Microsoft, Meta, Intel, AMD and others have formed a new group to design next-gen interconnects for AI accelerator hardware.
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China has closed a third state-backed investment fund to bolster its semiconductor industry and reduce reliance on other nations, both for using and for manufacturing wafers — prioritizing what is called chip sovereignty. China’s National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known simply as ‘the Big Fund,’ had two previous vintages: Big Fund I (2014 […]
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At its iPad event today, Apple announced its new iPad Pro tablets, powered by its new M4 chips, the fourth generation of its custom SoCs. The new chips feature a new display engine, as well as a significantly updated CPU and GPU cores. The base M4 chips come with up to 10 CPU and 10 […]
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As anticipated, Apple’s iPad Pro was the star of Tuesday’s “Let Loose” event. The arrival of the seventh-generation device marks the first major upgrade to the premium tablet since 2022. “We’re not only going to push the limits of iPad,” Apple SVP John Ternus noted during the event, “we’re going to crush them.” The new […]
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Apple is refreshing its iPad lineup on Tuesday, which is a bit overdue, as the previous iPad Air was announced more than two years ago. The most important addition to the new iPad Air is that it now comes in two sizes: 11 and 13 inches. This display is still an LED display; if you […]
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The expansion of Polar Semiconductor’s facility would enable the company to double its U.S. production capacity of sensor and power chips within two years.
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The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products
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Today is Apple iPad Event day, and we’re ready to bring you all the iPad goodness you can stand, including if some of the rumors are true of what’s coming, like a new iPad Pro, iPad Air, Apple Pencil and a keyboard case. Don’t have time to watch? That’s ok — we’ve summed up the most important parts of the event below.
Image credit: Apple
The iPad lineup is getting a facelift today, and one of the most important additions is that it now comes in two sizes, the 11-inch display and a 13-inch display. The cost is $599 for 11 inch and $799 for 13-inch. You can preorder today, and it will be available “next week.” Read more
And, as a special bonus, Apple finally places the front-facing camera on the landscape edge of the iPad. Read more
Image Credits: Apple
The iPad Pro is being touted as the thinnest iPad ever. Features include a visual experience with an OLED display in two panels called Tandem OLED. It also has a nanotextured glass option for less glare. And, it features the next generation of Apple silicon called M4, a jump from M2. It also has a 12.9-inch iPad Air and new gestures for the Apple Pencil.
In the U.S., the 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $999 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,199 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,299 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,499 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. Read more
Image credit: Apple
The M4 chip is the fourth generation of its custom SoCs. They feature a new display engine, as well as a significantly updated CPU and GPU cores. The base M4 chips come with 10 CPU and 10 GPU cores.
Apple claims that the new CPU is 50% faster than the M2 chips which powered the last generation of iPad Pros, while the GPU will offer a 4x increase in rendering performance, all while still offering the same performance per Watt as the M3. Apple stressed that the new GPU architecture features dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, something that’s a first for the iPad. Read more
“We’ve always envisioned iPad as a magical sheet of glass,” said John Ternus, SVP, Hardware Engineering during Apple’s iPad event in Cupertino on Tuesday. “And with the new iPad Pro, we wanted to give customers an even more remarkable visual experience.”
The company did that by bringing OLED to iPad for the very first time, suggesting that the technology helps get the light and color accuracy that iPad Pro owners want – but that it lacks the brightness. The company solved that by creating the Tandem OLED screen, which can support an incredible 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness for both SDR and HDR content, and 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness. The company says no other device delivers this level of display quality. Read more
Image credit: Apple
Shocking as it may seem, it’s been nearly a decade since the first Apple Pencil was announced, way back in 2015. The stylus hasn’t seen much in the way of updates since then. The most significant arrived in 2018, bringing magnetic charging to the line. Last year, meanwhile, saw the arrival of a less expensive model with fewer features and USB-C charging.
It comes in at $129. Many of the new features with the Apple Pencil Pro comes from the squeeze. You can take animations, move and rotate the object and even lens blurring. Read more
Image credit: Apple
Apple announced a new and improved Magic Keyboard, its keyboard accessory for iPad. This is the first major revision since 2020.
The Magic Keyboard has been “completely redesigned” to be much thinner and lighter, Apple says, and now includes a function row for quick access to controls like screen brightness. Beyond that, the new Magic Keyboard features aluminum palm rests and a larger trackpad. Plus it’s more responsive, Apple says, with haptic feedback.
In the U.S. the new 11-inch Magic Keyboard is available for $299 and the new 13-inch Magic Keyboard is available for $349. It comes with layouts for over 30 languages. Read more
Image credit: Apple
The latest version of Final Cut Pro introduces a new feature to speed up your shoot: Live Multicam. It’s a bold move from Apple, transforming your iPad into a multicam production studio, enabling creatives to connect and preview up to four cameras all at once, al in one place. From the command post, directors can remotely direct each video angle and dial in exposure, white balance, focus, and more, all within the Final Cut Camera app.
The new companion app lets users connect multiple iPhones or iPads (presumably using the same protocols as the Continuity Camera feature launched a few years ago). Final Cut Pro automatically transfers and syncs each Live Multicam angle so you can seamlessly move from production to editing. Read more
Much of Tuesday’s unveiling had to do with hardware, however, there was some teasing of new AI improvements. This included the upgraded M4 chip, which you can read more about above, which features a neural engine that’s “dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads.”
