We knew it five + years ago

The story is straightforward. Ever since Playstation One, Sony didn’t want to use Nvidia for various reasons nor did Nvidia wantto settle for low console margins offered by Sony.

In May 2019

The 5G networks around the world have just started booting up and Qualcomm’s President Cristiano Amon was happy to tell us that there are 75 5G design wins in the pipeline.

Will make 5G iPhone and end uncertainty  

The surprising development and announcement that Qualcomm and Apple have settled at the right time one of the nastiest boxing matches has begun in front of the San Diego court. Intel announced that it would exit the 5G smartphone modem dream while Qualcomm stepped in.

GTI AI technology to your SoC

Gyrfalcon Technology is a chip innovator targeting the industry densest AI inference accelerators on a custom SoC design. Now it's opened to IP licensing modem for greater customization for AI chips from edge to cloud. The company own the IP making it more attractive that some of the other players in the market. 

SmartNIC meets FPGA / smart accelerator growth

Xilinx under Victor Peng has managed to step up the game and take the company to a new high. Part of its data center first, AI and 5G strategy is where the acquisition of smartNIC manufacturer Solarflare fits perfectly.

Lidars are unnecessary

Tesla has shared a vast amount of details about its FSD (Full Self Driving) dual SoC 14nm computer and said that the 12 ARM core chip has a modest GPU, a custom neural network compute part, while the SoC packs 250 million gates, 6 billion transistors at 260 mm2. More importantly, Elon addressed Tesla’s apparent desire to stay away from Lidars.

That is why they walked away

In the last two weeks, there was much discussion about the possible reasons for Intel to walk away from 5G smartphone modems. The real reason is straightforward, the tape out of the 5G smartphone chip was not successful, and it would not be there in time for the 2020 iPhone. Another critical point was that Intel hasn’t made money on smartphone modems either.

Series of products in 2020

Last week Qualcomm announced a Cloud AI 100 data accelerator targeting future AI loads in big data centers. Facebook and Microsoft seem to be interested as they presented  at the Qualcomm AI events in San Francisco.

Huawei, Qualcomm, Apple

TSMC has announced that it is doing a test production of  5nm EUV chips, but real production starts in 2020. A long-term investigation leads us to believe that most chips launching in the latter part of this year or early next year will, unlike the UK, remain on 7nm.

Apple to go alternatives

In a surprising twist of events, Intel has just announced that it plans to exit the 5G Smartphone modem business. The surprising announcement happened just hours after Apple announced that it had settled its years of legal battles against Qualcomm.