Just days ago, Nvidia showed the world how valuable the AI market is to silicon and solution providers by  announcing a new set of hardware and services  during its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. While that news was focused

Just days ago, Nvidia showed the world how valuable the AI market is to silicon and solution providers by announcing a new set of hardware and services during its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. While that news was focused on data center AI compute in the form of multi-million dollar servers powered by some of the largest processors and chips ever produced, the world of client AI, where AI runs on individual laptops and PCs, presents an equally appealing, and profitable, arena for technology giants to take advantage of.

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Nvidia conference shows it’s still on track for AI dominance

Nvidia conference shows it’s still on track for AI dominance

In what seems like just one in a series of critically important moments for the most followed and scrutinized tech company in the world, Nvidia hosted developers, partners, and analysts this week in San Jose for its annual GTC event. This is Nvidia’s preeminent showcase of everything AI; at least it has become that as it shifted its focus from gaming and graphics, to compute and artificial intelligence.

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Can Qualcomm become the NVIDIA of the AI PC race?

Can Qualcomm become the NVIDIA of the AI PC race?

In the world of AI, and the computing infrastructure that powers AI, there is only one king: Nvidia. The company has skyrocketed to one of the largest in the world on the back of it success leading the transition to an AI computing ecosystem. It has a dominant hold on the chips that power the data centers and servers that enable companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to deliver the AI services that gather the headlines.

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AMD can see big growth with AI in 2024

AMD can see big growth with AI in 2024

The earnings whirlwind for technology and silicon companies continues this week with AMD reporting its Q4 and full year 2023 results. I know that many other stories and analysts will dive into the dollars more deeply than me, but it’s worth recounting a couple of the key points that I think are relevant to how we look at the ability for AMD to sustain its momentum into 2024.

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Intel earnings shows strength in client, questions for data center

Intel earnings shows strength in client, questions for data center

It’s a tale of two worlds for Intel today, as earnings are reported for the period ending Q4 of 2023 show the company is divided in how successful it has been in a turbulent time for the silicon industry. Revenue was up 10% YoY for Q4 and even better was a gross margin increase of 6.5 points. For the 2023 full year results, total revenue was 14% down compared to 2022 at $54.2B and total gross margin dropped from 42.6% to 40%. Compared to companies like TSMC or even NVIDIA, that had gross margins of 54% and 73% respectively, Intel continues to struggle to find ways to manage costs.

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Samsung unpacks the Galaxy S24 with Snapdragon and Exynos silicon

Samsung unpacks the Galaxy S24 with Snapdragon and Exynos silicon

The heart of this new device is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, first announced at the company’s Snapdragon Summit back in late October. This SoC has 8 CPU cores (one Arm Cortex-X4, five Cortex-A720, two Cortex-A520) that the company claims offers 30% better performance over the previous gen, an updated Adreno GPU that is 25% faster, and maybe you’ve heard of this thing called AI? The integrated Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is more than 40% faster than last year’s model thanks to hardware and drastic software improvements from the engineering team.

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The “AI PC” race is ignoring the AI leader: NVIDIA

The “AI PC” race is ignoring the AI leader: NVIDIA

Walking around the exhibit halls and the hotel conference areas in Las Vegas this week during the annual CES (Consumer Electronics Show) event there are two things that stand out. First, that this feels like a return to the years before 2020 with the size of the crowds and amount of new products. Second, you simply cannot turn a corner or sit at a blackjack table without someone talking about AI.

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AMD offers Ryzen 8040 series AI PC chips to compete with Intel Core Ultra

AMD offers Ryzen 8040 series AI PC chips to compete with Intel Core Ultra

AMD first unveiled its new Hawk Point processors at its AI event in December, now branded as the Ryzen 8040 series of APUs. Ahead of CES this week in Vegas, the company briefed me on some new performance metrics of interest that it plans to show off in its exhibit area, across a range of AI tests, content creation, and gaming.

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Winners and bigger winners for chips and tech market this year

Winners and bigger winners for chips and tech market this year

It’s hard to imagine that we could repeat the success of the chip and technology sector again next year, with market values increasing by more than 100% for companies like AMD and Nvidia, but financial and technology analyst groups are nearly universal in agreement that this is in fact likely. Fueled by the need for more computing horsepower than ever before, including the rise of AI, chip companies will likely see 2024 as another strong year, with nuances of course between the levels of success.

