NVIDIA might use Intel as a Foundry to Manufacture Chips

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March 25, 2022

Tech giant NVIDIA might soon use Intel’s foundry service to manufacture its chips. The development was hinted at by the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang.

According to him, Nvidia is considering leveraging Intel’s new foundry company to manufacture chips, but any agreement will take time to establish.

Huang wants to diversify his company’s suppliers as much as possible. Thus he is thinking about partnering with Intel, which is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers.

Over the last few years, Intel has pledged to transform itself into a chip manufacturer for the world, opening its factories to manufacture chips designed by anybody willing to pay.

Nvidia currently builds its products with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. Huang mentioned that foundry conversations take a long time as their ties with TSMC and Samsung in the past have taken years to develop. Whether the partnership between NVIDIA and Intel gets solidified is yet to be seen.

Reuters reported that Intel’s shares rose by 2.5% following Huang’s comments. “I’m sure he’s interested in having more options … and it doesn’t cost him anything to say that. But it doesn’t tell you anything at all about what it’s actually going to look like when they get there,” said Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon.

Huang stated that trusting and working with industry partners is critical, and Nvidia has historically partnered with a number of such companies, including Intel. He added that sharing chip designs with their competition Intel’s foundry services is not a concern for him.

Intel recently announced its plan to invest $36 billion for microchip manufacturing in Europe. As a part of the investment, Intel plans to establish R&D, manufacturing, and foundry services in Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Spain, along with a new R&D and design center in France.

Kroger partners with NVIDIA to improve Grocery Stores using AI

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 24, 2022

Retail grocery company Kroger partners with technology giant NVIDIA to improve its grocery stores using NVIDIA’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Through digital twin simulations, Kroger and NVIDIA will establish a next-gen artificial intelligence lab and demonstration center to enhance Kroger’s freshness programs, improve shipping operations, and offer a better shopping experience in stores.

The companies said that the newly announced artificial intelligence lab would be built in Kroger’s Cincinnati-based headquarters office located in the United States.

According to the plan, the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite will be used for retail, NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise will be deployed to develop digital twin simulations, and NVIDIA cuOpt to investigate logistical efficiencies.

Vice President and General Manager of Retail at NVIDIA, Azita Martin, said, “NVIDIA and Kroger’s collaboration on AI and digital twins will further expand Kroger’s digital technology leadership.”

She further added that Kroger already provides exceptional customer service in its stores and quick home delivery. Now, with the help of NVIDIA AI, shoppers will get more personalized experiences in real locations.

NVIDIA said that the initial installation would use nine NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, NVIDIA InfiniBand networking, and NVIDIA RTX workstations to acquire relevant data from 2,800 store locations across the United States.

The collaboration will allow the companies to find out how NVIDIA’s technology can perform the following tasks-

Detect early signs of deteriorating freshness using computer vision and analytics.
Use dynamic routing for last-mile delivery to assure freshness of delivered products.
Optimize store efficiency and processes with digital twin store simulation.

Vice President of Technology Transformation and Research & Development at Kroger, Wesley Rhodes, said, “Our collaboration with NVIDIA supports Kroger’s ‘Fresh for Everyone’ commitment.” He also mentioned that they are excited to learn more about how AI and data analytics can help them give anything, anytime, anywhere to their customers.

NVIDIA reveals Grace CPU Superchip

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 24, 2022

In the recent GTC 2022 event, NVIDIA announced the launch of its new Arm Neoverse-based discrete data center CPU named NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip.

The CPU has been specifically designed for artificial intelligence infrastructure and high-performance computing. NVIDIA claims that its Grace CPU Superchip offers two times the performance when compared with other similar options available in the market.

NVIDIA’s Grace CPU Superchip comes with two CPU chips linked together using NVIDIA’s novel high-speed, low-latency chip-to-chip interconnect, NVLink-C2C.

According to NVIDIA, its computing software stacks, including NVIDIA RTXTM, NVIDIA HPC, NVIDIA AI, and Omniverse, will all run on the Grace CPU Superchip.

Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said, “A new type of data center has emerged — AI factories that process and refine mountains of data to produce intelligence.” He further added that the Grace CPU Superchip combines the best performance, memory bandwidth, and NVIDIA software platforms into a single chip that will shine as the AI infrastructure’s CPU.

The Grace CPU Superchip is similar to NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchip, which was the company’s first CPU-GPU combined module released last year. The similarity between the two chips include the CPU architecture, and the NVLink-C2C interconnect.

