Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 05/14 – “Monstrous” Chip News

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

There is "monstrous" chip news from Nvidia, the world’s first camera sensor with AI built-in, a crypto experiment on Reddit that I feel like might actually have a shot at working, how long will Google stick with hardware, and new members of the $100MM ARR club. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com ExpressVPN.com/techmeme Links: Nvidia unveils monstrous A100 AI chip with 54 billion transistors and 5 petaflops of performance (VentureBeat) Nvidia’s first Ampere GPU is designed for data centers and AI, not your PC (The Verge) Sony Says It Created World’s First Image Sensor With Built-in AI (Bloomberg) Reddit to launch Ethereum-based tokens for cryptocurrency and Fortnite subreddits (The Block) Chrome will soon group tabs together to save pack rats from themselves (Engadget) The mastermind behind the Pixel's camera has left Google (AndroidCentral) Adding three more companies to the $100M ARR club (TechCrunch) Submit questions for the Zoom call this weekend here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Thursday, May 14th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, there is monstrous chip news from Nvidia. Also, the world's first camera sensor with AI built in. A crypto experiment on Reddit that I feel like might actually have a shot at working. How long will Google stick with hardware? And new members of the $100 million A-R-R Club. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So if you're a regular reader of the TechMeme website, then you might be familiar with the fact that the TechMeme editors handwrite all of the headlines that they post there. Often those headlines are rewritten for clarity or they sum up a story in as few words as possible for brevity. So they rarely get colorful with the language in the headlines because often that would be superfluous to their mission. But occasionally, let me just read you the headlines sitting at the top of the time. of Techmeme.com right now.

Nvidia unveils monstrous A-100 AI chip with 54 billion transistors and five petaflops of performance, about 20 times more than the previous generation Volta. It's that monstrous adjective that I say is a bit unusual for the editors, but indeed, if you hear this story, Monstrous is actually sort of an apt descriptor. This is from Venture Beat, quote, invidia unwrapped its Nvidia A100 artificial intelligence chip today, and CEO Jensen Huang, called it the ultimate instrument for advancing AI. Huang said it can make supercomputing tasks, which are vital in the fight against COVID-19, much more cost-efficient and powerful than today's more expensive systems. The Nvidia A-100 chip uses the same ampere technology that could be used in consumer applications such as Nvidia's G-Force graphics chips.

In contrast to advanced micro devices, NVIDIA is focused on creating a single micro architecture for its GPUs for both commercial AI and consumer graphics use. But Wong said, mixing and matching the different elements on the chip will determine whether it is used for AI or graphics. The DGX A100 is the third generation of NVIDIA's AI DGX platform, and Wong said it essentially puts the capabilities of an entire data center into a single rack.

That is hyperbole, but Karech Kaira, director of product management data center and cloud platforms, said in a press briefing that the 7 nanometer chip codenamed Ampier can take the place

of a lot of AI systems being used today. Quote, you get all of the overhead of additional memory, CPUs, and power supplies of 56 servers collapsed into one,

Wong said. The economic value proposition is really off the charts, and that's the thing that's really exciting, end quote. For instance, to handle AI training tasks today, one customer needs 600 central processing unit systems

to handle millions of queries for data center applications. That costs $11 million, and it would require 25 racks of servers and 630 kilowatts of power. With Amper, Nvidia can do the same amount of processing for $1 million, a single server rack, and 28 kilowatts of power. That's why you hear Jensen say, the more you buy, the more you save, Kyra said. Huang added, quote,

it's going to replace a whole bunch of inference servers. The throughput of training and inference is off the charts, 20 times is off the charts, end quote. Yeah, 54 billion transistors making this the largest 7 nanometer processor out there. Quote, that is basically at nearly the theoretical limits of what's possible in semiconductor manufacturing today, Wong said. the largest dye in the world ever made and the largest number of transistors in a compute engine the world's ever made, end quote.

So yeah, I'll admit that sounds like a pretty big deal. This is another summary from the verge. Much like how Nvidia used its previous Volta architecture to create the Tesla V100 and DGX systems, a new DGX A100 AI system combines eight of those A100 GPUs into a single giant GPU. The DGX A100 system promises five pepesters, a flops of performance thanks to these 8 A-100s, and they're being combined using

NVIDIA's third-generation version of NVLink. Combining these eight GPUs means there's 320 gigabytes of GPU memory with 12.4 terabytes of memory bandwidth. Invidia is also including 15 terabytes of Gen 4 NVME internal storage, two-power AI training tasks. Researchers and scientists using the DGXA100 systems will even be able to split workloads up into 56 instances, spreading smaller tasks across the powerful GPUs. Much like the larger DGX A100 cluster system, NVIDIA also allows each individual A100 GPU to be partitioned into up to seven independent instances

for smaller compute tasks. These systems won't come cheap, though. NVIDIA's DGX A100 comes with big performance promises, but systems start at $199,000 for a combination of eight of these A100 chips, end quote. It's a chip news Thursday, I guess, because Sony announced that it has apparently developed what it is calling the world's first image sensors with built-in artificial intelligence, which would give intelligent vision to cameras. What's this now?

