Silicon looks great and is on track to launch later this year

During its Q1 2024 financial report, AMD confirmed the status of its future products, including the Zen 5 CPU architecture, namely EPYC Turing CPUs.

According to AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, the company is already widely sampling Turin, and it is satisfied with how the silicon is looking. When it comes to the cloud market, the company expects to capture an even larger share of both first- and third-party workloads due to the significant performance and efficiency improvements that Turing is currently showing. On the server side, AMD expects 30 percent more Turin platforms, compared to Genoa.

AMD was keen to note that Turin remains on track to launch later this year.

"Looking ahead, we are very excited about our next-gen Turin family of EPYC processors featuring our Gen 5 core," said AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, chief executive officer of AMD. "We are widely sampling Turin, and the silicon is looking great. In the cloud, the significant performance and efficiency increases of Turin position us well to capture an even larger share of both first and third-party workloads."

"In addition, there are 30% more Turin platforms in development from our server partners, compared to 4th Generation EPYC platforms, increasing our enterprise and with new solutions optimized for additional workloads." Turin remains on track to launch later this year," she added during the financial call with investors and analysts. (via SeekingAlpha.com)

Might show up at Computex

Asus is apparently already working on an updated Asus ROG Ally 2024 handheld console that could show up at the upcoming Computex show.

While Asus was known to update its laptops every year, without changing the chassis, it could go the similar way with its ROG Ally handheld console. With this in mind, it is highly unlikely that the new version will have any big hardware changes, especially when it comes to the APU, as the Ryzen Z1 Phoenix chip is a dedicated version of gaming handhelds.

As reported by Videocardz.com, the new Asus ROG Ally 2024 console could fix previous SD card issues, and bring some minor improvements. Asus could also implement a couple of other changes, but so far, it has ticked all the right boxes with APU, screen, and general design, so we are not sure what else it can update without significantly changing the console or pushing it into a whole different price segment.

In any case, it is said that Asus could bring it to the Computex 2024 show, so hopefully, we'll get more info soon.

To offer much better performance

According to the latest rumor, AMD might implement a completely new Ray Tracing (RT) engine with its upcoming RDNA 4 architecture GPUs that are expected to debut with the Radeon RX 8000 graphics card series. The new RT engine could give a much higher performance compared to the current RDNA 3-based GPUs.

Although AMD managed to roll out a competitive product series with its Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards, it has been struggling to keep up with Nvidia when it comes to ray tracing support and performance. According to the latest rumor coming from Kepler_L2 over at Twitter, AMD is now working on a completely new Ray Tracing engine. AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs were using an improved RT engine from RDNA 2 architecture.

RT looks brand new 🤔

— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) April 30, 2024

This rumor does make sense considering that the upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console, which will come with a custom RDNA GPU, is expected to use BVH8 (8-level bounding volume hierarchy) traversal shaders, according to Videocardz.com. This suggests an RT engine taken from the RDNA 4 GPU, as the current RT code only supports a 4-level hierarchy. On the other hand, recent rumors suggested that AMD is going to mostly focus on the mid-range to high-end graphics card segment, while the enthusiast series will have to wait for RDNA 5 architecture.

AMD is expected to launch its RDNA 4-based graphics cards in the second half of the year, so we might hear more about them during Computex 2024 show.

Kevin Scott was right on with his tarot cards

It seems that Microsoft’s chief tech officer Kevin Scott (pictured).was totally correct when he checked his Tarot cards and magic eight ball on the future of AI.

In 2019, Scott fired off a four-page missive to CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates titled "thoughts on OpenAI," voicing his worry that Microsoft was seriously lagging in the AI stakes.

While this was true, ChatGPT was still a good four years from hitting the public, but even so, Scott clocked that OpenAI and Google were leaps and bounds ahead in AI development.

"The thing that's interesting about what OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain are doing is the scale of their ambition," Scott wrote. This email, now mostly blacked out, popped up during the Justice Department's antitrust probe into Google and was first spilt by Business Insider.