Grace CPU Superchip has 144 Arm cores in a single socket with a projected best-in-class performance of 740 on the SPECrate®2017_int_base benchmark. The powerful Grace Superchip is built on the latest data center architecture, Arm V9, which combines the best single-threaded core performance with compatibility for Arm’s new generation of vector extensions to provide unmatched performance.

Additionally, its revolutionary memory subsystem, which consists of LPDDR5x memory with Error Correction Code for the best balance of performance and power consumption, also provides industry-leading energy efficiency and memory bandwidth.

With the record performance, memory bandwidth, energy economy, and configurability, the Grace CPU Superchip will thrive at the most demanding high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, data analytics, scientific computing, and hyper-scale computing applications.

NVIDIA unveils RTX Professional GPUs at GTC 2022

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 24, 2022

Global tech giant NVIDIA announces the launch of its new range of RTX professional GPUs during its recently held Spring 2022 GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

NVIDIA unveiled seven new GPUs for desktops and laptops based on Nvidia Ampere architecture, including second-gen RT cores, third-gen Tensor Cores, and CUDA Cores.

The announced GPUs include Nvidia RTX A5500, RTX A500, RTX A1000, RTX A2000 8GB, RTX A3000 12GB, and RTX A4500.

The RTX A5500 with 16GB of RAM is NVIDIA’s new flagship laptop GPU, capable of handling the most demanding 3D and video applications. Moreover, it provides two times the rendering performance when compared with its previous generation RTX 5000.

According to the company, its RTX A5500 desktop GPUs are already available through select channel partners from March 23. The GPU will be launched globally by the second quarter of the year.

NVIDIA’s new laptop GPUs come with the latest RTX and Max-Q technology, offering unmatched performance in the thin and light notebook category. The A2000 8GB, RTX A3000 12GB, and RTX A4500 each have twice the memory of their predecessors, allowing them to handle larger models and multi-app workloads.

Additionally, NVIDIA announced the launch of its new Studio range of laptops in collaboration with ASUS and MSI.

The ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16 is a high-performance laptop that can be customized with various professional and consumer GPUs. The powerful laptop features a 16-inch 120 Hz 3.2K OLED wide-view 16:10 display with certified color accuracy, a three-button touchpad for 3D designers, an ASUS dial for video editing, and an extended touchpad for stylus compatibility.

The MSI laptops named Z16P and Z17 offer True Pixel display with QHD+ resolution and 100 percent DCI-P3 color. The laptops feature NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti or RTX A5500 GPUs.

NVIDIA also revealed its new Jetson AGX Orin developer kit and Isaac Nova Orin architecture to accelerate the development of autonomous mobile robots during GTC 2022.

Enterprise Software company Locofy.ai raises $3 million in Pre-seed Funding Round

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 24, 2022

Enterprise software developing company Locofy.ai raises $3 million in its recently held pre-seed funding round led by Accel, January Capital, Golden Gate Ventures, and Boldcap.

Angel investors and tech founders from Ola, Hasura, Holistics, Wego, GajiGesa, 1Bstories, Ohmyhome, CyberSierra, Wekan, and Canva’s former Head of Growth were among those that participated in the round.

According to Locofy.ai, it plans to use the freshly raised funds to expand its engineering and data science teams to accelerate product development.

Abhinav Chaturvedi, a partner at Accel India, said, “It takes an enormous amount of time and bandwidth of the frontend team to translate sparkling designs into precise code.”

He further added that Locofy.ai would address this issue by delivering high-quality translation and dynamic variable flexibility. Additionally, Locofy.ai also launched its global beta program and has already automated over two million lines of code.

Locofy.ai says that a shortage of qualified technical personnel has become a global issue that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. Using high-productivity low-code development platforms like Locofy.ai, companies are solving this problem.

The newly generated funds will allow Locofy.ai to further enhance the capabilities of its platform. Interested users can visit Locofy.ai’s official website to try out the company product for free.

Singapore-based software startup Locofy.ai was founded by Honey Mittal and Sohaib Muhammad in 2021. The firm specializes in providing a service that converts designs into code. The unique solution lets developers and designers work faster with its low-code platform that translates designs to production-ready code.

The goal of Locofy.ai is to eliminate engineers’ routine tasks without adding complexity by automating 50% or more of the present workflow, beginning with frontend code.

“Overtook an army of good developers to build world-class products like Airbnb and Uber. We believe that will look very different in the next decade,” said co-founder and CEO of Locofy.ai Honey Mittal.

