Apple has announced new 14- and 16-inch iterations of its MacBook Pro laptops, featuring Apple’s next-generation silicon. The M2 Pro and M2 Max chips turn the MacBook Pro into a portable workstation, able to tackle demanding tasks like effects rendering and color grading. Apple is promising up to 22 hours of battery life, the most ever in a Mac. The smaller model starts at $1,999, while entry level for the 16-inch is $2,499. Pre-orders began last week and delivery starts tomorrow. Apple is also releasing an updated Mac mini with M2 ($599) or M2 Pro ($1,299) chips. Continue reading Apple Debuts MacBook Pros with M2 Pro and M2 Max Chips

The design of truly contextual experiences — whether for utility or entertainment — requires a knowledge of both the user and the environment they are in. This becomes especially relevant when we think of what it means to build interesting mixed reality experiences. CES this year showcased a variety of computer vision AI software tools oriented towards understanding environmental context. At Eureka Park in the Venetian, however, MantiSpectra’s chip sensor technology provided a peek into the benefits for user experience enabled by environmental intelligence arising from hardware. Continue reading CES: Encoding Environmental Intelligence with New Chip Tech

Intel announced its 13th-gen family of laptop CPUs, including new entry-level chips and its flagship Core i9-13980HX, the high-end of its mobile processor collection (based on Raptor Lake architecture), featuring 24 cores and an impressive boost speed of 5.6GHz. The HX-series includes similar features to Intel’s 12th-gen lineup, such as 32 EUs of onboard graphics capability and support for DDR5 and DDR4, but promises significantly faster speeds to multithreaded performance. When compared to the earlier Core i9-12900HK, Intel claims game performance increases of up to 12 percent and a massive 74–79 performance jump when rendering a scene in Blender. Continue reading CES: Intel Rolls Out 13th-Generation Lineup of Laptop CPUs

What some call “Apple’s unchecked dominance” in mobile phones may get a real challenge from Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S23 Ultra, expected to hit the market in Q1. The new model will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chips, which benchmarks have shown to be fast approaching the performance of Apple’s A16 Bionic. There is also a rumor that Samsung may take a page from Google and Apple and begin designing bespoke phone chips. Samsung already has a chip foundry, but it is independent of the company’s mobile unit, a Switzerland for its diversity of phone customers. Continue reading Samsung to Take on Apple with Upcoming Galaxy S23 Ultra

Japan, once the world’s top producer of computer chips, is seeking to regain its foothold in the manufacture of leading-edge semiconductors. Last month, a consortium of eight Japanese companies formed Rapidus, a foundry the Japanese government hopes will help get the nation on track for advanced chip manufacturing. IBM Research is joining forces with Rapidus, with plans to manufacture IBM’s 2nm technology in fabs that Rapidus is building in Japan, with output expected to commence in the latter half of the decade. Continue reading IBM Teams Up with Rapidus Foundry on Chip Manufacturing

TSMC has revised plans for its Arizona chip plant, reportedly the result of pressure from customers including Apple, Nvidia and AMD, who urged the Taiwanese company to reconsider its plan to output 5-nanometer processors that will be old news by the time the $12 billion plant opens in 2024. TSMC is expected to announce during a scheduled Tuesday visit by President Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that it will output advanced 4-nanometer chips when production commences and will add a second nearby plant to manufacture even more sophisticated 3-nanometer chips. Continue reading TSMC’s Advanced Chipmaking Plans Leak Before Biden Visit

Amazon Web Services, a leading provider of cloud computing services, is rolling out its new ARM-based Graviton3E chips for high-performance workloads, including tasks like weather forecasting and gene sequencing. AWS customers can rent the high-performance computing (HPC) power to take advantage of “performance gains and cost savings” as a result of making its own chips, Amazon says. The move makes AWS something of a competitor to other top chipmakers, including Intel, AMD and Nvidia, who continue to be among Amazon’s major chip suppliers. Amazon says it will continue to offer HPC services that rely on third-party chips. Continue reading AWS Touts HPC with Launch of Graviton3E Chip at re:Invent