In a significant move, Microsoft invested a substantial €1 billion (€930 million) in OpenAI, the very organization Scott had mentioned in his email. This was just the beginning, as Microsoft later poured at least another €10 billion (€9.3 billion) into the startup. This partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, now as close as ever, is a testament to Microsoft's dedication to AI development and OpenAI's top-notch AI know-how.

In his email, Scott admits he got it wrong about what Google and OpenAI were up to with their AI projects. At the time, DeepMind, owned by Google, was trying to cobble together an AI that could play the Chinese board game Go, which Scott seems to be hinting at.

"I was highly dismissive of that," Scott scribbled. "That was a mistake."

Scott was gobsmacked at how Google and OpenAI had cobbled together a whole setup for their AI push. In the email, he's taken aback that Google and OpenAI had knocked up data centres, got hold of silicon chips, and whipped up programming frameworks to get all their work done, according to the email.

"When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build NLP [natural language processing] models that we couldn't easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously," Scott told Gates and Nadella.

Microsoft kept schtum when asked to chip in.

The rise of AI has made a lot of those resources hot property. AI needs a monstrous amount of computing grunt to both run and train the brains behind chatbots like Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Data centres have become all the rage, both as tech investments and as bricks-and-mortar assets, with the big investment firms jostling to get a piece of the action.

 Silicon chips, or semiconductors, faced a shortage as companies tried to stockpile them, scared they'd run dry. Their clout is best shown by Nvidia's legendary share price rocket over the last year. AI models also needed a shedload of cloud computing, which outfits like Google and Microsoft have been splashing cash on for the past decade.

But in 2019, when he pinged off the email, Scott twigged how crucial all these infrastructure upgrades were for cooking up the sort of AI that's now run-of-the-mill. "As I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried," Scott said.

Scott mentions that back then, it took Microsoft about half a year to train one of its AI models because "our infrastructure wasn't up to the task."

Microsoft clocked that it was trailing behind its rivals in the number of boffins it had beavering away on machine learning and AI research. Since then, folks clued up in AI have been swamped with job offers (some with pay packets in the millions) from companies desperate to snap them up. The scramble to recruit AI whizzes has since spread to pretty much every industry out there.

According to Scott, Microsoft had some proper brainy machine-learning experts, but they were short on the right gear and manpower to make a real splash in deep learning, the tricky training methods used to whip up AI models. That meant their work dragged on longer than it should've, a bit of a worry with the AI arms race hotting up.

 "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of [machine learning] scale," Scott said.

Nadella seemed to take Scott's worries seriously. Nadella cc'ed chief financial officer Amy Hood and replied: This is "why I want us to do this."

Will not have to pay $1.6 billion for software swap 

A federal appeals court in the States chucked out a ruling that would've had IBM cough up a whopping $1.6 billion ( €1.488 billion) to its rival BMC Software.

This was after a judge had decided that IBM was a bit naughty for swapping out BMC's mainframe software at AT&T with its own gear.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals over in New Orleans reckoned the lower court judge had got it wrong when it came to who was liable.

Writing for the trio of judges, US Circuit Judge Edith Jones reckoned that AT&T, which is one of BMC's biggest customers, had gone over to IBM software on its own and that BMC had "lost out to IBM fair and square."

A spokesperson for BMC kept mum on the matter, while an IBM spokesperson was chuffed to bits, saying the company "acted in good faith in every aspect of this engagement" and was "grateful the court agrees."

AT&T, which isn't involved in the legal tussle, hasn't piped up with any comments just yet.

BMC, which hails from Houston, makes and flogs its own mainframe software. They had a deal with IBM that said IBM could look after mainframes running BMC software, but there was a "non-displacement" clause that stopped IBM from pushing BMC clients to switch to IBM's software, according to the court's decision.

AT&T had brought in IBM to handle its mainframe operations. BMC's lawsuit, filed in a Houston federal court, accused IBM of breaking their contract when AT&T ditched BMC's software for IBM's.

