
It’s no dinosaur but the newly-announced NVIDIA Titan RTX, dubbed T-Rex, is certainly very powerful — to the tune of 130 teraflops of deep learning performance and 11 GigaRays of ray-tracing performance.

It’s no dinosaur but the newly-announced NVIDIA Titan RTX, dubbed T-Rex, is certainly very powerful — to the tune of 130 teraflops of deep learning performance and 11 GigaRays of ray-tracing performance.
A new player has entered the machine learning arena. While big players such as Google, Intel and NVIDIA have been slugging it out, Amazon has thrown its hat into the ring with its newly-launched Inferentia chip.

Semiconductor maker Systems on Silicon Manufacturing Company (SSMC) has opened a new S$300 million Annex 10 clean room in Singapore.
Singapore headquartered Arcadier, has launched Token Generation Event (TGE) Presale to raise US$25 million by Q3 next year for its Project ArcadierX blockchain-enhanced marketplace platform. A private sale has yielded US$1 million in investment.

A six-person team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has achieved 56.51 teraflops, the highest Linpack score — a measurement of a system’s floating point computing horsepower — in a global supercomputing competition held in conjunction with SC18 in Dallas.

Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are not usually associated with food and agriculture but five startups have shown that such technologies can play a major role in minimising food loss. Some 1.3 billion tonnes of food are lost worldwide each year.

The world’s top two supercomputers — – the US Department of Energy’s Summit, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. — pack a combined total of more than 40,000 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, according to the latest of the Top 500 list released in conjunction with SC18.
Talent development solutions provider Saba Software has completed its acquisition of Lumesse, a provider of talent acquisition, talent management, and learning experience technology.
Taiwan’s Chinese Medical University Hospital (CMUH) has become the first healthcare provider in Asia to deploy and operate the NVIDIA DGX-2 AI supercomputer.
IBM has announced its US$34 billion acquisition of open source leader Red Hat. The move has been dubbed a “game-changer” by Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, who added that it changes everything about the cloud market.

Names such as Ampotech, Plunify, SHADO, and XNERGY may not ring a bell today but with a little help from Infineon, they may well become the successes of tomorrow.
It’s interesting how trends keep evolving. In the past decade or two, many supermarkets have opened up online stores to cater to changing consumer demands. On the other side, new companies set up online stores to challenge these traditional players. Yesterday, one of these, Honestbee, took the reverse route by setting up Habitat, its first brick-and-mortar outlet in Pasir Panjang, Singapore.
Huawei has upped the ante with an ambitious US$140 million investment in developing one million artificial intelligence (AI) talents in three years. Under its AI Developer Enablement Programme, the China telecoms giant will work with universities and research institutions as well as partners and developers to build an ecosystem with AI resources, platforms, courses, and joint solutions to better support AI development.
Google Plus aka Google+ will be no more — for consumers, at least. The search giant is shutting down its social media service after discovering security lapse that put the data of half a million users at risk.
Supermicro has become infamous overnight following an expose by Bloomberg quoting unnamed sources. According to the report, “the attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 US companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain.”
Social media giant Facebook is partnering with Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore to give Southeast Asia startups a head start in developing data-driven technologies.
The legal tussle between Qualcomm and Apple has hit another level with the chipmaker accusing the smartphone giant of passing trade secrets to Intel. An earlier court battle, Qualcomm said that Apple breached an agreement for it to audit Apple’s use of Qualcomm’s source code.
The number of QR codes for payment is akin to the number of credit card offerings in the market — it keeps growing, making it more of a hassle than convenience for merchants and consumers. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has stepped in to solve this problem with the launch of the Singapore Quick Response (SGQR) Code.
The weather wreaked havoc across the world last week with a number of hurricanes and typhoons. The Weather Channel leveraged the same technology used for computer games to create simulations that brought the impact of such weather into homes.
By Edward Lim
It’s hard to let go when you’re one of the richest man in the world and leading one, if not the biggest, e-commerce company in the world. But, Jack Ma is a man of his word. A man who knows his time and a man who has shown what resilience is all about.
NVIDIA and Microsoft have announced that Microsoft Azure is now supported on the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) platform.
A battle of sorts is taking place in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). It has been widely reported that China is ramping up its focus on the technology that is expected to transform businesses and industries. Numbers from ABI Research point to a swing in favour of China.
The first NVIDIA AI Conference in Sydney on September 4 will kick off with two keynote addresses. Marc Hamilton, Vice President of Solutions Architecture and Engineering, NVIDIA, will talk about Transforming Industries With AI. Jason Humphrey (right), Head of Retail Risk, ANZ Bank, will then share on Creating the Infrastructure to Undertake Deep Learning.
WhatsApp backup will no longer count towards Google Drive storage quota, thanks to a new agreement between the two companies.
8K is the new benchmark for professional videos captured by state-of-the-art cameras but delivering that standard for editing was not quite possible until NVIDIA’s announcement this week at SIGGRAPH of the Turing architecture and the new Quadro RTX GPUs.

