Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week this week we have well lots of news on fourth-quarter earnings as it is that time of year Intel continuing expansion in one of its Israel fabrication plants and then there's a new white hat AI machine learned anti hacking device so we'll be talking about that as well it's a supercomputer is what it is except it's water-cooled so it deserves to be in the news roundup for an enthusiast channel before that this video is brought to you by the coarser 1i 140 compact gaming PC the Corsair 1i 140 is a small form-factor PC outfitted with a 9700 K RT x 28 e 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 480 gigabyte nvme SSD all housed within a 2 millimeter thick aluminum chassis the Corsair 1i 140 is a 12 liter system fit for desktop use with the same sized I 160 counterpart with higher-end parts learn more at the link in the description below very quick GN note first the disappointment shirt was in such high demand even after 2018 ended that we did decide to bring back just the front of the design and then update the back of the shirt so it's got a glitched out GPU artifact with logo as well so if you wanted the the design from the disappointment build shirt and you didn't get it when we first had it we do have one back on the store just it doesn't have the 2018 dates on the back anymore it's not 2018 but it does have a GPU art effected logo on the back so it does sort of follow the r-tx artifacting issues from last year and speaking of RTS Nvidia's fourth quarter 2018 revenue lower than expected again so in this instance starting the week out and video was met with a 15% drop in its shares as it updated its quarter for revenue guidance the full statement from Nvidia's website highlights quote deteriorating economic conditions in China and also points towards headwinds in the gaming market Nvidia as such lowered its guidance to a quarterly revenue of 2.2 billion down about 500 million from 2.7 billion previously while and video maintains the depletion of access 10 series cards went mostly according to plan despite the as Jensen Wan has said several times crypto Hanover the company experienced that lower than expected sales of high-end GPUs and stated that some customers quote may have delayed their purchase while waiting for lower price points and further demonstrations of r-tx technology in actual games they did say actual games there so Nvidia was was fully aware of some of the criticisms of arti acts at launch and we'll see how that pans out as more games do launch with r-tx in it DX are in it or in them additionally nvidia notes that the data center sector remains cautious and its purchases and that the company was unable to close several deals that are expected to close in quarter four regarding the the china reference in their nvidia isn't the only tech company claiming struggles here nvidia was joined by apple which recently issued its own statement a rare adjustment of first quarter 19 at revenue guidance due to a slump in iphone sales primarily in china some news in the fabrication side of the industry reports indicate that TSMC is preparing to scrap thousands of pieces of silicon of chips due to defective chemicals finding their way into some of the wafers and causing damage so in this contamination it seems that it's linked to a photoresist chemical details regarding the specific chemical and the supplier are both scarce the disruption and fabrication seems to be isolated to TSM C's 16 nanometer and 12 nanometers lines at fab 14 in southern Taiwan primarily affecting Nvidia Media Tech high silicon and Huawei nakai Asian review has a statement saying quote TSMC has discovered a shipment of chemical material used in the manufacturing process that deviated from the specification and will impact wafer yield as we mentioned in our last Hardware news segment Intel has plans to expand and upgrade some of its global fabrication plans and we talked about their upcoming plans in Oregon for 7 nanometer Intel's plans include Oregon Israel and Ireland seen significant investments it seems Israel is next as Intel is currently weighing an 11 billion dollar investment to build a new fab Israel's Finance Minister confirmed that Intel could receive a 1 billion dollar grant for its investment saying quote the moment the company comes to Israel and invest ten billion it receives a grant of nine percent that means 91 percent of it stays here and in the interview on army radio the Finance Minister continued to say there are always such discounts there are always incentives so Intel's financial outlay here would include a separate five billion dollar expansion and it's already sizable operations in Israel Intel's had fabs there for a number of years at this point the expansions would add one thousand new employee positions to Intel's existing about thirteen thousand strong workforce in Israel and if the deals materialized it would be the largest investment in Israel and in fabs in general in that region of the world so this is a pretty cool and we've long relied on the sort of white hat hackers to find and hopefully help fix security vulnerabilities before they come become major issues you can look at meltdown inspector for examples of this or websites like have I been owned with a P because it's pronounced owned not pwned so in relying on those white hat hackers it seems like such people are going to be getting assistance from machine learning soon and one of these examples is Mayhem a water called white hat hacking machine so it's pretty cool mayhem is a water-cooled supercomputer of sorts it is capable of finding validating and to some extent patching potential exploits and vulnerabilities in software and while this method isn't new completely or altogether it's finally getting some some real spread because machine learning AI dee' putting all this stuff is now getting a lot more focus in developments one of the fastest growing industries in the tech sector and so we start to see how this applies to sort of white hat hacking I guess and mayhem is planning to actually exploit the vulnerability first to obtain proof that it exists so this sort of sidestep some of the concerns with having a false positive because it will it will exploit it and validate the existence of the vulnerability before just simply reporting that it thinks there's one there one of Mayhem's first tests came by setting it loose on every program in the Debian