Chinese AI chipmaker Horizon endeavours to raise $700M to rival NVIDIA

AI chipmaker Horizon Robotics is seeking to raise $700 million in a new funding round.

Horizon is often seen as potentially becoming China’s equivalent of NVIDIA. The company is founded by Dr Kai Yu, a prominent industry figure with quite the credentials.

Yu led Baidu’s AI Research lab for three years, founded the Baidu Institute of Deep Learning, and launched the company’s autonomous driving business unit.

Furthermore, Yu has taught at Stanford...

22 December 2020 | China

TensorFlow is now available for those shiny new ARM-based Macs

A new version of machine learning library TensorFlow has been released with optimisations for Apple’s new ARM-based Macs.

While still technically in pre-release, the Mac-optimised TensorFlow fork supports native hardware acceleration on Mac devices with M1 or Intel chips through Apple’s ML Compute framework.

The new TensorFlow release boasts of an over 10x speed improvement for common training tasks. While impressive, it has to be taken in the context that the GPU...

19 November 2020 | Apple

NVIDIA DGX Station A100 is an ‘AI data-centre-in-a-box’

NVIDIA has unveiled its DGX Station A100, an “AI data-centre-in-a-box” powered by up to four 80GB versions of the company’s record-setting GPU.

The A100 Tensor Core GPU set new MLPerf benchmark records last month—outperforming CPUs by up to 237x in data centre inference. In November, Amazon Web Services made eight A100 GPUs available in each of its P4d instances.

For those who prefer their hardware local, the DGX Station A100 is available in either four 80GB A100...

16 November 2020 | Hardware

Sony has a new ‘AI robotics’ drone division called Airpeak

Sony’s latest division, Airpeak, is described as being “in the field of AI robotics” and will focus on next-generation drones.

Despite incidents of reckless flying, drones unlock huge opportunities. We regularly see beautiful photography and videography shot using drones—but, of course, they can do so much more.

Sony has built a stellar reputation in media capture. The company builds great cameras – both for itself and sensors it supplies to other manufacturers...

10 November 2020 | Drones

NVIDIA chucks its MLPerf-leading A100 GPU into Amazon’s cloud

NVIDIA’s A100 set a new record in the MLPerf benchmark last month and now it’s accessible through Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) first launched a GPU instance 10 years ago with the NVIDIA M2050. It’s rather poetic that, a decade on, NVIDIA is now providing AWS with the hardware to power the next generation of groundbreaking innovations.

The A100 outperformed CPUs in this year’s MLPerf by up to 237x in data centre inference. A single NVIDIA DGX A100...

3 November 2020 | Amazon

NVIDIA sets another AI inference record in MLPerf

NVIDIA has set yet another record for AI inference in MLPerf with its A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

MLPerf consists of five inference benchmarks which cover the main three AI applications today: image classification, object detection, and translation.

“Industry-standard MLPerf benchmarks provide relevant performance data on widely used AI networks and help make informed AI platform buying decisions,” said Rangan Majumder, VP of Search and AI at Microsoft.

Last...

22 October 2020 | Benchmark

Intel, Ubotica, and the ESA launch the first AI satellite

Intel, Ubotica, and the European Space Agency (ESA) have launched the first AI satellite into Earth’s orbit.

The PhiSat-1 satellite is about the size of a cereal box and was ejected from a rocket’s dispenser alongside 45 other satellites. The rocket launched from Guiana Space Centre on September 2nd.

Intel has integrated its Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU) into PhiSat-1 – enabling large amounts of data to be processed on the device. This helps to...

20 October 2020 | Edge

South Korea wants to develop 50 types of AI chips by 2030

South Korea has set itself the ambitious national target of developing 50 types of AI chips within the next decade.

The country’s ICT ministry made the announcement this week as South Korea positions itself to move beyond its historic foothold in memory chips into artificial intelligence semiconductors.

South Korea is investing heavily in AI; especially in the hardware which makes it possible.

Around one trillion won ($871 million) will be spent on developing...

13 October 2020 | Government

British AI chipmaker Graphcore claims Nvidia’s crown with GC200 processor

Graphcore, a British AI chipmaker, has unveiled a powerful new processor which takes Nvidia’s crown.

Bristol-based Graphcore ranked number one on Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative AI companies of 2020 list. Nvidia, for comparison, ranked fifth.

Fast Company’s confidence in Graphcore clearly isn’t misplaced. Announcing its GC200 processor, Graphcore says its new chip is the world’s most complex.

The GC200 processor boasts 59.4 billion transistors...

15 July 2020 | Hardware

Neuralink will share progress on linking human brains with AI next month

Elon Musk's startup Neuralink says it will share progress next month on the company's mission to link human brains with AI.

Musk made the announcement of the announcement on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1281123131281666048

When Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in September 2018, the CEO told Rogan that Neuralink’s long-term goal is to enable human brains to be “symbiotic with AI”, adding that the company would have “something...

9 July 2020 | Hardware