Every Friday, reporter Jan Sedlák prepares a selection of interesting news from the IT world. What happened this week?
Russia’s Baikal processors are ending. Respectively, the parent company T-Platforms, under which Baikal Electronics falls, has entered insolvency and is selling off assets, essentially for free. Baikal’s patents were valued at five million dollars. Baikal does not want to keep the intellectual property, so it is not too much to expect that the company will continue. Baikal developed outdated processors intended for the Russian market, or the state sector requiring a secure and proprietary solution. Baikal was never a cry for state-of-the-art technology, but the entire Russian semiconductor sector was significantly damaged by the sanctions after the military invasion of Ukraine.
Closer chip cooperation between the Czech Republic and Taiwan is imminent. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Markéta Pekarová Adamová (TOP 09), said that centers for chip design and supply chain resilience should soon be opened. It should be Taiwanese investment in the hundreds of millions. Pekarová calls it a “mega project”, but Lupa would be more careful with such a name – according to our information, the parameters of the centers are not so mega. Taiwan also pays semiconductor scholarships to Czech students. Pekarová also confirmed that the Czech Republic never discussed the construction of the TSMC factory, which will be in Dresden.
The Italians have completely taken over the Brno game company InGame Studios. The 100% owner is Digital Bros, a company traded on the Milan Stock Exchange. It previously held a stake and now bought the rest from Swedish investor Varvtre. InGame is behind the action game Crime Boss: Rockay City, starring Chuck Norris and other formerly famous names (reviews are unflattering). Digital Bros releases games like Control, Death Stranding and more. The history of InGame is wild, it goes back to the gambling Synot. The company is led by Jarek Kolář, co-creator of Vietcong and other games.
Strnad’s arms company Czechoslovak Group (CSG) acquired a 70 percent stake in the Czech AR/VR company Pocket Virtuality. In the past, she dealt with “virtual teleportation”, where she transferred the captured real space into a virtual environment. It was tested, for example, in power plants. CSG wants to use the technology for its arms activities and presents the takeover as a positive thing. According to Lupa’s information, however, the situation around Pocket Virtuality was crazy, a role was played by a certain appointed manager. We’ll bring you some behind-the-scenes gossip in Monday’s Lupa+ newsletter, so subscribe.
Budník’s Thein Digital acquired a smaller section from T-Mobil focused on the supply of Oracle and SAP to Škoda Auto. This is not a key sector for the operator, while Thein profiles itself as an integrator and partner of similar projects. Thein will also build private 5G networks with T-Mobile.
Microsoft will not ship Teams as part of Microsoft 365 (Office 365) in Europe. This is in response to antitrust complaints from competitors such as Slack arguing that Microsoft is gaining an unfair advantage in this way. European authorities have started to look into it. The changes will start from the first of October.
BlackBerry may change hands. The American fund Veritas Capital submitted a buyout offer. Details are not available yet. And yes, BlackBerry still exists, even if it no longer makes the once-dominant phones. It took its strengths in secure software and morphed into a cybersecurity firm.
Huawei will still be present in the CETIN network and not only there. It’s a bit of a tabloid shorthand, but in the end that’s how it is. Huawei has agreed with Ericsson to share patents for 3G, 4G and 5G, so the Swedish company, which has shut Huawei out of many markets due to bans and security concerns (including the RAN part of CETIN), will deploy technologies researched in China. China is generally among the biggest players in 5G patents, earning royalty payments. That is also why the fight for the form of 6G standards has already started, so that the West gets the biggest share. Huawei she statedthat it had patent revenue of $560 million last year.
The graphics accelerator from Huawei has reportedly reached the performance of the Nvidia A100. At least according to Chinese state-owned iFlytek, which is a big customer of GPUs for its AI products like voice recognition. Huawei hasn’t been publicizing much about its accelerators lately, but it has been developing Ascend models for some time, and under US sanctions they have accelerated those efforts, as they have in the rest of China.
Imports of chip-making machines from the Netherlands’ ASML to China have increased significantly this year. So far, it is a growth of 65 percent to 2.6 billion dollars. Again, this points to China’s increased activity following US sanctions. At the same time, ASML has to restrict supplies to China precisely because of the sanctions, for example it is not allowed to sell the most advanced machines with EUV lithography at all. China buys production machinery in bulk wherever it can, even those from the bazaar. The Financial Times is dedicated to the fact that China is importing a record number of such devices.
Foreign Affairs covers Mexico’s chip advantage. In today’s geopolitical debates about how to replace dependence on Asia and China, many things are discussed, but Mexico is not heard of. For the USA, Mexico is an interesting destination, among other things, due to the neighborhood of the two countries.
OpenAI should reach one billion dollars in annual sales, Bloomberg found. Businesses have started deploying its ChatGPT technology.
Amazon buys startup Fig, will logically integrate it into AWS. Fig is a tool for autocomplete, i.e. automatic completion of written commands offering possible variants. This is a pretty hot field right now, thanks to GitHub Copilot.
IBM has a new analog processor for AI operations. It should achieve low power consumption, it is made with a 14nm process and has 35 million analog PCMs. Power per watt is 6.7 TOPS. An analog processor of this type is an interesting promise, thanks to in-memory computing.
Mavenir dropped from the list of the most important suppliers of core parts of mobile networksat least according to Dell’Oro statistics. The top five are Ericsson, Cisco, Huawei, ZTE and Nokia. Mavenir recently won the tender to supply core for Deutsche Telekom (replacement for Huawei) and received another batch of investments. Mavenir has a relatively large development center in Brno, the company also focuses on open RAN.
The Czech-Slovak open source library Greenie already has three hundred books available. They are available in Czech and Slovak.
Chinese companies have formed their own alliance for RISC-V. This includes companies like VeriSilicon and others. RISC-V is an open alternative to ARM, which China is very interested in, partly because of sanctions. And one Chinese company apologized for presenting Microsoft’s open source technology as its own product.
Reading on Cnews.cz: The arrival of 5Gb Ethernet is delayed. AMD showed Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT graphics. AMD FSR 3 (similar to DLSS) is here. The increase in performance of the new Intel processors will be minimal, but the prices will increase. Market shares of GPU manufacturers.
2023-09-01 04:35:13
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