The decision on turned over US District Judge Gray Miller's verdict from 2022, which had IBM owing BMC a hefty $1.6 billion in damages for tearing up their agreement. Miller believed IBM had already slyly agreed to swap out BMC's software at AT&T behind closed doors when they shook hands on the contract back in 2015.

Still might get a Special K

Chipzilla was expected to discard the old Core I tag it has been slapping on its kit since '08, but in its new Arrow Lake lineup, it is keeping some bits we're used to.

Interestingly, Intel has chosen to retain the 'K' at the end of the model names in their new Arrow Lake lineup. This is a subtle nod to the overclocking capabilities of these CPUs, a feature that tech enthusiasts will surely appreciate. As before, there will also be the non-K variants, offering a locked-down experience for those who prefer it.

The source of the leak is a well-known figure in the tech community, OneRaichu, who has shared some intriguing details about the new CPUs. While OneRaichu has been somewhat secretive, only revealing the model numbers with and without the 'K', we can speculate that these new desktop CPUs will be part of the same family as Intel’s Meteor Lake desktop CPUs.

So, here's the lowdown on Intel’s fresh Arrow Lake gaming CPUs that have sneaked out: Intel Core Ultra desktop CPU names have popped up in a OneRaichu tweet on X.

It looks like the Core Ultra 9 will be the big cheese, followed by the Core Ultra 7 and then the Core Ultra 5. Since these are the K-series, we're guessing they'll get the 'Ultra' label because they're all about giving the enthusiasts what they want.

If the rumours hold water, here's what you might see on the shelves:

• Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
• Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
• Intel Core Ultra 245K

RaichuOne reckons the locked-down CPUs will be the 275, 255, and 240 models. They might drop the 'Ultra' bit to make it clear they're a different kettle of fish. They're also a step behind the K-series in the number stakes.

We already knew Chipzilla was going to ditch the 'Core ix' branding with its next-gen Intel Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, but now we've had a sneaky peek at what could be the new gaming CPU names. They're all sporting the Core Ultra badge we've seen on Intel’s Meteor Lake laptop CPUs but with a few twists in the tale.

Rumour has it that Intel's gearing up to throw these new Arrow Lake desktop CPUs into the ring before 2024's out, but they've got their work cut out. AMD's not sitting around twiddling their thumbs – they're expected to drop their new Zen 5 CPUs first. We're in for

So, it is using its cash pile to boost its share value

The fruity cargo cult known as Apple begrudgingly acknowledged that its quarterly profits dipped as consumer interest in its overhyped gadgets waned.

The company, famed for throttling batteries on its expensive gadgets iPhone, reported a profit of €23.6 billion ($25.26 billion) on €90.8 billion (around $97.16 billion) in revenue for the first quarter of this year.

Rather than channelling funds into innovation, the company opted to repurchase shares from the market, a move designed to artificially inflate its stock price without the need for any real effort. This strategy seemed to pay off, as Apple's share price rose by six per cent to €183.20 ($196.02) in after-hours trading.

As anticipated, iPhone revenues took a hit due to increased competition from Huawei and market pressures from China. Despite being barred from using advanced Western technology, Huawei has managed to produce smartphones that outperform and undercut Apple's offerings in terms of cost.

Apple disclosed that its iPhone revenue fell to €45.7 billion ($48.90 billion), a ten per cent decrease from €51.3 billion ($54.89 billion) in the same period last year. In the crucial Greater China market, iPhone revenue shrank to €16.4 billion ($17.55 billion) from €17.8 billion (equivalent to $19.04 billion ), according to the earnings report. Huawei's first-quarter profits soared, further encroaching on Apple's market share.

Counterpoint's senior research analyst Ivan Lam noted that Jobs' Mob's sales suffered throughout the quarter as Huawei's resurgence significantly impacted Apple in the premium segment.

Adding to Apple's woes, Samsung regained its status as the world's top smartphone seller in the first quarter of the year, as reported by the International Data Corporation.

