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SK Hynix has just made their next generation GDDR6 memory available to customers which can include graphics card manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD.
WCCF Tech
Amazon opens its first supermarket without checkouts - human or self-service - to shoppers on Monday. Amazon Go, in Seattle, has been tested by staff for the past year. It uses an array of ceiling-mounted cameras to identify each customer and track what items they select, eliminating the need for billing.
BBC News
Japan's Sumitomo Chemical has halted production of a key material used in LEDs at a joint venture with South Korea's Samsung Electronics. The two founded the 50-50 joint venture SSLM in 2011, with hopes of combining their strengths to broaden their market shares of sapphire wafers in emerging countries and elsewhere. Their ambitions were shattered by the rise of low-cost manufacturers in China.
Nikkei Asian Review
If this is the case, it would be the first time that Apple has not retained the previous year's model to allow for a wide range of iPhones available at many price points.
Apple Insider
Beijing-based Naura Microelectronics Equipment has completed a deal to buy US semiconductor manufacturing equipment company Akrion Systems.
Reuters
Two China-based fabless companies made the top 10 ranking last year-HiSilicon, which sells most of its devices as internal transfers to smartphone supplier Huawei, and Unigroup, which includes the IC sales of both Spreadtrum and RDA.
IC Insights
In an interview with Reuters, Trump and his economic adviser Gary Cohn said China had forced US companies to transfer their intellectual property to China as a cost of doing business there.
Reuters
Built on 10nm process technology, the new GDDR6 memory comes in a 16Gb density, which doubles that of the company's 20nm 8Gb GDDR5 memory.
Company release
China will have capacity in place to run 700,000 300mm wafers a month by the end of this year, according to TrendForce.
Electronics Weekly
The Dutch maker of lithography systems said on Wednesday its outlook for 2018 had been bolstered by a growing backlog of orders. Its products play a decisive role in shrinking the size of chips so as to cram ever more circuits onto them.
Reuters UK
Outside of Samsung's Galaxy, the only other Exynos customer is Meizu.
SlashGear
Price increases for both DRAM and NAND flash memory are raising the outlook for the overall semiconductor market.
Gartner
The acquisition has now received 8 of the 9 approvals around the world, with China remaining.
Company release
Alphabet Inc's Google has agreed to a patent licensing deal with Tencent Holdings Ltd as it looks for ways to expand in China where many of its products, such as app store, search engine and email service, are blocked by regulators.
Reuters
Christopher Rolland of Susquehanna today writes that chip makers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) probably had much better sales of graphics chips, or GPUs, than the companies predicted, last quarter, driven by their use in mining the Ethereum blockchain.
Barron's
Intel says devices are rebooting more than usual after being patched with fixes it has issued to the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws in its chips. The company said it had reproduced the problem and was "making progress toward identifying the root cause".
BBC News
Apple has announced that it will be contributing US$350 billion into the US economy over the next five years, combining both new investments and its existing spending with domestic companies for supply and manufacturing.
The Verge
A new "text bomb" affecting Apple's iPhone and Mac computers has been discovered. A software developer tweeted about the flaw which typically causes an iPhone to crash and in some cases restart.
BBC News
Users ofGoogle Home and Chromecast may experience trouble connecting online through their home Wi-Fi, according to new reports.
Fortune
A month after announcing plans to open its first AI lab in China, Google is expanding again through a move into Shenzhen. The U.S. tech giant has opened an office in the Chinese city, which borders Hong Kong and known for being a global hardware hub, according to an internal email obtained by TechCrunch. This isn't a fully-blown Google campus, instead the company has taken up space within a serviced office starting this week.
TechCrunch
A Democratic U.S. lawmaker asked Intel and two other microchip makers on Tuesday to provide a briefing on the recently detected Spectre and Meltdown security flaws that could allow hackers to steal information from most computers and devices.
CNBC
When Intel and AMD announced they'd be cooperating on a new CPU with an Intel processor paired with an AMD GPU, it was easy to see who the loser was going to be. Nvidia has a dominant overall position in the GPU market, including the types of all-in-one and small form factor systems that might opt for one of Intel's new CPUs with Radeon RX Vega graphics rather than an Intel CPU with Nvidia GPU. Now, there's hints that Nvidia is planning to respond with a new GPU iteration of its own: The GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q.
ExtremeTech
Veeco Instruments has announced that Osram Opto Semiconductors has ordered a multi-reactor Propel High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) Gallium Nitride (GaN) Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) System.