Quoting Bloomberg. Calling it the first of its kind, Sony said the technology would give intelligent vision to cameras for retail and industrial applications. The new sensors are akin to tiny, self-contained computers, incorporating a large, logic processor and memory. They're capable of image recognition without generating any images, allowing them to do AI tasks like identifying, analyzing, or counting objects without offloading any information to a separate chip. Sony said the method provides increased privacy while also making it possible to do near-instant analysis and object tracking. The new AI augmented sensors

are capable of capturing a regular 12-mixel image, 4K video at up to 60 frames per second, or neither providing only metadata about what the sensor has seen. Among the applications suggested by Sony are the counting and tracking of visitors to public spaces, heat and congestion mapping, and measuring shopper behavior in retail locations. Though intended for commercial customers in its present iteration, the technology has promised for consumer applications as well. Without generating any actual images, it can help a personal device such as a smartphone identify objects and users securely.

The accelerated object detection would all. also be an advantage for maintaining sharp focus when filming fast-moving subjects such as sports players or pets, end quote. Given my self-admitted skepticism around the crypto space lately, I've got to say, the most interesting use case that I've seen for crypto all along was sort of something like this. Reddit is apparently beta testing two Ethereum-based tokens that will allow users to earn rewards for contributing content to subredits, quoting the block. The two tokens, one named Moons and the other Bricks, will be issued to members of the subreddit's R-slash cryptocurrency and R-Slas Fortnite BR, respectively,

as part of Reddit's new initiative called Community Points. Reddit also now has a webpage that guides users to open Vault, a new platform to manage these tokens. With Vault, users can view their tokens from, multiple subreddits and claim and spend their points according to a prompt on Reddit's mobile app. Both tokens will be ERC20 tokens issued on the Ethereum blockchain, and by creating a vault, users essentially create new Ethereum wallets where tokens can be stored. According to Reddit, the tokens are currently in beta, and it will be under the testing mode

through summer 2020. Reddit said that the smart contracts and mobile apps have been reviewed and audited by trail of bits, an independent security firm with blockchain expertise. As good texture said on Twitter, 330 million Reddit users getting an Ethereum wallet, thinking face emoji. This is a seemingly simple feature, but Jesus, has this been something that I've wanted for years. Google has announced that it is slowly rolling out a new tab grouping feature for Chrome, which will allow users to cluster tabs together and organize them by name and color, quoting and gadget. The feature works almost exactly as you might imagine. To start sorting your tabs, right-click on a single one and press the

Add tab to group option. When you create a new group, you can assign it a name and color to make it easily identifiable. If you feel like moving a tab to a different group afterwards, you can do so by dragging and dropping it. Better yet, anytime you close and reopen Chrome, your groupings will load up automatically. As the company points out, both tab minimalist and hoarders, you know who you are, should appreciate the ability to bring order to their browser's top bar, end quote. If you absolutely can't wait for Google to slow roll this out to you, you can try this feature today by updating to the latest beta version of Chrome. This might sound a bit like inside baseball, but go with me on this for a second. Google's

pixel division has recently lost Mark Levoy, the engineer that had been leading. the camera division at the pixel unit and also Google hardware overall. And that's interesting, shall we say, because remember, we had been hearing that there's been turmoil over at the pixel team, as sales have been disappointing recently. And concerned trolls have been wondering if pixel is even long for this world. So losing the head of cameras, that's worrying. In fact, here's exactly how the information puts it. Quote, the shakeup follows sluggish sale, and tepid reviews for Google's most recent phone, the Pixel 4, and precedes one of the most critical launches in the Pixel Phone Lines 4-year history.

The company's hardware division needs to maintain favor and funding, as Google's top brass look to rain in costs because of a recent slowdown in advertising revenue. A return to the strong reception that followed the release of earlier pixel devices would help, end quote. Yeah, what is apparently going to be called, the Pixel 4A, is coming sometime in the near future. It was actually supposed to be announced at I.O., which was supposed to start this week, but you know what happened in the meantime. Now, seeming turmoil on the pixel team probably isn't helping perceptions of pixel as an overall concept inside Google. Losing the head of the camera team is certainly indicative of turmoil, as if there's one thing pixels have been known for,

it has been their excellent cameras. Here's the information's description of some more turmoil. at this unit. Rick Osterlo is the head of hardware at Google. Remember how he was on stage at the Pixel 4 launch about six months ago? Quote, sales for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3A showed promise, but last year's Pixel 4 got panned. At a hardware team, all hands meeting in the fall ahead of the October launch in New York, Osterlo informed staff about his own misgivings. He told them he did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone, according to two people who were present at the meeting. In particular, he was disappointed in its battery power. Google denied a request to speak to Osterlo. Google CEO Sundar Pachai had hired the former Motorola president in 2016

to unify and lead the tech giant's disparate hardware projects, and Osterlo had predicted the pixel would move from a niche to a mainstream product by 2022. Instead, the latest pixel looked like it would help cement the smartphones place as an also-ran, end quote. So that news paired with the story that I gave you yesterday about Amazon's Fire HD tablet prompted this interesting observation from Dieter Bone in his processor newsletter this morning, quote, At Google, as reported by the information, operational chaos, that is as bizarre as it is inept. Hardware boss, Rick Osterlo, reportedly held a meeting where he tells everybody he did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone.

