Phison had something very cool to show off at NVIDIA GTC 2024 last week, with a single MAINGEAR PRO AI workstation PC packing 4 x NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada workstation GPUs using its in-house aiDaptiv+ software to use SSDs and DRAM to make up for the lack of VRAM, using it to super-speed AI workloads on the cheap.

By cheap, we mean cheaper than using full-fledged NVIDIA Hopper H100 or new H200 AI GPUs, let alone the next-gen Blackwell B100 and B200 AI GPUs that will be very hard to come by this year, and a huge chunk into 2025. Phison's aim with its aiDaptiv+ platform is to lower the (cost) barrier of AI LLM training by using systems' already-there DRAM and SSDs to augment the amount of GPU VRAM available for AI training.

Phison says that achieving intense generative AI training workloads at a far lower cost than using standard GPUs will come at a cost: reduced AI training performance and longer training times. If you want the best, you'll spend magnitudes more money on it, but more off-the-shelf AI systems from the likes of MAINGEAR and its PRO AI system, putting Phison's new aiDaptiv+ platform in between is a big win.

Described as a "Super Hero team-based PVP shooter," Marvel Rivals from NetEase and Marvel Games gives off serious Overwatch and Valorant vibes. The free-to-play PC game was announced earlier today, and the announcement trailer showcases a stacked lineup of Marvel characters battling it out, including Black Panther, Spider-Man, Magneto, Rocket Raccoon, Iron Man, and more.

According to the press release, the global team developing the game comprises talent who has worked on franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield. The game will, of course, fall into the live service online competitive space currently populated by Overwatch, Valorant, and even Counter-Strike, with the game set to feature an "ever-evolving all-star squad of Super Heroes and Super Villains." So expect new maps, characters, Season Passes, and all that.

Marvel is calling it one of the most ambitious game projects it has worked on to date. It is set to feature characters from the worlds of the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men, and more. An Alpha Test for Marvel Rivals begins in May, so a full or Early Access launch should happen this year.

Introspect Technology is a member of JEDEC, the body that covers memory -- including the next-gen GDDR7 memory standard -- with Introspect shipping the world's first GDDR7 memory test system.

The just-launched Introspect M5512 GDDR7 Memory Test System is the world's first commercial solution for testing JEDEC's fresh new JESD239 Graphics Double Data Rate (GDDR7) SGRAM specification. GDDR7 is a category-creating memory solution that enables graphics memory engineers, GPU design engineers, product engineers in both memory and GPU spaces, and system integrators to quickly design new GDDR7 memory devices, debug protocol errors, characterize signal integrity, and perform detailed memory read/write functional stress testing without requiring any other tool.

The new M5512 GDDR7 Memory Test System is the perfect solution for these engineers, AMD and NVIDIA, and AIB partners to get ready to launch GDDR7-powered graphics cards, the first of which will be NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs.

We already know that in the age of the Windows AI PC, devices are set to arrive with dedicated Copilot keys. Microsoft's AI is on track to be integrated with all parts of the operating system. Today, Intel executives at Intel's AI Summit in Taipei confirmed that Copilot AI services will soon run locally on PCs - as long as they meet a certain performance threshold.

That threshold is 40 TOPS of performance on the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found in an AI PC. Based on this information, which Tom's Hardware confirmed, the definition of an AI PC has been given a specific hardware or performance baseline. Anything below 40 TOPS will still be able to run Copilot AI tasks and processes in the cloud, but it will serve as a way to differentiate hardware-based 'AI PCs' versus could-only devices.

Though it might take a generation or two to get there, Intel says it has next-gen products lined up that will fall into this 40 TOPS of performance category. Currently, The Meteor Lake NPU in Core Ultra chips offers only 10 TOPS performance, with AMD's Ryzen Hawk Point offering 16 TOPS.

NVIDIA might have just announced its next-generation Blackwell B200 AI GPU, but the beefed-up Hopper H200 AI GPU is smashing performance records in the very latest MLPerf 4.0 results.

NVIDIA's optimizations on TensorRT-LLM have been a non-stop chain of progression since the company released its AI Software suite last year. There were major performance increases from MLPerf 3.1 results to MLPerf 4.0, with NVIDIA amplifying Hopper's AI performance.

Using these new TensorRT-LLM optimizations, NVIDIA has pulled out a huge 2.4x performance leap with its current H100 AI GPU in MLPerf Inference 3.1 to 4.0 with GPT-J tests using an offline scenario. With server-based scenarios using GPT-J, NVIDIA's current H100 AI GPU had a huge 2.9x increase in MLPerf 3.1 to 4.0 performance.

