Bit-Rauschen: Nvidia boss Huang delivers hardware in person

Here, the boss delivers himself – if the order is large enough: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang personally delivered the world's first DGX-H200 machine to OpenAI bosses Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. With its financially strong partner Microsoft behind it, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Dall-E, has probably already generated billions of US dollars in sales for Nvidia. Huang obviously likes to present himself as a close business friend and praises OpenAI as an AI pioneer. This should also dispel rumors that OpenAI and Microsoft are working hard on their own chips and are looking for other suppliers so that they don't have to buy as many of Nvidia's expensive chips.

One potential major Nvidia customer, Inflection AI, has apparently dropped out of the race. In mid-2023, it announced its intention to invest a whopping 1.3 billion US dollars in a huge AI supercomputer. Investment commitments were collected from prominent investors such as Bill Gates. Inflection AI founder Mustafa Suleyman is also no stranger to AI, having founded the company DeepMind in 2010, which Google swallowed up in 2014.

Now Suleyman has suddenly moved to Microsoft together with Inflection AI co-founder Karén Simonyan, where they are to build up "Microsoft AI". What will become of Inflection AI and the in-house language model "Pi" is still up in the air. In any case, Sean White, who led Mozilla's development from 2016 to 2020, was hired as the new head.

A number of AI hardware start-ups are working on chips in which they combine their own AI computing units with RISC-V processor cores, including Esperanto Technologies and Chinese companies such as SophGo and Alibaba's T-Head division. A group of 18 US politicians is now investigating how Chinese companies could be prevented from using the disclosed and license-free RISC-V technology. They argue, among other things, that parts of RISC-V were also developed with US funding. However, it is likely to be very difficult to restrict access to RISC-V, especially as the RISC-V Foundation is nominally based in Switzerland.

Farewell, Zilog Z80!

Zilog, now part of Littlefuse or IXYS, is discontinuing its Z84C00 CPU series - 48 years after the Z80 was launched. One of the leading developers of the Intel 8080, Federico Faggin from Vicenza, had left Intel in a dispute in 1974 and, with the help of financial backers, founded the company Zilog and, in just two years, the Z80, which was compatible with the 8-bit 8080 processor. It enjoyed decades of popularity, far beyond early home computers such as the Sinclair ZX80 and Schneider CPC 464.

Meanwhile, Intel continues to struggle through the restructuring process. In the first quarter of 2024, Pat Gelsinger's team sold a surprisingly large number of processors for desktop PCs and notebooks. However, things are still looking bleak for servers and AI. Even the subsidiary Mobileye - in which Intel holds a stake of almost 90 percent and which has long shone brightly - has suffered a setback. Mobileye mainly supplies chips for cars, and things have been looking bleak recently.

AMD was also unable to satisfy investors in all divisions. Like Intel, AMD sold a surprisingly large number of PC processors, with sales climbing 85% year-on-year to 1.4 billion US dollars. However, price pressure is high and profits are relatively low. AMD's server division made up for this with an 80 percent increase to 2.3 billion US dollars, over 1 billion of which was attributable to the Instinct MI300 AI accelerator. However, shareholders are concerned about the sharp declines in the gaming division and in the embedded sector, i.e. Xilinx FPGAs. According to AMD, many customers are reducing their stocks. However, the first effects of the Altera resurrection may already be apparent here. Intel acquired the Xilinx competitor in 2015 and spun it off again a few months ago.

Despite the slight dip in its share price, AMD's market capitalization of 233 billion US dollars is still 80 percent higher than Intel's, even though Intel generates 2.3 times the turnover. But Intel is currently making losses and the bet is still open whether Intel will make it back to the top of chip production technology with billions and billions of US dollars invested in new fabs. (ciw)