Author: Techtime

x86 continues to be the mainstream for server CPUs

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Despite ARM and other newcomers, x86 continues to be the mainstream architecture for server CPUs this year, with Intel and AMD being the market leaders. According to a new study made by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, Intel represents around 98% of the total server CPU shipments worldwide in 2018. For the next year, the market share of AMD x86 server CPUs is expected to go up to 5%, after the company’s introduction of 7nm CPUs to the market.

“Intel will remain the leader in server CPU market”, says Mark Liu, senior analyst from DRAMeXchange. “However, competitions will come from AMD, who is on pace to migrate to more advanced processes and to offer solutions with better performances and lower power consumption.” AMD’s solutions have been adopted by a small scale of cloud service providers like Baidu, Ali Cloud and AWS. “AMD may have a chance to scale up in volumes after 7nm products are launched in the future.”

AMD 7nm solutions may be released in 2H19

The survey finds that the market penetration rate of product lines based on Intel Purley Gen 1 (Sky Lake) has already reached 60% and is estimated to reach 65% at the end of 2018. In terms of product plan for the next year, Purley Gen 2 Cascade Lake will be still produced on 14nm process, the same as Gen 1. The new solution will not become the market mainstream until 2H19.

Around 70% of AMD’s product lines have been transferred to new EPYC systems this year, while the company’s Naples solutions have migrated from 28/32nm to 14nm process, with computing performance improved significantly. However, AMD takes only about 2% in the current server CPU market. This is because AMD provides mainly 1-socket solutions, and the limited offerings have constrained the company’s market expansion compared with Intel.

AMD’s new solution, Rome, will migrate to the 7nm process. The company will also switch from GlobalFoundries to TSMC for future collaboration of product development on 7nm process. Previous problems of high power consumption will also be corrected. The Rome platform server processors are expected to enter production in 1Q19 and have a chance to come onto the market in the second half of next year.

DRAMeXchange notes that the penetration of new platforms may drive the average content per box in servers. In 2019, the average density of DRAM in a server will see an annual growth of 25% YoY, significantly lower than almost 40% growth in 2018

Read more at https://press.trendforce.com/node/view/3184.html#SyY7G2bRW2vHGYpt.99

temi Raised $20 Million for Tablet-based Personal Robot

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temi from Tel-Aviv has completed a $20 Million financial raising round to boost the sales of its unique home robot, mainly in the US and China. With the last round, the 5 years old 100 employees startup had raised a total of $82 million. Among the new investors in the company is the Chinese wellness giant, OGAWA group, who joined the company with $5 million investment. OGAWA’s VP for innovation, Rafi Aviram, told Techtime that this investment will be followed by a strategic cooperation between the two companies.

Temi combines the qualities of modern digital assistants with the mobility of a robot. It follows its user in the house and connects him with friends, smart devices, media and video
communications, by voice and gestures. Temi’s interaction is based on patented ROBOX technology comprised of 16 sensors, object recognition, and face recognition enabling temi to autonomously navigate around the home or office.

The idea came up a few years ago when the founder and CEO Yossi Wolf went to visit his grandmother. Spending an afternoon with her he noticed how shaky her hands were and how difficult it was for her to hold a cup of tea. At that moment, he decided to creat temi for her. Invetment by the Lead Investor and Former CTO of Alibaba – John Wu – who assisted in raising a $60 Million
capital  – was the starting point of the company.

Today temi is a global company with offices in Shenzhen China (production), New York (Marketing&Sales), Tel Aviv (R&D), and Singapore. The first batch of robots just went out lately fom flex factory in China, and the company is focused now mainly on sales and marketing.

RH to produce Foresight’s Automotive 3D Sensors

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Photo above: SMT production line at RH Electronics plant in Nazareth Elite, Israel

Many Electronics Manufacturing Service providers are facing now a new reality, in which the road to Autumotive Manufacturing contracts sometime must cross an investment junction. Now also in Israel: Foresight Autonomous Holdings Ltd. (Nasdaq: FRSX), signed a non-binding Development and Investment Agreement with RH Electronics Ltd., a primary manufacturing and assembly of electronic systems contractor from Nazareth Elite, Israel.

According to the agreement, RH will buy 1% of the issued and outstanding share capital of Foresight for $1 million (89% premium over the share market price), and start a development and production project of Foresight’s automotive vision systems. RH, directly and/or through its approved contractor, Tonson Labs, will initiate a multi-phase project to develop chip-based FPGA and ASIC solutions for QuadSight, Foresight’s four-camera vision system.

