Artificial Intelligence News - Page 1

SIGGRAPH 2024 begins on July 28, where NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a 'fireside chat' at the show, which is the 50th anniversary of SIGGRAPH, which first took place in 1974.

SIGGRAPH, or Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, is an annual conference that looks into the world of computer graphics. We're talking academics, developers, and GPU makes like NVIDIA and AMD. SIGGRAPH takes place on July 28, running through to August 1.

The official SIGGRAPH page explains Jensen: "Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer, and a member of the board of directors. Huang has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association's highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award; IEEE Founder's Medal; the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University".

Miles Astray entered into a top photo competition with his work titled "F L A M I N G O N E," which received honors from a high-profile jury that included members from the New York Times, Getty Images, Phaidon Press, and more. However, the artist was disqualified after he won the category.

Notably, the competition was under the category of Artificial Intelligence-generated photos, and Astray's real photograph has now been deemed the "first real photo to win an AI award". The reason behind the artist entering a real photograph into the AI category was to demonstrate that people are unable to tell the difference between an AI-generated image and a real photograph and the ethical and societal implications of the emerging technology.

This isn't the first time AI and real photograph has caused a stir in competions, as AI-generated photos have made international headlines for winning photo competitions, which they weren't meant to be competing in Probably the most infamous of these stories is when the Sony World Photography Awards awarded Boris Eldagsen a prize in the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition for his AI-generated image.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled its latest foundry innovations and outlined its vision for the "AI era" during its Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) event, which it holds annually at its Device Solutions America HQ in San Jose, California, USA.

The theme was "Empowering the AI Revolution" to which Samsung reinforced its process technology roadmap, including two new cutting-edge nodes -- SF2Z and SF4U -- as well as its integrated Samsung AI Solutions platform that holds the "unique strengths" of its Foundry, Memory, and Advanced Package (AVP) businesses.

Dr. Siyoung Choi, President and Head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics, said: "At a time when numerous technologies are evolving around AI, the key to its implementation lies in high-performance, low-power semiconductors. Alongside our proven GAA process optimized for AI chips, we plan to introduce integrated, co-packaged optics (CPO) technology for high-speed, low-power data processing, providing our customers with the one-stop AI solutions they need to thrive in this transformative era".

TSMC is absolutely dominating, and we all know it. The big AI chip players are eating up its 3nm production into 2026, and now upstream IC design companies are reporting price increases.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, and Google are all working on getting chips made on TSMC's new 3nm process. Ctee reports that Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen4 processor is made on TSMC's new N3E process, and its quotation has increased by 25% compared to the previous generation, which Ctee reports "does not rule out subsequent price increases."

Another issue is that semiconductor competitor Samsung led the mass production of 3nm chips using the GAA (Gate All Around) process on June 22, but the first-gen N3 node "SF3E" was not successful at all. The yield rates of Samsung's in-house Exynos 2500 chips dropped, and Google Tensor processors are all made by Samsung. The current fourth-generation Tensor SoC uses Samsung's new 4nm process, but the rumored fifth-generation Tensor chip will switch to TSMC's new 3nm process.

The world of AI chips hasn't stopped, and won't stop, with advanced packaging production capacity in short supply.

TSMC's new CoWoS plant in Nanke Chiayi Park is entering the "environmental review stage," reports UDN, with TSMC now purchasing equipment to help speed up the construction of the new CoWoS advanced packaging facility. At the same time, the two new CoWoS advanced packaging factories were planned to be built in Nanke Chiayi Park, but they're "not enough," reports UDN.

TSMC reportedly sent personnel down to southern Taiwan to scout for land for a third CoWoS advanced packaging facility. UDN reports that the Chiayi County Government previously announced that TSMC's new advanced packaging plant will be located in Nanke Chiayi Park, covering an area of around 20 hectares. The first CoWoS advanced packaging plant was planned to take up around 12 hectares of space, will be completed by 2026, and will create 3000 jobs.

NVIDIA has had a mega-successful last 12+ months riding the AI wave, with data center GPU shipments hitting 3.76 million units according to semiconductor analyst firm TechInsights.

NVIDIA has an absolutely dominant 98% market share in AI GPU shipments for 2023, with 3.76 million AI chips shipped. However, if you add AMD and Intel AI processor shipments, the total number only goes to 3.85 million. This means that AMD and Intel shipped only 710,000 AI accelerators, compared to the 3.76 million shipped by NVIDIA alone.

This also means that NVIDIA has 98% market share of AI GPU revenue, with $36.2 billion -- that's 3x the revenue of 2022, which stood at $10.9 billion -- while AI processor alternatives are coming from Google with its TPUs, AMD with its Instinct AI accelerators, Intel's Gaudi AI accelerators, and CPUs that feature NPUs for AI workloads.

Just before the weekend, Microsoft announced it was making changes to the controversial incoming Windows 11 features that will be exclusive to the company's Copilot+ PCs.

That feature is Windows Recall, which is a Copilot+ PC tool that enables users to access different times on their PC through screenshots the PC is continuously snapping. These snapshots are of the users desktop and don't hide any potential sensitive information, and are also stored in a single folder. Security researchers and the public raised serious concerns with Microsoft about the potential of hackers gaining access to the folder and the ramifications that could follow.

Microsoft has since responded and said it is adding additional security measures and encryption to Recall, making it much harder for a bad actor to gain access to Recall's data stored on a user's PC. Now, Microsoft has quietly pulled the build of Windows 11 24H2 update, which contains the Recall feature and was being tested in its Release Preview channel - usually the last stop before a Windows update is rolled out the public.

Apple unveiled its new ChatGPT-powered "Apple Intelligence" during its WWDC 2024 event, with a slew of new AI features... with smartphone competitor Samsung taking to its X account and posting this:

Samsung said: "Adding 'Apple' doesn't make it new or groundbreaking. Welcome to AI" taking a stab at Apple's just-announced Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence will launch with iOS, iPadOS, and macOS later this year... but most of these AI-powered features are already on plenty of Android-powered smartphones.

The PC has been reborn -- at least according to Qualcomm -- with the wave of Copilot+ PCs with NPUs for AI workloads, and the biggest winner of them all? TSMC.

TSMC will manufacture Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 200 series "Lunar Lake" CPUs, AMD's new Ryzen AI 300 series APUs, the new Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" processors, and Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X series processors.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite is powered by TSMC's new N4 process node, some of the Tiles on Intel's new Lunar Lake chips are made on TSMC N3B, while AMD's new Zen 5-based processors will be made on TSMC's 4nm process node.

NVIDIA's next-gen GB200-based AI server cabinets are expected to ship in "small quantities" in Q4 2024 at the earliest, with GB200 AI server cabinets to be fully unleashed in 2025.

In a new report from Ctee, we're learning that there will be a "slight gap" in the delivery time between each factory and the customer and that it "will not be available until next year." The outlet continues, saying that shipments can be expected, with multiple Taiwanese manufacturers "striving to increase profitability as their revenue scale increases".

NVIDIA's new GB200 Superchip is a monster, with the company supplying the front-end AI chip modules, Switchboards, power modules, chassis/cabinets, and more. It's expected to see the NVIDIA GB200 Superchip enter mass production in Q3 2024, with "legal persons" talking to Ctee, with the outlet reporting: "Hon Hai, the parent company of Hongbai, and Wistron, as well as Delta Electronics, Lite-On, Shengming Electronics, Yingguang, etc., shipments of GB200-related products will increase in the second half of the year and will further demonstrate strong growth momentum".