Are these decisions not things he himself is in charge of? The visionary who made the pixel's excellent camera what it is quietly leaves, while the man in charge of pixel hardware overall is shuffled off to a strange job before leaving entirely. Woof. At Amazon, a few new iterative updates to its fire HD tablets. No fanfare and nothing to get really excited about, but also zero drama at Amazon. Only Amazon, Samsung, and Huawei seem to really still keep trying to make Android tablets. and I bet only Amazon has a clear business case for them to begin with. It's sort of stunning to sit and think how dominant Android phones are worldwide

and yet how badly the OS has fared on tablets. In the U.S., truly only Amazon even bothers. Both Amazon and Google run businesses that make gobs of money from things that have nothing at all to do with making gadgets, and yet each company thinks it's important to produce consumer electronics. Why? or I would ask for how long. Finally today, I was checking my interesting raise file this morning for something to end with along the interesting raise lines.

But then I remembered how in the before times we were tracking the new members of the $100 million annual recurring revenue club as sort of a new version of the unicorn metric. Remember, we even tried to come up with a new name for this club, like Senecaorns or something like that. Actually, what was the name we settled on? I don't remember. Anywho, I discovered that Alex Willowm hasn't forgotten about this, and he's been diligently adding new companies to the $100 million ARR club all along. He added eight names to the club last month, and just yesterday morning he added three more, so let me introduce them to you, quoting from Alex. Boston-based Recorded Future is a cybersecurity company focused on

threat intelligence, and it announced that it crossed the $100 million AARR mark recently, making the firm a success story for its city. Recorded Future puts itself in our good graces by sharing a few growth metrics along with its ARR milestone, including that its recurring revenue expanded, quote, on average by 80% year over year in the last five consecutive years. TechCrunch wanted a more recent number, which Recorded Future also shared, telling us that it grew 53% in 2019 alone. Notably, the firm doesn't anticipate COVID-19 taking, quote, significant impact on its 2020 growth. Next, on 24, based in San Francisco and backed by a known $72.4 million in venture capital, pivoted to software as a service in 2014, and that apparently went well. We can infer that because after a roughly eight-year fundraising gap, the company put together a $25 million round from Goldman Sachs in 2016, two years after it moved to SAS.

That it reached $100 million ARR just four years later underscores the point. backed by Canaan Partners, Roe Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs, On 24 sells software that lets companies host webinars, videos, and tailored content for different users. If you need to explain your product over the internet, On 24 wants to help. I wonder if it's seen any recent growth. And finally, Chicago-based active campaign works in marketing tooling. The software company does email marketing, some light CRM work, and marketing automation. The latter is a term that I've had explained to me a few times, but I've yet to find a way to condense to fewer words than making all the bits of your marketing efforts work together instead of in direct opposition to one another. No matter, the company announced its $100 million A-R result today, making active campaign truly the newest addition to our little club.

Happily for its investors, the firm reached the revenue milestone just a few months after it closed a monster $100 million series B round led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, and Silversmith Capital Partners, which led its $20 million Series A in 2016. Notably, active campaign akin to On24, was a company that moved to software as a service later in life, finding that the model helped it to grow. According to its CEO, Jason Van de Boom, his company's expansion massively accelerated when it moved to SaaS. The executive told TechCrunch in an email that when the company moved to the SaaS model in 2016, it had just over $6 million in ARR. To run up to that $100 million mark,

just four years later or so, is quite impressive, end quote. All right, everybody. Remember sometime last year when I did an experiment where we had a listener call-in show? Well, I want to try that again, but let's do it this time by joining the whole bandwagon

and recording the show via Zoom. Here's what we're going to try. At the end of tomorrow's episode, I will post a Zoom link that you can call into at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday, which is also 5 p.m. GMT. And participate. Absolutely anyone can call in and ask me questions. We will be limited to a certain number of people that can call in, of course, so it will be first come first served. And also, I believe Zoom has a 40-minute hard time limit or something like that. But whatever, let's give this a go.

again, we'll record the Zoom call on Saturday, and then I'll immediately throw it up as a bonus episode so you can feel free to join in or just listen in or just wait for the episode to post, but better yet, come with a question to ask me. I might throw the floor open to anyone that has a question, but also I have put a post up in the show subreddit at R slash Ride Home, so you can post questions ahead of time and I can pick the best ones. Again, if you want to submit a question, You can do so at R-slash ride home. And, hey, this is an experiment. But it was cool the last time we did it.

I really enjoyed it. And Zoom seemingly makes it so much easier than me having to edit together questions into a whole episode. So to sum up, the Zoom call will be Saturday 1 p.m. Eastern. I'll post the Zoom link in the show notes tomorrow. Come with your questions, and I'll call on you. But better yet, pre-post your questions in the subreddit.

And we'll just go from there. Talk to you tomorrow.