One year after its acquisition of Movidius, Intel is introducing a new chip called the Myriad X, which TechCrunch describes as “a ‘Pro’ version of the Myriad 2, bringing a major redesign to the computer vision-minded chip, while also flaunting some new sophisticated deep-learning capabilities by way of its new ‘Neural Compute Engine.’” While a dedicated computer vision chip has a wide range of potential applications, Intel is looking to use the Myriad X in drones, robots, smart cameras and VR and AR headsets. Continue reading New Intel Chip Can Handle 4 Trillion Operations Per Second

Apple is reportedly working on Apple Neural Engine, the internal name for a new AI-enhanced processor that will enable facial and speech recognition ordinarily accomplished by human intelligence. The company, which would not comment, had an early AI win with Siri, but has since been playing catch up with Amazon and Google, both of which offer AI-powered digital assistants. Apple Neural Engine would give Apple more capabilities in autonomous vehicles and augmented reality devices, both fields Apple is involved in. Continue reading Apple Develops AI Chip to Compete in Autonomous Cars, AR

Intel demonstrated the first version of its Project Alloy headset, a “wearable” computer that enables a combination of virtual and augmented realities, or “merged reality.” At CES 2017, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich announced Project Alloy will ship in Q4 this year, a fairly quick turnaround for a headset/project only first made public in August 2016. Project Alloy is evidence of Intel’s effort to position itself as a leader in wearable computing, in which the device contains all its essential computing components. Continue reading Intel Demos Merged Reality Headset, Compute Card, 5G Modem

If you look hard enough, CES is often the place to discover smaller, less publicized technologies and products that could become the seeds for something practical and useful to the ETC member companies. This year I came across several that fit this description, including a technology called SynTouch that could prove beneficial to haptic feedback R&D and physical product quality control, a simple and elegant method from ManoMotion to use hand gestures as a user interface, an OLED necklace that could lead to the launch of a social e-collectible marketplace, and a tiny chip from Chirp Microsystems that could provide a compelling motion capture solution. Continue reading Beyond the Headlines: This Year’s Outliers of Interest at CES

Nvidia introduced Titan X, a new chip that is a successor to a current chip with the same name, targeted at the high-end gaming and artificial intelligence communities. Priced at $1,200 and available beginning August 2, the new Pascal-based Titan X chip offers 12 billion transistors, compared to seven billion on a high-end Intel chip. The new Titan X will be available as an add-on card for PCs. Nvidia’s closest competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) offers a similar chip for PCs and game consoles. Continue reading Nvidia Rolls Out Titan X Chip for Games, Artificial Intelligence

Google has just built its own chip as part of its efforts to speed up artificial intelligence developments. The company revealed that this is just the first of many chips it plans to develop and build. At the same time, an increasing number of businesses are migrating to the cloud, lessening the need for servers that rely on chips to function. That’s led some to believe that Google and other Internet titans that follow its lead will impact the future of the chip industry, particularly such stalwarts as Intel and Nvidia. Continue reading Google Develops its Own Chip to Speed Up Machine Learning

Google Cardboard is no longer the only inexpensive VR headset around. From Oakland, CA-based hardware collective Next Thing Co. comes Pockulus, a $49 portable game console that consists of a palm-sized computer and 3D-printed facemask. The tiny computer that runs Pockulus is CHIP, which was the company’s successful seller at $9 per unit. The idea to repurpose CHIP as a VR controller was an April Fool’s Day joke that is now a real product. It requires some DIY, mainly 3D printing the bezel that fits the display on the face. Continue reading What Began as April Fool’s Day Joke is Now $49 VR Headset

Nvidia has entered the field of artificial intelligence with the debut of its Tesla P100 chip, which contains 15 billion transistors — about twice as many as its previous high-end graphics processor and, says Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, the largest chip ever made. Nvidia is creating the DGX-1 computer with eight Tesla P100 chips and AI software; computers from third parties integrating the chip are expected to be on the market by next year. Huang hints its first use is likely to be for cloud computing services. Continue reading Nvidia’s Tesla P100 Chip Enables Speedy Machine Learning