Company release
Sure, we all know what famous person we vaguely look like (I always get Geena Davis, which ... I wish! She's still in a "League of Her Own.") But the blandly named Google Arts & Culture app will dig through thousands of museum artworks from days gone by to see if you have a truly old-school doppelganger.
CNET
While investors pressure Apple to address youth phone addiction, experts are more optimistic about the voice-enabled smart speakers that Google and Amazon want to plunk into your living room
CNBC
We're getting a slightly clearer picture of the performance hits on PCs from the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability patches.
Forbes
Japanese giant Softbank is planning to list its mobile phone business in Tokyo and overseas, according to the Nikkei newspaper. Softbank confirmed in a statement that the share sale is an option but no decision has yet been made.
BBC News
Duisburg Germany has signed a MoU with Huawei to work together on smart city development. Both partners will begin work to make Duisburg an innovative and digitalized Western European model city.
Company release
US lawmakers have long worried about the security risks posed the alleged ties between Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE and the country's government. To that end, Texas Representative Mike Conaway introduced a bill last week called Defending US Government Communications Act, which aims to ban US government agencies from using phones and equipment from the companies.
The Verge
At CES 2018, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua has explained that millions of cars hitting the streets this year, simply equipped with a front-facing camera and Mobileye's new fourth-generation EyeQ system-on-chip, will play a crucial role in the delivery of a driverless future.
Company release
More than 300,000 US-based small and medium-sized businesses joined the Amazon Marketplace in 2017, and SMBs on Amazon sold billions of items to customers around the world. Half of the items sold on Amazon worldwide are from small and medium-sized businesses that offer their products through the Amazon Marketplace, many of whom also choose to use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to tap into Amazon's global logistics network.
Company release
At CES 2018 Nvidia has unveiled details of its functional safety architecture for Nvidia Drive, its AI autonomous vehicle platform, which uses redundant and diverse functions to enable vehicles to operate safely, even in the event of faults related to the operator, environment or systems. The Nvidia Drive architecture enables automakers to build and deploy self-driving cars and trucks that are functionally safe and can be certified to international safety standards, such as ISO 26262.
Company release
At CES 2018, Huawei Consumer Business Group (CBG) has revealed that its Mate 10 Pro will be available in the US through major electronics retailers, including Best Buy, Amazon, Microsoft, Newegg and B&H beginning on February 18, with pre-orders beginning February 4. Huawei also unveiled the world's first hybrid smart home network solution. The Huawei WiFi Q2 series is a true plug-and-play Wi-Fi system designed for the entire house.
Company release
At CES 2018, Qualcomm Technologies International has announced that its Qualcomm Smart Audio Platform now supports Microsoft Cortana. The platform integrates the hardware and software required to help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) reduce the time and cost of developing smart speakers with support for the intelligent digital assistance provided by Microsoft Cortana.
Company release
For the longest time, we've been waiting for Google to bring its Assistant to devices with a screen. After all, voice assistants are great - until you need some visual information to go with their answers. To address this, Amazon launched the Echo Show and Spot last year and now it's Google's turn. But it's not launching a Google Home with a screen. Instead, the company today announced it is working with JBL, Lenovo, LG and Sony to launch new smart displays later this year.
TechCrunch
iOS 11.2.2 is here and it provides Apple AAPL -0.37% with a much needed chance to change the script as it rolls out ??itigations' to block the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws which affect the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. But it also only delays a bigger reckoning which pushes even greater pressure onto the mysterious iOS 11.2.5.
Forbes
Microsoft has paused distributing its Meltdown and Spectre security updates for AMD machines after reports of PCs not booting. Microsoft's support forums have been full of complaints from PC owners with AMD processors, and the software giant has acknowledged the issues today. Microsoft is blaming AMD's documentation for the unexpected problems.
The Verge
Two big shareholders of Apple are concerned that the entrancing qualities of the iPhone have fostered a public health crisis that could hurt children-and the company as well.
Fortune
Nvidia's big push into the world of autonomous vehicles has attracted a vast amount of customers for what is still early stage technology - over 320, by the company's count. This week at CES the company announced that it's finally making Xavier, an AI chip made for self-driving vehicles that Nvidia announced in 2016, available to customers. And the company's also adding a few marquee names to its list of self-driving technology customers, including Uber and VW.
The Verge
In 1994, Intel faced a public relations crisis over an elusive mathematics glitch that affected the accuracy of calculations made by its popular Pentium computer chips. After insisting that the problem would not affect many people, the company succumbed to public pressure and recalled the chips, costing it $475 million.
New York Times
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