regards to the manufacturing of DRAM. In particular, this move is preempted by the expectation of DRAM bit growth to be less than 20% year-over-year, with bit growth being the key measurement for gauging market demand based on the amount of memory produced. Considering the semiconductor industry is known for its up and down cycles, Samsung's preemptive move could stabilize or even drive up the cost of memory coming out of not just them but Micron and SK Hynix as well. This would help keep their profits rolling in, just in case a downturn in demand does take place, but it also means PC enthusiasts will have to deal with memory prices remaining roughly the same or possibly climb higher going forward.

Anthea Lai, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, in Hong Kong made note that "If Samsung does cut its DRAM bit growth, it shows the company is happy with the current oligopoly market structure." Elaborating further, he said that "It prefers keeping supply tight and prices high, rather than taking market share and risking lower prices, therefore chances for DRAM prices to stay strong is higher."

NVIDIA's embargo on their Turing-based RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti ended Wednesday, September 19 and it appears that enthusiasts were not the only ones left wanting more from these graphics cards. In particular, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore shared a note today (Thursday, September 20) with company clients saying "As review embargos broke for the new gaming products, performance improvements in older games is not the leap we had initially hoped for. Performance boost on older games that do not incorporate advanced features is somewhat below our initial expectations, and review recommendations are mixed given higher price points." The NVIDIA Corporation share value on the NASDAQ exchange had closed at $271.98 (USD) Wednesday and immediately tumbled down to a low of $264.10 opening today before recovering to close at $266.28, down 2.1% over the previous closure.

The Morgan Stanley report further mentioned that "We are surprised that the 2080 is only slightly better than the 1080ti, which has been available for over a year and is slightly less expensive. With higher clock speeds, higher core count, and 40% higher memory bandwidth, we had expected a bigger boost." Accordingly, the market analyst expects a slower adoption of these new GPUs as well as no expectation of "much upside" from NVIDIA's gaming business unit for the next two quarters. Despite all this, Morgan Stanley remains bullish on NVIDIA and expects a $273 price point in the long term.

AMD's stock on Monday took a relatively steep dive in value, following a report by Morgan Stanley that pegs cryptocurrency-fueled graphics shipments to decline by 50% next year (a $250 million decline in revenue). "We believe that AMD's graphics surge has been caused by a sharp increase in sales of graphics chips to cryptocurrency miners. We expect this to meaningfully decelerate next year," Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said. At the same time, the report expects video game console demand to decline by 5.5% in 2018, which led Moore towards lowering his price target for AMD shares to $8 from $11, a 32% decline from Friday's close.

As a consequence of the report, Morgan Stanley reduced its rating on AMD shares from equal-weight to underweight, which reduced confidence in the market, and triggered a sell-off - and following the mechanism of availability and demand, a descent in stock pricing was already painted on the wall. A 9% fall isn't something to scoff at - especially when the economics surrounding it are attributed to a single - as of yet - report. AMD stock fluctuations aren't new; the company's stock has been particularly volatile in recent times - especially when compared to its peers (and competitors) Intel and NVIDIA.

It looks like there's a subtle but relentless push to get ARM CPUs into desktop PCs. Morgan Stanley recently surveyed 30 PC makers (names not revealed) and discovered that 40% of them are interested in trying out ARM-based PCs within the next two years. As we reported previously that the Wintel alliance appears to be crumbling, this finding appears to add weight to that assertion. Of course, there's a huge mountain to climb before ARM processors can compete head to head with high performance x86, as explained in our article, not least because Microsoft won't begin supporting ARM until Windows 8 is released late next year and the fact that the vast majority of existing software won't run on ARM. A real catch-22 if ever there was one. Just as crucially, the many high performance enhancements and interface standards that currently go into making a modern x86 chip fly will also have to go into an ARM - and developing that isn't going to be cheap, although it may not take that long, since these are tried and trusted technologies that need to be applied. Still, the interest is there and Morgan Stanley expect that 10% (39 million) PCs, excluding tablets, will have an ARM processor at their heart. If true, it will make for interesting times.