Affected by the overall global economic situation in 2023, Taiwanese industrial PC (IPC) manufacturers saw high inventory levels among their downstream customers with DIGITIMES Research estimating that the total revenue of Taiwanese IPC manufacturers reached NT$283.66 billion (US$8.66 billion) for annual decrease of 1.3% in 2023, a relatively weak performance, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest AIoT report covering Taiwanese IPC makers' performance in recent years.
DIGITIMES Research's latest report on the global smartphone industry shows that global smartphone shipments totaled around 330 million units, rising 6.5% on year.
In the past, it was the chip that created the user's needs, but when hardware has little room to expand for running Artificial Intelligence (AI) models while the difference between each generation of chips gets smaller and smaller, it's the Operating System (OS) and applications that decide the winner in the AI PC, AI smartphone and AIoT era, said DIGITIMES Research analyst and project manager Joyce Chen.
DIGITIMES Research's study on the global top-5 notebook brands, not including Apple, and the top-3 ODMs' shipments in February 2024 (shipment volumes do not include detachable models) showed their combined shipments enjoyed a 10% month-on-month increase and a 13% year-on-year increase.
Thanks to short-term orders from the electronics supply chain and HPC chip shipments, Taiwan's wafer foundry revenue increased by more than 10% in the fourth quarter of 2023, driving up the revenue for the entire year to US$79.1 billion, according to DIGITIMES Reseach's latest report on Taiwan's wafer foundry industry.
South Korea-based panel makers are investing in transparent displays and trying to expand the technology's application into more applications, while China-based display panel makers are catching up quickly, particularly in the inkjet printing for manufacturing AMOLED displays, says DIGITIMES Research.
The emerging communication technology NearLink is positioning itself as an alternative to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the Chinese market and is competitive regarding network latency and the number of terminal connections, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest report covering communication technologies.
DIGITIMES Research believes that the neural processing unit (NPU) will bring new choices for AI accelerator chips in edge devices. Compared to general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), NPU has power consumption and price/performance ratio advantage, making it suitable to handle AI computing tasks in edge computing, according to DIGITIMES Research's findings in the new AIoT report.
With air cooling being the mainstream solution at data centers, 3D Vapor Chambers (VCs) have successfully broken through the theoretical heat dissipation limitations of air cooling and brought higher heat dissipation efficiency to data centers. DIGITIMES Research predicts that 3D VCs will become mainstream air cooling solutions for servers in 2024-2025.
China's smartphone shipments totaled 78.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2023, increasing 23.5% sequentially and 10.5% annually and accounting for 23.9% of global smartphone shipments, higher than the share of 23.1% a year earlier, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest figures from its China smartphone market report.