Prototyping and Mass Production under one Roof

Initially, RH will lay the infrastructure for an FPGA-board platform. Following completion of phase 1 and successful pass of acceptance tests, RH is planned to proceed towards development and manufacturing of an ASIC chip for the QuadSight system. The parties are targeting to enter, within two months, into a binding agreement that gives RH a “right of first refusal” for the manufacturing of QuadSight systems.

“This is an important strategic alliance,” said CEO of Foresight, Haim Siboni. “RH’s intended investment at a premium over the share market price marks a confidence in Foresight’s technology. RH’s engineering, developing and manufacturing capabilities are of great value to Foresight, making them an ideal partner for our future roadmap.” The Chairman of the board of RH Electronics, Yacov Rozenberg, said that the collaboration allows RH to make a step into the automotive market. “This agreement is expected to give RH exclusive rights to new production lines that will surely generate growth for company.”

Foresight’s vision systems are based on 3D video analysis, advanced algorithms for image processing and sensor fusion. The company’s systems are targeting the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicle markets. Electronics provides turnkey solution of design, engineering, testing, manufacturing and subcontracting services.

NoTraffic Raised $3.2M for IoT-based Traffic Optimization

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NoTraffic from Tel Aviv has completed a $3.2M seed funding round, led by Lool ventures with participation of Next Gear Ventures, North First Ventures and the private investors Tal Recanati and Uri Rubin. The funds will be used to further invest in R&D, commercial roll out in the US and to recruit additional employees in Israel and the US.

The company has developed an advanced IoT platform for traffic management in urban environments, based on the integration of information collected through communication between vehicles and infrastructure (V2I) and information from smart vision sensors deployed at traffic light-controlled intersections and conflict points on the road.

The system employs advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to identify, categorize and track all road users: cars, buses, cyclists, electric scooters and pedestrians, and predicting their time of arrival at an intersection. It sends warnings to the drivers before they enter into a dangerous situations, and also helps to optimize traffic flow in real time, by adjusting traffic lights operation.

Video: How NoTraffic system works:

 

Although NoTraffic is a newcomer, it was founded in 2017 by CTO Uriel Katz, VP R&D Or Sela and CEO Tal Kreisler, the companyit has already started pilot projects for its technology. The financing round follows a recent live pilots in California, and in the upcoming months will be deployed in several other location in the USA.

In June 2018, NoTraffic successfully completed an experiment in cooperation with Foresight Autonomous Holdings Ltd. The experiment demonstrated accident prevention through real- time communication between vehicles and road infrastructures, inter alia in order to prevent accidents similar to the accidents involving Google and Uber autonomous vehicles in the US. Specifically, the trial demonstrated the benefits of vehicle to infrastructure communications, whereby vehicles were able to access data on both vehicles and pedestrians outside of the vehicle’s own line of sight, preventing collisions with both vehicles and pedestrians.

Habana Labs’ AI Processor Received PCI-SIG Certification

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Habana Labs from Caesarea near Tel Aviv, announced that its Goya AI inference processor, successfully passed the PCI-SIG™ compliance testing at the Taipei, Taiwan workshop. As a result, the AI processor card and the HL-1000 chip, have been added to the PCI-SIG integrators list of add-in cards and Components lists for PCI Express 3.0 x16, operating at 8 Giga-transfers per second (GT/s).

PCI-SIG approval is a milestone for Habana Labs: The PCI-SIG workshop promotes compliance with real products to eliminate interoperability issues and ensure proper implementation of the PCIe specifications. This is the second major approval for Goya processors: Working with IBM, the Goya HL-100 x16 PCI Express card interoperability was also observed operating at PCIe 4.0 speeds on IBM POWER9-based IBM Power Systems, the only commercially available enterprise computing servers with the 16GT/s PCIe 4.0 interface.

The PCIe 4.0 technology operates at 16 GT/s or up to 32 GB/s (per direction), double that of PCIe 3.0-only devices. Goya has set two industry records, by delivering 15,012 images/second throughput with 1.3msec latency on the ResNet-50 benchmark, while simultaneously attaining an unmatched power efficiency record of 150 images/second/watt.

“The successful certification of Goya AI processor chip incorporating Synopsys’ low-latency, high-performance DesignWare IP for PCI Express 4.0 demonstrates the robustness of the IP and enables Habana Labs to accelerate their development effort,” said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP at Synopsys.

