At its semi-annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia showcased its latest server-class GPU family, called Blackwell, offering a jump in both computing power and bandwidth and, most importantly, a significant increase in integrated memory. As mentioned in our July 2023 article, memory is the main bottleneck in the training of large GenAI models. As data…
Even if data is widely considered as the oil of the 21st century, it has been largely under-monetized until now. As an illustration, OpenAI developed ChatGPT with massive amounts of data, free of charge… But data-rich companies, such as social media, have taken notice and the situation is rapidly evolving with companies including X and Reddit…
The stellar rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence continues to shake up the whole IT industry. At the end of last week, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) and the world’s second largest memory maker, SK Hynix, announced a new alliance around the development of AI chips. This news, which has gone almost unnoticed,…
Two days ago, AMD unveiled its long-awaited server-class GPU chip called the Instinct MI300X. This chip is positioned to be a direct competitor to the successful H100, Nvidia’s current Generative AI workhorse. As GenAI models keep on growing in size, memory and the way to access it represent one of the key elements of focus…
The Who’s Who of High-Performance Computing (HPC) is currently gathering in Colorado, US for the annual SuperComputing conference (SC23). Halfway through the conference, one trend is pretty clear: the whole IT industry is all in on Generative AI, starting from the chip designers up to the large system builders. Nvidia teased its upcoming server-class GPU…
During its recent earnings conference, security and edge computing infrastructure provider Cloudflare highlighted the AI inference opportunity, stating that it has a pipeline of customers (large and small) “interested in putting hundreds of billions of inference tasks on its infrastructure each month” and that it will have rolled out inference optimized GPUs in 100+ of…
Chip equipment makers have been hit in recent days and weeks by the intensification of export controls to China and by order delays as manufacturers are experiencing troubles in building their new fabs. Most notably, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC)’s $40 billion Arizona plant is running behind schedule. Accordingly, Dutch equipment giant ASML delivered this morning a…
There’s been a lot of attention in recent months about the computing power requirements of Artificial Intelligence and the rise of various pieces of hardware (GPUs, ASICs, TPUs…) used to train massive data models. Surprisingly, there’s been much less hype around software and, specifically, around data science and analytics software that appears as important as…
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is the bedrock of modern digital transformation, encompassing software-based tools used by all semiconductor companies to design cutting-edge chips and complex integrated circuits that power our technological landscape. EDA has, accordingly, accompanied the growth of the semiconductor industry over the years. Looking forward, the growth pace of the main EDA players,…
As we commented a couple of months ago, generative AI has been emerging as a weapon for hackers, making phishing attempts (emails or texts inviting a user to open a malicious link to steal his/her credentials) bespoke and then much harder to detect, and helping to reduce malware software development cycles and/or rewrite code to…