The company also hinted that improved AI capabilities would soon be in the hands of iPadOS app developers, noting that the operating system software offers advanced frameworks, like CoreML, and that developers would be able to tap into its neural engine to deliver “powerful AI features right on device.” Read more
Image Credits: Apple
Apple just updated its two high-end tablets: the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. While the entry-level iPad didn’t receive an update, the company lowered its price, too. And of course, yes, the iPad mini is still around.
Not sure which one is for you? That’s ok. We have a rundown of all of the iPads and what make them different. Read more
Meta, hell-bent on catching up to rivals in the generative AI space, is spending billions on its own AI efforts. A portion of those billions is going toward recruiting AI researchers. But an even larger chunk is being spent developing hardware, specifically chips to run and train Meta’s AI models.
Meta unveiled the newest fruit of its chip dev efforts today, conspicuously a day after Intel announced its latest AI accelerator hardware. Called the “next-gen” Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), the successor to last year’s MTIA v1, the chip runs models including for ranking and recommending display ads on Meta’s properties (e.g. Facebook).
Compared to MTIA v1, which was built on a 7nm process, the next-gen MTIA is 5nm. (In chip manufacturing, “process” refers to the size of the smallest component that can be built on the chip.) The next-gen MTIA is a physically larger design, packed with more processing cores than its predecessor. And while it consumes more power — 90W versus 25W — it also boasts more internal memory (128MB versus 64MB) and runs at a higher average clock speed (1.35GHz up from 800MHz).
Meta says the next-gen MTIA is currently live in 16 of its data center regions and delivering up to 3x overall better performance compared to MTIA v1. If that “3x” claim sounds a bit vague, you’re not wrong — we thought so too. But Meta would only volunteer that the figure came from testing the performance of “four key models” across both chips.
“Because we control the whole stack, we can achieve greater efficiency compared to commercially available GPUs,” Meta writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch.
Meta’s hardware showcase — which comes a mere 24 hours after a press briefing on the company’s various ongoing generative AI initiatives — is unusual for several reasons.
One, Meta reveals in the blog post that it’s not using the next-gen MTIA for generative AI training workloads at the moment, although the company claims it has “several programs underway” exploring this. Two, Meta admits that the next-gen MTIA won’t replace GPUs for running or training models — but instead will complement them.
Reading between the lines, Meta is moving slowly — perhaps more slowly than it’d like.
Meta’s AI teams are almost certainly under pressure to cut costs. The company’s set to spend an estimated $18 billion by the end of 2024 on GPUs for training and running generative AI models, and — with training costs for cutting-edge generative models ranging in the tens of millions of dollars — in-house hardware presents an attractive alternative.
And while Meta’s hardware drags, rivals are pulling ahead, much to the consternation of Meta’s leadership, I’d suspect.
Google this week made its fifth-generation custom chip for training AI models, TPU v5p, generally available to Google Cloud customers, and revealed its first dedicated chip for running models, Axion. Amazon has several custom AI chip families under its belt. And Microsoft last year jumped into the fray with the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt 100 CPU.
In the blog post, Meta says it took fewer than nine months to “go from first silicon to production models” of the next-gen MTIA, which to be fair is shorter than the typical window between Google TPUs. But Meta has a lot of catching up to do if it hopes to achieve a measure of independence from third-party GPUs — and match its stiff competition.
The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday that it has signed an agreement to award Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) $6.6 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to set up semiconductor factories in Phoenix, Arizona, and provide up to $5 billion in loans.
This grant, pegged for the company’s U.S. subsidiary, TSMC Arizona, is the latest step by the U.S. to strengthen its domestic supply of semiconductors as it seeks to reshore manufacturing of chips amid escalating geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China.
The CHIPS Act, signed into law in 2022, earmarks an investment of about $280 billion to boost domestic chip research and production in the U.S, of which about $52 billion has been set aside to subsidize domestic chip manufacturing. Besides national security concerns arising from semiconductors primarily being made in Asia, a big motivator for the U.S. is to diversify the production of semiconductors, and bring more electronics production to the West. The Act is primarily aimed at attracting manufacturing stateside, and also prohibits recipients of the funding from increasing their semiconductor manufacturing footprint in China.
With the new investment, Taiwan-based TSMC, which is the world’s largest producer of semiconductors, is broadening its plans for its fabrication plants in Arizona. The company said it would build a third fabrication unit in addition to the two being built right now, and will manufacture 2-nanometer or more advanced chips. The company had previously said it would invest about $40 billion to set up plants in the U.S.
TSMC said its first fab unit is slated to begin producing chips under the 4nm process in the first half of 2025; the second factory will produce 3nm and 2nm chips from 2028; and the third plant will start manufacturing 2nm and more advanced chips near the end of the decade.
TSMC is investing more than $65 billion via these projects in the U.S., and the company said in a statement that the investment makes this the largest ever direct investment by a foreign entity in a greenfield project in the U.S.
TSMC Arizona will sell its chips to its U.S. customers, which include AMD, Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm. The company expects the three fab units to create approximately 6,000 direct high-tech, high-wage jobs, and more than 20,000 construction jobs.
The White House last month said it had signed an agreement with the Department of Commerce to grant Intel up to $8.5 billion to shore up U.S.-based production.
Intel could receive approximately $20 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS and Science Act for its semiconductor manufacturing. Meanwhile, Samsung, which announced a $17 billion additional investment in Taylor, Texas, is expected to receive more than $6 billion in grants for its chip facility in Texas.
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