To the uninitiated, images just look look sharper and more detailed because of improved resolution. But, there’s much more to that, one of which is ray tracing, a rendering technique used to generate an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.
NetApp has introduced NetApp ONTAP AI proven architecture to simplify, accelerate and scale the data pipeline across edge, core and cloud for deep learning deployments and to help customers achieve real business impact with AI.
IBM has axed reportedly at least 200 staff from its Tampines plant in Singapore. This is because the IT giant is shifting manufacturing of its IBM Power Systems to IBM Guadalajara, Mexico.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was among 1.5 million patients who had their personal data stolen in the nation’s most severe cyber attack to date. Also compromised were the outpatient prescriptions of 160,000 patients.

TechnologyOne has inked a five-year contract with New Zealand’s Central Agency Shared Services, under which it will provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) to the Treasury, the State Services Commission and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Amazon Prime Day is still going strong and racking up tons of sales despite an outage that prevented some customers in North America from accessing the website and the app, and a strike by workers in Spain.
Singapore Land Authority (SLA) has launched GeoWorks, the first geospatial industry centre in Southeast Asia (SEA). The centre will kick off by housing 22 geospatial technology start-ups from across the region to network and interact with government agencies and the industry with the aim of developing geospatial solutions.

Global traditional PC shipment posted the strongest growth in more than six years during the past quarter, according to IDC. Total shipment was 62.3 million units, which translates to a 2.7 percent year-on-year growth.
Fresh from its failure to acquire Qualcomm in March, Broadcom has made a move for former software giant CA Technologies. The US$18.9b deal brings together two unlikely partners — one a chipmaker and the other a software company that had its glory days in the 1990s.
Daimler and Bosch have chosen NVIDIA Drive Pegasus AI supercomputer to power their robotaxis, which are expected to start testing in Silicon Valley next year.
China e-commerce firm Suning Tesco has opened the first pilot route for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) logistics and transportation in Wuhan, China. Its logistics arm Suning Logistics and Ewatt Aerospace jointly developed two UAVs for this purpose.
China has emerged tops with five out of 19 winners in the 2018 IDC Smart City Asia Pacific Awards (SCAPA). Taiwan and Singapore were next with four and three awards respectively across 12 functional categories.
IBM has scored a massive win with a five-year A$1 billion agreement with the Australia government.
Dell Technologies is making a comeback on the New York Stock Exchange. The PC giant went private in 2013 as part of a transition strategy in the midst of changes in the industry brought about by mobile and cloud computing.
Banking led professional services, manufacturing, telecommunications and government to contribute more than 80 percent to overall external storage market in India in Q1, according to IDC India. The quarter saw a jump of 12.7 percent year-on-year to US$84.1 million.
APrivacy has introduced APrivacy Bot on WhatsApp to help banks and insurance companies better engage with their customers. It offers a fully programmable chatbot, or connection with an existing chatbot, providing interaction with customers directly over WhatsApp.
High-performance server maker AMAX has launched the DL-E48A, a reconfigurable single/dual root high-density GPU platform designed for artificial intelligence (AI) training and inference.
On June 13, Intel had the GPU world in a flurry when it tweeted “Intel’s first GPU coming in 2020”. The media were quick to post stories of this incoming new GPU, which would add interesting competition to a market dominated by NVIDIA with AMD a distant second.
China e-commerce giant JD.com has received a US$550 million investment from Google as part of a strategic partnership.

Dell EMC turned in a stellar performance in Q1 by growing 51.4 percent in server revenue, enabling it to widen the gap with second-place Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) which nevertheless grew an impressive 21.5 percent.

The United States has regained its pole position at the fastest supercomputer race with the aptly named Summit.

NVIDIA has announced the availability of NVIDIA Isaac, a new platform to power the next generation of autonomous machines, bringing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to robots for manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, construction, and many other industries.

Taiwan is going big on artificial intelligence (AI) and its Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) will be collaborating with NVIDIA on AI initiatives.
As a prelude to Computex Taipei next week, co-organiser Taipei Computer Association (TCA) has announced 35 winners of the 17th Best Choice Award (BC Award).

Power efficient chipsets are set to be the main driver as artificial intelligence (AI) moves makes a significant shift from the cloud to the edge, according to ABI Research.
NVIDIA has introduced the NVIDIA HGX-2, the first unified computing platform for both artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC).

Information and communications technology (ICT) spending in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) will hit US$1.5 trillion in 2021, according to IDC.
Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive will have one more thing in common besides being cloud storage services — they will not be accessible to all 28,000 staff of SingHealth from July 1.
Google has ousted Amazon from the perch of the global smart speaker market. According to Canalys, Google shipped 3.2 million units with its Google Home and Google Home mini series , surpassing the 2.5 million units of the Amazon Echo series for the first time in Q1.
China’s biggest initial public offering (IPO) since 2015 will come to pass if Foxconn Industrial Internet hits its target of 27.1 billion yuan on May 24.
Singapore-headquartered Carry is teaming up with Spoqa of South Korea to bring cryptocurrency payment and blockchain-enhanced loyalty points to brick-and-mortar retailers.
Singapore-based Carousell has secured US$85 million in Series C funding to grow and expand its e-commerce business across the region.
High performance systems maker CIARA has announced that it will produce an AMD-based ORION HF server line, as well as customised Blockchain platforms, running on AMD’s high-performance processors, with GPU mining cards.
Alibaba Group has acquired Daraz, its second purchase for a Rocket Internet company following the earlier deal for Lazada in Southeast Asia.