Anch.AI Launches Ethical Artificial Intelligence Governance Platform

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 24, 2022

Anch.AI Ethical Artificial Intelligence Governance Platform

A leading expert on the effects of digitalization on organizations, Anch.AI announces the launch of its new ethical artificial intelligence governance platform.

The newly launched platform will act as a one-stop-shop for businesses looking for ethical AI governance. According to the company, its AI governance platform offers multiple services such as screening, assessment, auditing, mitigation, reporting tools, and others.

The features enable companies and their technology, legal, and business teams to manage compliance and risk exposures on any artificial intelligence solutions in their environment.

It is a highly capable solution that allows organizations to quickly and efficiently adapt responsible AI solutions and gain control over their ethical AI risks.

Göran Sundin, an AI strategist at Swedish Tax Agency, said, “Anch.AI is a trusted partner of three years, supporting us to achieve ethical AI through transparency and alignment across our organization.”

Anch.AI’s novel platform uses the following methods to provide recommendations for businesses helping them in avoiding costly and damaging risks –

Screening specific AI solutions for ethical pitfalls.
Evaluating the ethical vulnerabilities to which the AI solution or the organization is exposed.
Using risk-mitigation tools based on specific risk exposure.
Continuously auditing ethical AI performance.
Reporting on ethical AI performance

Sweden-based artificial intelligence company Anch.AI was founded by Anna Fellander in 2018. The firm specializes in assessing the effects of digitalization on organizations, society, and the economy to determine the ethical and societal risks of artificial intelligence. To date, Anch.AI has raised more than $2 million from investors like Benhamou Global Ventures, Terrain Invest, and many others over one funding round.

Founder of Anch.AI, Anna Fellander, said, “Ethical AI is not just about mitigating legal and reputational risk, it’s the right thing to do to gain trust among stakeholders and clients. Beyond compliance measures, organizations need to be accountable for their use of AI.”

She further added that their platform provides companies with the tools they need for cross-team collaboration allowing them to visualize all ethical considerations and trade-offs, enabling them to stay true to human values along with their organizational values.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover traverse Martian delta using AI

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 23, 2022

NASA’s Mars rover named Perseverance is all set to traverse quickly into the Martian delta using artificial intelligence (AI).

The rover will cover a significant distance in a single month, which has never been achieved before to date.

According to mission officials, the six-wheeled rover is now on a 5-kilometer filled with sandpits, craters, and fields of sharp rocks. The mission began on March 14th, 2022, and will take the Perseverance rover to an ancient river delta on Mars.

The intriguing fact about the 40-meter high ancient river delta within Jezero Crater is that it had a lake that existed billions of years ago and has indications of prior microscopic life.

Perseverance will use its self-driving AutoNav technology, which can “think while driving,” allowing it to take and process photographs while driving.

Perseverance’s venture scientist, Ken Farley of Caltech, said, “The delta is so necessary that we’ve truly determined to minimize science actions and give attention to driving to get there extra rapidly.”

He further added that they would be capturing a lot of images of the delta throughout the trip. The closer they get, the more amazing those images may become. Scientists will then study the captured images in detail using the high-tech instruments present in the Mars rover.

Scientists have integrated Perseverance with an extra computer dedicated solely to image processing. The component uses a field-programmable gate array, which is a single-purpose, super-efficient microprocessor that is ideal for computer vision processing.

“When we first looked at Jezero Crater as a landing site, we were concerned about the dense fields of rocks we saw scattered across the crater floor,” said veteran rover planner and flight software developer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mark Maimone.

NVIDIA Announces World’s Most Advanced Enterprise AI Infrastructure, DGX H100 System

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 23, 2022

Tech giant NVIDIA announces the launch of its new DGX H100 System, which it claims to be the world’s most advanced enterprise AI infrastructure.

NVIDIA made this announcement during its ongoing Spring 2022 GPU Technology Conference (GTC). The newly launched system is powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor nCore GPUs.

DGX H100 systems offer the scale required to handle the vast computing requirements of large language models, recommender systems, healthcare research, and climate science.

Each DGX H100 contains eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs connected as one by NVIDIA NVLink, delivering 32 petaflops of artificial intelligence performance at new FP8 precision, which is 6x faster than the previous generation.

The company says that the next-generation NVIDIA DGX POD and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI infrastructure platforms will be built on DGX H100 systems.

