good morning From CES in Las Vegas, where the future awaits… flight delays and long taxi lines. (In this economy?)
By the way, last night's annual Fortune Brainstorming Tech Dinner was a huge success. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon was on a roll (me: “Smartphones, robotics, industrial IoT, automobiles, PCs…what business would Qualcomm not want to be in?” Him: “Bad stuff”), and the panel discussion on agent AI was lively to say the least (“It's more psychology than technology,” said Disney CIO Susan Doniz, spouting a line about change management).
Gadget news is coming in fast and furious this week, so recharge your batteries and keep reading. —Andrew Nazca
Want to send comments or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Type a line here.
Nvidia rolls out Vera Rubin chips
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
The world's most valuable company opened CES on Monday by announcing its latest AI chip platform, Vera Rubin, named after the pioneering American astronomer.
Putting them together like the Infinity Stones of an AI supercomputer, the six-chip family includes a CPU, DPU, GPU, network accelerator, and a set of switches.
Nvidia plans to sell it rack-ready (if possible). promise to cut costs For frontier AI companies who are concerned about the cost of inference tokens.
The pressure is on. Nvidia dominates the business of advanced AI chips for data centers, with an estimated global market share of 80%, but competition is fierce.
Rivals AMD and Intel want an even bigger slice of the growing pie. Customers Amazon, Google and Microsoft hope to reduce their dependence on Jensen Huang's company by producing their own chips. Never mind the geopolitical complexities of Chinese competitors.
The Vera Rubin family is expected to roll out in the second half of this year. —Anne
Boston Dynamics installs Google DeepMind on its robots
If intelligent humanoid robots are the stuff of your nightmares, you may want to stop reading this article.
Boston Dynamics (famous for “That robot can't be real, right?”) said on monday That means the company has partnered with Google DeepMind (of “Why is Google Gemini in Every App Suddenly?” fame) to power Gemini's AI smarts into the brains of BD's industrial humanoid Atlas robots.
The company's goal, in their own words, is to “enable humanoids to complete a variety of industrial tasks” with an eye toward manufacturing plants, the factories that produce cars.
They will conduct research together as they progress toward their goals. (I'm not kidding, I swear.)
It is worth noting that Boston Dynamics has been majority-owned by Hyundai Motors since it purchased a stake from Softbank in 2021.
At the time, Hyundai spoke fondly of a robot that would “take current mobility services to new heights.” But this week's news is much more real. Robots navigate unfamiliar environments, identifying and manipulating objects. This is exactly the ability needed to perform manual labor. as wired put it down. —Anne
Intel introduces 2-nanometer 'Panther Lake' chips
An icon of American chip manufacturing comes out swinging on monday With the new products, the company hopes to prove to investors and partners that customers really want the chips it makes.
Intel's so-called Panther Lake chips, based on a 2-nanometer architecture, represent the first batch produced on the company's 18A semiconductor manufacturing process.
These are also Intel's first mass-produced in-house laptop chips since the company prioritized outsourcing production.
The new chip, officially called Intel Core Ultra Series 3, is aimed at mobile gadget makers. The CPU and integrated graphics processor have increased power, promising better performance and graphics using less energy.
But its real power comes thanks to an improved neural processing unit that has increased processing power for AI workloads, adding to the conversation in an industry that Intel hasn't really been a part of lately. —Anne
More technology
—AMD also has new chips. The MI455 AI chip used by OpenAI and others and the MI440X used by on-premises companies.
—Dell brings back the XPS brand. Two models (and some changes) to quell criticism of the company's premium laptop product line.
—X faces a new investigation About xAI's Grok creating “naked images” of people.
—Qualcomm is committed to physical AI Featuring a new robotics architecture.
—amazon fire tv Get a facelift.
—Food delivery drama. A whistleblower post alleging fraud has been reported to be an AI-generated hoax.
—The future of LEGO: “Smart bricks” with embedded chips.
