Author Archives: Doug Black

Doug Black

Xilinx vs. Intel: FPGA Market Leaders Launch Server Accelerator Cards

August 6th, 2019 (0)

The two FPGA market leaders, Intel and Xilinx, both announced new accelerator cards this week designed to handle specialized, compute-intensive workloads and unburden already overworked CPUs in data center servers. Xilinx today announced the Alveo U50 accelerator card, which ...

Mass Shootings, Contraband Cargo in Crosshairs of AI, Advanced Scanning

August 5th, 2019 (0)

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared last December and has been updated to reflect recent developments at Liberty Defense. AI may be on the cusp of making inroads against two menaces of modern life: mass shootings and terrorism. Two ...

Hacker Traffic Havoc: Stalled Autonomous Cars and City-wide Gridlock

August 2nd, 2019 (0)

Another potential source of skepticism about self-driving cars has cropped up, one that the auto industry may need to quell in the public mind: a new report depicts hackers causing autonomous vehicle (AV)-driven gridlock tying up entire parts of ...

Xilinx–SolarFlare Deal Closes, Combines FPGAs, High Performance Networks

July 31st, 2019 (0)

In a year of major M&A activity in the high performance technology sector, Xilinx announced today the closing of its acquisition of low latency network provider SolarFlare, whose speedy network interface card (NIC) technology is widely used by financial ...

Red Hat Usage Data: IBM AI Gold Mine?

July 31st, 2019 (0)

Data may have been a major – and under-appreciated – factor compelling Big Blue to plunk down $34 billion for Red Hat, a deal (the third largest in tech industry history) that closed earlier this month. The acquisition’s overt ...

Easing AI Access: ‘Citizen Data Scientists’ and Humanized Machine Learning

July 30th, 2019 (0)

IDC estimates worldwide data volume is set to rise by 61 percent between 2018 and 2025 – eventually reaching 175 zettabytes – with much of this generated by businesses. So how can this be harnessed to optimize business processes, ...

SoftBank Launches 2nd $100 Billion-Plus AI Investment Fund

July 26th, 2019 (0)

The march of money – big money – into AI continues. On the heels of Microsoft’s investment of $1 billion in OpenAI’s R&D of artificial general intelligence, SoftBank has announced a blockbuster $108 billion private fund comprised mainly of ...

5G: Higher Data Rates Only Part of It – Here’s Why

July 25th, 2019 (0)

5G is massively faster than 4G: 5GB/second vs. 100-200MB/second. Impressive, yes, but higher data rates explains only part of 5G's significance. The coming 5G cellular network will bring the network up to speed with faster processing (GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs), ...

Bitfusion Acquisition Extends VMware Virtualization of GPUs

July 23rd, 2019 (0)

VMware has championed the virtues of virtualization of the x86 architecture for more than 20 years, and now the company plans to extend its commitment to virtualizing new architectures used for training AI models. VMware has announced its intended ...

Microsoft Investing $1B in OpenAI Artificial General Intelligence R&D

July 22nd, 2019 (0)

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is AI’s moonshot, the next giant leap for the AI field. Microsoft regards it to be feasible enough to warrant a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, the not-for-profit research organization formed in 2015 by Elon ...