Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Sunday, June 28, 2026
With Strong Q2 Earnings, Nvidia’s System Play Comes Into Focus
Nvidia has announced its Q2 2021 earnings: $3.87 billion, outperforming analyst expectations amid a global pandemic and showing signs of a successful (and ongoing) reorientation of its business strategy. Compared to the same quarter in the last fiscal year, earnings were up 50 percent; compared to Q1 2021, up 26 percent. This is another major ... Full article
Arm’s Segars Unwraps ‘5th Gen’ Computing Vision
The simultaneous maturation of three technologies—AI, the Internet of Things and 5G wireless—are ushering in a data-driven 5th wave of computing underpinned by current cloud infrastructure, according to the chief executive of chip intellectual property vendor Arm. Speaking at an annual Defense Department microelectronics summit, Simon Segars said new chip architectures are being designed around ... Full article
DARPA Chip Effort Pivots to Securing US Supply Chain
A three-year-old Defense Department electronics initiative is bearing fruit in the form of public-private partnerships in areas ranging from post-Moore’s Law chip architectures to the growing national security requirement of securing the microelectronics supply chain. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched its Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI) in 2017 to help reboot a domestic chip ... Full article
Microsoft Azure Touts ‘Supercomputer-class AI’ with Nvidia A100 GPU Instances
Microsoft Azure continues to infuse its cloud platform with HPC- and AI-directed technologies. Today the cloud services purveyor announced a new virtual machine family aimed at “supercomputer-class AI,” backed by Nvidia A100 Ampere GPUs, AMD Epyc Rome CPUs, 1.6 Tbps HDR InfiniBand, and PCIe 4.0 connectivity. The NDv4 VM instances are scalable to more than ... Full article
Toyota and AWS Team Up to Enable a Smarter Future for Cars
Cars are getting smarter, and it’s not just Tesla at the wheel. Vehicles are increasingly connected to the cloud, allowing manufacturers to streamline smarter contextual and internet-driven services. Now, Toyota – the second-largest car manufacturer in the world – has chosen its dance partner for cloud-based vehicle services, and it’s another juggernaut: Amazon Web Services ... Full article
Open 5G Push Seen Attracting Hyperscalers
The technology lines are being drawn in the race to deploy 5G wireless networks that would underpin emerging enterprise applications ranging from the Internet of Things a host of software-defined services. The opening of interfaces on those costly networks could also attract new hyperscale players such as pubic cloud giants, network equipment vendors say. While ... Full article
Neuromorphic Computing to Assist Children Who Use Wheelchairs
Intel’s neuromorphic chip has learned to smell, learned to touch – and now, it’s here to help. The chip, which mimics the behavior of the human brain, is being used in a collaborative effort to develop a wheelchair-mounted assistive robotic arm for pediatric patients with spinal injuries, helping them to more easily navigate the challenges ... Full article
NIST Tackles Explainable AI Gap
Among the best ways to create stable technologies are standards and specifications that provide a template for building trust while often seeding new technological ecosystems. That’s especially true for AI, where lack of trust and inability to explain decisions has hindered innovation and wider enterprise adoption of AI platforms. Indeed, early corporate AI deployments have ... Full article
COVID’s ‘Next Normal’ Fueling Cloud Migration
The pandemic’s impact on how and where enterprise IT infrastructure is deployed remains an open question, with datacenter backers arguing security doubts will keep corporate data on-premises while cloud advocates insist COVID-19 is forcing the migration of more workloads out of datacenters. The uncertainty is among the reasons some public cloud vendors are hedging their ... Full article
IBM Debuts Power10; Touts New Memory Scheme, Security, and Inferencing
IBM this week introduced its next generation Power10 microprocessor, a 7nm device manufactured by Samsung. The chip features a new microarchitecture, broad new memory support, PCIe Gen 5 connectivity, hardware enabled security, impressive energy efficiency, and a host of other improvements. Unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference (virtual this year) Power10 won’t turn up ... Full article
New Tool Emerges to Speed COVID Test Results
Efforts to accelerate SARS-CoV-2 testing results got a boost this week with the unveiling of a series of workstations advertised as capable of preparing and running thousands of COVID-19 tests per day. PerkinElmer Inc., (NYSE:PKI) the diagnostics and informatics specialist, said Monday (Aug. 17) its Explorer series of workstations would allow labs to ramp up ... Full article
Photonics Processor Aimed at AI Inference
Silicon photonics is exhibiting greater innovation as requirements grow to enable faster, lower-power chip interconnects for traditionally power-hungry applications like AI inferencing. With that in mind, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched a startup in 2017 called Lightmatter Inc. to develop silicon photonic processors. Another goal was leveraging optical computing to “decouple” AI processing ... Full article
AI/ML in Broadband Networks: the Role of Standards
Earlier this year a new initiative to create standards for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the cable telecommunications industry was launched. The working group, which draws members from both inside and outside of cable including giants like IBM, is exploring how AI and ML can be leveraged to make the network more ... Full article
Russian Malware Targets Linux, US Warns
The Russians are coming, again, this time with new malware targeting Linux systems, according to a U.S. advisory issued this week. The FBI and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) dispatched a cybersecurity advisory on Thursday (Aug. 13) describing previously undisclosed malware targeting Linux dubbed “Drovorub”. The agencies pointed to a branch of Russia’s General ... Full article
AI Chip Start-up Groq to Detail Technology Progress in Fall
AI chip startup Groq announced this week it had closed its most recent funding round, saying the new investments will help it double in size by the end of this year and double again by the end of next year as it transitions to commercial development. Groq’s new neural network chip – the Tensor Streaming ... Full article
Op-Ed: Intel Confronts Its IBM Moment
On July 28, 1993, IBM announced a staggering quarterly loss of over $8 billion, the second largest in corporate history after GM’s $21 billion the previous year. Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the newly installed chairman of the company wanted to end the “Chinese water torture” of payroll cuts year after year and “get this process ... Full article
Half of DevOps Teams Surveyed Pushing Vulnerable Code
Organizations continuing to strive for secure application development are nevertheless succumbing to growing pressure to get distributed apps out the door. Those time pressures and the sheer velocity and complexity of enterprise IT are prompting some to consciously deploy applications with known vulnerabilities, according to a new DevSecOps report. The study by Enterprise Strategy Group ... Full article
‘Open Season on Open Source,’ Supply Chain Survey Warns
Open source software development is thriving despite the pandemic, with a new supply chain survey estimating a record 1.5 trillion downloads this year of open source components and containers. In its annual report on the state of the software supply chain, security specialist Sonatype foresees no let-up in the shift to open source tools, noting ... Full article
Low-Code Market is Flying High
Low-code development platforms that automate application development using integrated tools, visual modeling and input from domain experts are making inroads in closing the gap between insatiable enterprise demand for apps and the ability of DevOps teams to keep up with that demand. By 2024, Gartner Inc. (NYSE: IT) estimates the visual development approach will account ... Full article
US Chip Industry Launches Apprenticeships
As efforts ramp up to revive U.S. chip manufacturing, the nation’s largest pure-play foundry services provider is teaming with an industry group to advance a workforce training program designed to bridge the electronics talent gap. SEMI, the industry group representing IC design and equipment vendors, said this week it is launching an apprenticeship program in ... Full article