Moreover, the new NVIDIA NVLink Switch System in the DGX SuperPOD architecture can connect up to 32 nodes with 256 H100 GPUs.

NVIDIA also announced Eos, a new, powerful supercomputer to demonstrate these advancements. According to the company, Eos is intended to be the world’s fastest AI system, with 576 DGX H100 computers and 4,608 DGX H100 GPUs.

The supercomputer is expected to begin its operations from the latter half of this year and will be deployed in the United States. Eos will replace its predecessor Selene, which debuted in seventh place on the Top500 in June 2020.

Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said, “AI has fundamentally changed what software can do and how it is produced. Companies revolutionizing their industries with AI realize the importance of their AI infrastructure.”

He further added that their new DGX H100 systems would power enterprise AI factories, allowing data to be refined into their most valuable resource – intelligence.

NVIDIA says its newly announced technologies will be available globally from the third quarter of 2022. Additionally, customers can also use NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Center partners such as Cyxtera, Digital Realty, and Equinix IBX data centers to deploy DGX systems.

NVIDIA reveals Isaac Nova Orin to Accelerate Development of Autonomous Mobile Robots

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 23, 2022

NVIDIA Isaac Nova Orin Autonomous Mobile Robots

Technology giant NVIDIA announces the launch of its new Jetson AGX Orin developer kit and Isaac Nova Orin architecture to accelerate the development of autonomous mobile robots.

The announcement was recently made during NVIDIA’s Spring 2022 GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

According to NVIDIA, Isaac Nova Orin is a cutting-edge compute and sensor reference platform to help accelerate the creation of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), which is built on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin edge AI system that features state-of-an-art sensor technology along with high-performance artificial intelligence processing capability.

Jetson AGX Orin units offer up to 550 TOPS of AI computing for perception, navigation, and human-machine interaction. The modules process data gathered from the AMR’s central nervous system in real-time — essentially the sensor suite, which includes up to six cameras, three lidars, and eight ultrasonic sensors.

NVIDIA is also releasing additional software and simulation tools to help AMR deployments move faster, including hardware-accelerated modules, or Isaac ROS GEMs, which are critical for allowing robots to navigate visually.

As the eCommerce industry is flourishing worldwide, the need for better automation at warehouses is ever increasing. Intralogistics for AMRs is a big deal, with a market anticipated to hit $46 billion by 2030, up from about $8 billion in 2021.

NVIDIA’s new offering will considerably help developers make AMRs smarter and meet the global demand.

Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said, “Modern fulfillment centers are evolving into technical marvels — facilities operated by humans and robots working together.” He further added that new processors, software, and simulation capabilities would usher in the next phase of AI, including robots that can detect, plan, and act.

The NVIDIA Isaac Sim April release includes new simulation tools that can assist save time when creating virtual settings to test and train AMRs. It drastically helps developers build complicated warehouse scenarios and configurations using 3D building blocks, allowing them to verify the robot’s performance on various logistical tasks.

IIT Madras partners with TCS to launch M.Tech in Industrial AI

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Dipayan Mitra

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March 23, 2022

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras announces its partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to launch its new online M.Tech course in industrial artificial intelligence (AI).

According to officials, the program aims to upskill corporate employees in artificial intelligence applications to industrial problems. IIT Madras will provide the 18-month program, developed in collaboration with TCS, in a completely online live teaching method via virtual classrooms.

The first batch of the online M.Tech program will accept intakes from TCS working professionals.

Officials say that the newly announced M.Tech program will help upscale capabilities across the Indian workforce, expand the knowledge ecosystem in artificial intelligence/machine learning, and many more.

The course will consist of 28-30 hours of online classes per week, with additional activities outside of the classroom. In addition to project work, each subject in the program will include an online midterm and final test.

Director of IIT Madras, Professor V Kamakoti, said, “This program, designed in consultation with TCS, will have strong theoretical courses and labs covering important topics in data science and AI.”

He further added that fundamental mathematical approaches essential for comprehending data science algorithms, time series analysis, multivariate data analysis, machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning would be covered in theoretical courses.

In a case study approach, applied courses will describe implementations of artificial intelligence solutions for industrial problems. When taken collectively, these courses will provide learners with a solid theoretical basis along with a considerable application perspective.

“There is a strong need for well-trained human resources in the area of AI. This program aims to meet this need in a manner that directly addresses Industry requirements,” said Prof. Prathap Haridoss, Dean (Academic Courses), IIT Madras.