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Intel lays claim to AI PC leadership with new laptop chips

Intel lays claim to AI PC leadership with new laptop chips

Intel believes, and has now put the technology world on notice, that it provides the most complete solutions for AI compute across end user and data center product lines. It asserted this clearly and emphatically during the company’s “AI Everywhere” event held in NYC today, rolling out a bevy of new products, demos, and partnerships as supporting evidence. The questions to ask now are simple: is it true? And how does it impact Intel and its competitors in 2024?

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AMD is setting stage for huge AI growth in 2024

AMD is setting stage for huge AI growth in 2024

Starting off the company’s “Accelerate AI” event held in San Jose yesterday, CEO Lisa Su tried to squelch some of that debate. One of the first slides she showed described how the projected TAM (total addressable market, or the market size to which AMD could potentially target with its chips) for data center AI accelerators through 2027 has increased from $150B to a projected $400B in just the last year. That is a growth rate of more than 70% for the next 4 years and justified the last words I heard from Lisa on stage: 

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Is Nvidia well positioned to sustain its meteoric growth in AI?

Is Nvidia well positioned to sustain its meteoric growth in AI?

Not a surprise to any, it turns out that Nvidia made a lot of money last quarter. The company reported $18.1B in revenue, an increase of 206% compared to just one year ago. Earnings per share were up 6 times or 12 times, depending on if you view at the GAAP or non-GAAP numbers. Nvidia has been raising eyebrows with investors and analysts in the markets for some time, and yesterday’s results continue to do so.

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Microsoft and T-Mobile enable free 5G for the PC

Microsoft and T-Mobile enable free 5G for the PC

Seeing the news yesterday about T-Mobile offering free 5G connectivity for the Surface Pro 9 with 5G brought back a wave of memories. Back in April 2018 I wrote a paper titled “Defining the Always On, Always Connected PC” that looked at how the Snapdragon 835 (!!) based platforms with their extended battery life and integrated LTE modems changed how users could think about device connectivity. Later that same year I looked at the second generation of Snapdragon devices in another paper, analyzing what had improved and what still needed to get better.

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How Microsoft’s new chip for AI could disrupt big tech — especially Nvidia, AMD and Intel

How Microsoft’s new chip for AI could disrupt big tech — especially Nvidia, AMD and Intel

During a Microsoft Ignite event this morning the company took the wraps off one of the more important reveals in the chip market in a long time. Microsoft now has both a custom-designed AI processing chip and a custom Arm-based CPU to add its growing stable of products to help it vertically integrate its services and solutions.

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Nvidia continues to gain ground in high performance and quantum computing

Nvidia continues to gain ground in high performance and quantum computing

Though Nvidia was built on the promise of the GPU for gaming and advanced rendering, its rise to a $1 trillion valuation was on the back of high performance compute and AI. What began as a small project called “general purpose GPU” (GPGPU) that looked at in-game physics and video transcoding applications transformed the company into the titan of the silicon space, displacing Intel as the clear thought-leader for the future of computing.

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Will Arm’s leadership in lower power chips be challenged?

Will Arm’s leadership in lower power chips be challenged?

One of the most important technology companies in the world is often times one of the least discussed and debated. Arm Holdings (or just Arm) is a UK-based company founded in 1990 that has been the silent leader in the expansion of computing outside the world of servers and PCs. If you have a smartphone, a connected appliance, a smart TV, or digital home assistant, you are working with a piece of technology with Arm at its core.

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Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

Apple M3 and M3 Pro Performance Analysis: Should Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm be worried?

This launch is made even more interesting due to the pending onslaught of competition coming the PC space from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Only days prior to the Apple announcement, Qualcomm had shown the Snapdragon X Elite SoC that will come in 2024, making some significant claims of performance relative to the best from its rivals. Heading out to my local retailer on Tuesday I picked up a pair of the new MacBook Pro laptops to do some testing and get a feel for how well these new devices compare to other systems powered by Intel and AMD, as well as my own M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro.

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Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

Apple M3 chip announcement leaves doors open for competition

At the heart of all the new MacBook Pro laptops is a series of M3 processors, for the first time announced and available in the same window. It has been less than a year since Apple launched the M2 Pro and M2 Max CPUs, and only four months since we saw the M2 Max released. This is a very fast cadence for a whole new family of processors and probably indicates that sales of that generation weren’t living up to expectations.

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