Out of Stealth Mode

Habana had been working for a year in stealth mode until September 2018, when it announced the sampling of its first AI processor to select customers. Designed to process various AI inferencing workloads such as image recognition, neural machine translation, sentiment analysis and recommendation systems, Goya platform has been designed from the ground up for deep learning inference. It incorporates a fully programmable Tensor Processing Core (TPC), development tools, libraries and a compiler.

A PCIe card based on its Goya HL-1000 processor delivers 15,000 images/second throughput on the ResNet-50 inference benchmark, with 1.3 milliseconds latency, while consuming only 100 watts of power.  Habana Labs’ AI processors offer one to three orders of magnitude better performance than solutions commonly deployed in data centers today. The Goya silicon has been rigorously tested and is ready for production,” said Avigdor Willenz, Habana Labs’ lead investor and Chairman of the Board.

In November 2018, it has secured $75 million in series B funding, led by Intel Capital. The round is joined by WRV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and others, including existing investors and brought the total investments in the company to $120 million. “Among all AI semiconductor startups, Habana Labs is the first and the only one, which introduced a production-ready AI processor,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Partner of WRV Capital.

“Israel May be a Bridge Between China and US”

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The trade war between US and China has sent shocking waves across the Technology Industry and sent many high profile exetutives to plea for “ceasefire”‘. But, according to Haggai Ravid, CEO of Cukierman & Co. Investment House, the real impact of the trade war is smaller than what had been anticipated, and some countries, like Israel for example, can benefit from this newly arrived reality.

“The financial markets have become ‘accustomed’ to the threats of the trade war”, He explained in a statement to Techtime. “We have seen that things are very fluid. Statements often change from a fight to reconciliation, therefore in the end, the market forces will be the ones to dictate the tone. China has reacted moderately to the US policy, and both sides seem to be looking for solutions behind the scene.”

Haggai Ravid believes that one possible result of this trade war is that “Israel may become an investment bridge between China and the US”, and will attracts Chinese investors for its technology.  “In the past two years the Chinese market has matured and has created many start-ups. It seems that now the Chinese today are more interested in medicine, advanced production, automation and robotics technologies that are very advanced in Israel.”

Israeli Technologies in Europe

Europe will continue to be an excellent market for Israeli technologies, he said. “European investments in Israel nearly doubled in 2018, compared to 2017”. He warned that possible reduction of Israel’s budget for the Horizon 2020 plan, which is currently under consideration, could harm investments in joint Israeli and European ventures.

“The Europeans are eagerly interested in water technologies, automotive, life sciences and cyber security. The low valuations of Israeli start-ups versus their counterparts in the US and Europe, encourages European investors to make investments in Israeli technologies.” Cukierman and Co. Investment House is headquartered in Tel Aviv, and provides Investment Banking services, including M&A, Private Placement, IPO on international exchanges, asset management, and strategic advisory services to Israeli and International companies.

Artificial Intelligence is taking Center Stage in Israel

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most expanding trends in Israel. According to IVC Research Center, more than 1,200 AI companies have been established since 2010, of which 79% are still active, 6% have been acquired, and 15% have ceased to operate. AI capital raising has grown significantly since 2013, and AI exits in the first half of 2018 were higher than for all of 2017.

IVC Research’s data shows that until 2013, computer vision technologies accounted for most of the development activity in Israeli AI companies. But since 2012, new technology trends appeared while Big Data and Data Science (data mining, statistical inference and predicting models) have gained more attention, bringing a new wave of innovation and has became a driver of growth in the last decade.

While there has been significant growth in all sectors, since 2014, IVC found an increase in the share of companies implementing data science and chatbots/robotics/assistant as part of the mix. However, the share of companies developing technologies related to computer vision, recommendation systems, and text analytics, is decreasing.

The researches found out that Israeli AI companies have been focused on seven main technologies: The biggest group (43% fo all companies) is of Data Science & Analytics focused mainly on statistical models for data mining and analysis. This group is represented by Gett, which has raised $597 million.

The second biggest group (20% of the companies) deals with Computer Vision: methods of acquiring, processing and analyzing digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data. The leader of this group is Mobileye, that was sold to Intel for $15.3 billion.

The third group is far behing with 11% of the companies: Ut is focused on Chatbots, Robotics & Assistants, mainly dealing with the development of technologies based on computer imitating human interface and mobility.The largest raising in this group belongs to Lemonade with its $180 million funding.

The other areas of expertise are Sound Recognition & Analysis (10%), Text and Context Analytics (8%), Recommendation Systems (5%) and Unspecified Technologies (3%).