Amidst the intensifying competition, Apple continues to push for growth in revenue from services and digital content sold to its loyal customer base. However, this strategy is under threat from regulators and app developers who accuse Apple of monopolistic practices due to its stringent control over the App Store and device operating systems.

The US Department of Justice has launched a legal battle against Apple, accusing the company of illegally maintaining a monopoly over its iPhone by stifling competition and imposing excessive costs on consumers.

Apple has countered the lawsuit, claiming it is "wrong in both facts and law, and we will vigorously defend against it."

Meanwhile, the EU is investigating whether the App Store allows developers to offer promotions to consumers for free, outside of the marketplace.

Apple has lagged in integrating artificial intelligence into its products, a field where rivals Google and Microsoft have been actively innovating. Apple has remained secretive about its plans for AI but has assured that it will eventually integrate generative AI into its technology.

In hardware, Apple's recently launched Vision Pro "spatial reality" headgear has not made a significant impact, and Forrester's principal analyst Thomas Husson has advised his clients that it is unlikely to affect the company's financial performance in the foreseeable future.

We don't want you guys to fall behind

Chinese Telecommunications behemoth Huawei is clandestinely supporting advanced research at American institutions, including Harvard, via a separate foundation headquartered in Washington.

For those not in the know, Huawei is blacklisted by the US government for the crime of providing cheap and cheerful products which were better than anything the US could make, spying. 

However, it seems that the US is still happy to take Huawei's money. The company has been exclusively sponsors a research contest that, since its launch in 2022, has distributed millions of dollars and drawn numerous submissions from scientists globally, including those from leading US universities where affiliations with the firm are prohibited.

The Optica Foundation, a branch of the non-profit professional group Optica, manages the competition. Optica's members conduct research on optics that is fundamental to technologies like communication, medical diagnostics, and lasers.

The foundation "is not obligated to acknowledge Huawei as the benefactor or the programme's sponsor" for the contest, and "the details and existence of this Agreement, as well as the relationship between the involved Parties, are to be treated as Confidential Information," according to a non-disclosed document seen by Bloomberg.

Arrested development 

Microsoft, the software king of the world, has banned US cops from using generative AI from its Azure OpenAI Service.

For those just catching up, this is Vole's significant service incorporating OpenAI technology. As of Wednesday, the updated terms of service are explicit: no Azure OpenAI Service for US police work, and that includes any advanced text and speech models from OpenAI. This decision has global implications, affecting law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Vole has thrown in a rule that's got global law enforcement in its sights, specifically saying a big no-no to "real-time facial recognition tech" on the go, like on body cams or dashcams, when you're trying to spot someone out in the wild.

However, Microsoft has allowed for some flexibility in its decision. The ban on Azure OpenAI Service is strictly for US law enforcement. International police are not part of this ban. And if you're considering facial recognition with stationary cameras in an office setting, that's not off-limits—unless you're with US law enforcement, then it's a hard pass. This nuanced approach shows that the situation is not as straightforward as it may seem.

This move is pretty much in line with what Microsoft and their buddy OpenAI have been doing when it comes to AI and the folks in uniform.

Just last week, Axon, the Taser folks, dropped news about their latest gizmo. It's an AI tool, built on OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, that listens to body cam audio and whips up a police report on the fly. It is unclear if Microsoft's move changes all that. 

Hedy's gear can see the stars now

Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite, a critical technology validation that could potentially open the door to connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world.

The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites to orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-10 ride-share mission in March; since that time, the company confirmed that it has received signals from the onboard 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away.

The sky is truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: the startup says its technology can be used in markets including logistics, cattle tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for kids, car inventory, construction sites, and soil temperature monitoring. Haro said the low-hanging fruit is those industries that are desperate for network coverage even once per day, like remote asset monitoring for the oil and gas industry.

As the constellation scales, Hubble will turn its attention to sectors that may need more frequent updates, like soil monitoring, to continuous coverage use cases like fall monitoring for the elderly.

Once its up and running, a customer would simply need to integrate their devices' chipsets with a piece of firmware to enable connection to Hubble's network.