Research Notes

Research Note: AMD Versal Edge Series Gen 2

Steve McDowell April 10, 2024

AMD expands its Versal portfolio with the introduction of its Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 adaptive SoCs. These next-generation solutions cater to the increasing demands for AI-driven and classic embedded systems, providing a balanced mix of performance, power efficiency, functional safety, and security within a single chip.

Research Note: MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results

Steve McDowell April 3, 2024

MLCommons released the results of its MLPerf Inference v4.0 benchmarks, which introduced two new workloads, Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL.
Since its inception in 2018, MLPerf has established itself as a crucial benchmark in the accelerator market. The benchmarks offer detailed comparisons across a variety of system configurations for specific use cases.

Research Note: Databricks DBRX LLM

Steve McDowell April 3, 2024

Databricks launched DBRX, a new open, general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) that sets a new benchmark for performance and efficiency.

DBRX surpasses the capabilities of existing models like GPT-3.5 while also demonstrating competitive performance with closed models such as Gemini 1.0 Pro, making it a formidable player in general-purpose applications and specialized coding tasks.

Research Note: Arm’s New Automotive Cores

Steve McDowell March 26, 2024

Arm recently launched new safety-enabled AE processors incorporating Armv9 technology and server-class performance. These processors are tailored for AI-driven applications to enhance autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).

Research Note: Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA

Steve McDowell March 20, 2024

At the 2024 NVIDIA GTC conference, Dell Technologies unveiled the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, a comprehensive set of enterprise AI solutions aimed at simplifying the adoption and integration of AI for businesses.

Dell also announced enhancements to its flagship PowerEdge XE9680 server, including introducing Dell’s first liquid-cooled server solution, which allows the server to deliver the full capabilities of NVIDIA’s newly announced AI accelerators.

Research Note: NVIDIA & AWS’s Broad AI-Focused Collaboration

Steve McDowell March 20, 2024

At the Nvidia GTC event in San Jose, Nvidia and Amazon Web Services made a series of wide-ranging announcements that showed a broad and strategic collaboration to accelerate global AI innovation and infrastructure capabilities.

The joint announcements included the introduction of NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPU-based Amazon EC2 instances, NVIDIA DGX Cloud integration, and, most critically, a pivotal collaboration called Project Ceiba.