If you thought the insatiable AI GPU demand was (and is, and will continue) nuts, well... the cocoa beans market is in trouble, with the price of cocoa beans skyrocketing. The price of cocoa beans has smashed through $10,000 a ton for the first time in the futures market.

The last major cocoa tree planting spree happened throughout the early 2000s in West Africa, which, if you didn't think was important to the global cocoa business, you're wrong: West Africa counts for around 75% of the global supply of cocoa beans. After already bad weather amplified by the ongoing El Nino phase of the Pacific Ocean, cocoa trees throughout Ghana and the Ivory Coast have been decimated.

Fast-forward to today, and the world is heading to an annual supply deficit of between 300,000 and 500,000 tons of cocoa beans, the largest shortfall in over 60 years. Right now, the price of cocoa is more expensive than copper on the commodities market, and we're sprinting directly into Easter, which is when chocolate makers have now increased pricing for consumers after multiple years of subpar cocoa harvests in West Africa with another on the way.

Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake-MX mobile processor for future-gen thin and light laptops has been leaked by our good friend Igor at Igor's Lab. Check it out:

The next-gen Intel Lunar Lake-MX processor will have up to 8 cores, with 4 powerful "Lion Cove" P-Cores and 4 efficient "Skymont" E-Cores. There's no need for massive amounts of cores in thin and light laptops, as Intel is focusing on balancing performance and efficiency, something Lunar Lake-MX is expected to deliver.

On the integrated GPU side of things, Lunar Lake will feature an Intel Arc Battlemage GPU with a maximum of 64 Xe2-based Execution Units (EUs) and 8 x Xe2 GPU cores. Igor's report says that this will provide a "significant leap in graphics performance that could set new benchmarks for integrated graphics solutions".

LG is promising a whopping 100 trillion won (around $74.3 billion USD) in investments in South Korea through 2028. Half of the $74.3 billion will go towards future growth drivers, including AI, biotechnology, batteries, and displays.

According to LG, the huge $74.3 billion sum will be 65% of LG's entire global investment for the same four-year period. The gigantic new investment plan was announced on Wednesday at LG's recent 62nd shareholders meeting. It comes in hot off the heels of fellow South Korean company -- SK hynix -- which announced an even bigger $90 billion investment for the "world's largest mega fab complex" in South Korea.

LG Chairman Koo Kwang-mo, said: "The global management environment in 2024 will have more uncertainties as a number of inflection points reside related to the generalization of AI, decarbonization, and so on. While closely monitoring the industries around our core businesses, we will bolster future businesses like AI, bio and cleantech so they can grow into main pillars of our future business portfolio".

Apple has confirmed that it will hold the annual WWDC event starting from June 10 and that's likely to be when the company will unveil the new iOS 18 software update, among others. Apple has yet to officially confirm what the update will have to offer but strong rumors have suggested that new AI functionality will very much be the order of the day. However, those hoping for Apple's in-house chatbot to debut are going to be left disappointed.

That's according to a new report by the well-connected Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg. According to him, Apple's chatbot won't be ready for iOS 18, but that doesn't mean that there won't be those rumored AI improvements this time around. Instead, Apple has plans to use technology from other companies instead.

We'd already heard from previous reports that Apple is in talks with both Google and OpenAI about potentially using their own generative AI technology instead. Baidu is also thought to be a company that Apple is in talks with, but its AI features will only be used in China.

With Apple announcing yesterday that it intends to launch the WWDC 2024 event on June 10 we now know exactly how long we will have to wait before we get to see what the company has been cooking in terms of new software updates. We're expecting new releases for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro and we've been told to expect big things. Now, a new report has again reiterated that fact, saying that the iOS 18 update will be "the most ambitious overhaul" of the iPhone's software that we have ever seen.

The iOS 18 software update has long been tipped to be a key update for Apple especially given its intent to bring new AI technology to bear this year. Now, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has again upped the ante, saying that people working on the new software update have told him that this will be a huge update for iPhone owners.

There are a few things that we've been told to expect from this release with Apple itself also tipping that that AI will be a focus this time around. SVP of marketing Greg Joswiak posted to the X social network to say that the event is going to be "Absolutely Incredible," with the choice of capitalization thought to be a clear nod to Apple's AI work.