Linux distribution where found 14,000 unique vulnerabilities 250 of which were new never before discovered Mayhem's team for all secured entered mayhem into DARPA the world's first all machine hacking competition put on by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency mayhem was up against six other machines and would be judged on its ability to find and patch vulnerabilities long story short mayhem won the competition despite suffering a crash in the 40th round out of 100 rounds Mayhem's lead was so sizeable in this competition that it was able to stay ahead even with the crash the rest of the machines that simply couldn't catch up and that was still with more than half of the competition left after winning the competition david brumbley the co-founder and CEO of for all secure stated that for all secure would sell mayhem services to early adopters like the US government and additionally Bromley stated that mayhem will work alongside humans for now but he firmly believes that in the future machines will handle the job solo back to some of the financial news here AMD posts drawn fourth quarter 2018 earnings and its recent earnings report and it's renegotiated its wafer agreement with Global Foundries one of its largest suppliers of silicon so a.m. these fourth quarter 2018 earnings are in and they appeared to have fared better on average or at least relative to the Intel and NVIDIA earnings when considering the some of the adjustments for both companies both Nvidia and Intel had quarters that were comparatively underwhelming fourth quarter 18 revenue was one point four two billion for AMD which is a six percent increase year-over-year with the full year revenue coming in at six point four eight billion a 22 percent increase year-over-year AMD atributes the growth to a higher revenue and it's a compute and graphics segment now and these earning reports are a bit tricky because it bundles CPU and GPU performance together so you can't really get a good feel for how while once performing versus the other now it's probably fair to say that the CPU segment comparatively is doing better than the GPU segment today at least and that that was not true some time ago but it is currently with Rison so Andy's gross margins are also up it's gone up from 34 percent to 38 percent of course the company still has some debt to pay down it is still compared really small when compared to well Intel for example which has a market cap several times higher or nvidia but for fighting against two companies in two difficult segments of silicon andy is at least picking up so shipments of risin epoch thread Ripper and Radeon are why it's grown and if you're saying well they don't make anything else and he does have another segment then in the past has performed very well and that's the semi custom segment so Andy's got sort of a five pillars approach and one of those bigger ones is the semi custom segment where AMD works with companies like Microsoft and Sony for instance and in the past with those new consoles that segments done well but of course it's slowed down a bit right now Andy expects first quarter 2019 to be a little soft compared to the previous quarter as even it feels the stain of excess inventory from the cryptocurrency void quote for the first quarter of 2019 and the expects revenue to be approximately 1.25 billion dollars plus or minus 50 million a decrease of approximately twelve percent sequentially and 24 percent year-over-year the sequential decrease is expected to be primarily driven by continued softness in the graphics channel and seasonality across the business and the further says that the year-over-year decrease is expected to be driven by lower graphic sales due to access channel inventory the absence of blockchain related GPU revenue and lower memory sales and the also renegotiated its way for supply agreement or WS a with Global Foundries and this is important because there was a limitation in there previously so just a quote it here well Andy freed itself at least seven nanometer third party supplier limitation so it can now work with TSMC basically but the quote was the amendment provides AMD full flexibility for wafer purchases from any foundry at least seven nanometer node and Beyond without any one-time payments or royalties Global Foundries will be AMD's partner for twelve nanometer and above with the same stipulations as before applying to using third party suppliers the amendment will see Andy using Global Foundries through at least 2021 but TSM C is now usable for seven nanometer next up after seven months the interim CEO and former see Robert or Bob Swan will assume the role of Intel CEO permanently Swan assumed the CEO duties when Brian crows Annette's resigned in 2018 following and while an affair with a subordinate which violated Intel's policies so on we'll pick up where Cruz and it's left off and that's the continued transformation of Intel's business from PC centric to data centric swallow even notes in his email saying our core strategy is not changing we've embarked on what we believe it can be the most successful transformation in corporate history we are evolving from a PC centric to a data centric company and we must remain focused on playing offense and innovating for an increasingly data centric world a world where all data needs to be processed moods stored and analyzed Swann has extensive financial experience and has previously worked for General Atlantic eBay and General Electric Intel is currently conducting an internal and external search for a new CFO to replace Bob swans position and finally Intel supply crisis is well documented at this point we've been talking about it for it feels like probably a year specifically 14 nanometer so this supply crisis has now affected Microsoft to some extent interestingly and Microsoft has subtly indicated that its earnings reports are actually impacted by Intel's of limitations Satya Nadella CEO and Amy hood CFO alluded to Intel as the primary reason for lower-than-expected windows growth quote now to the results for more personal computing segments revenue was 13 billion increasing 7 percent results in our Windows OEM business were lower than expected partially offset by strong service results in Windows the overall PC market was smaller than we expected primarily due to the timing of chips apply to our OEM partners which constrained an otherwise healthy PC ecosystem and negatively impacted both o M Pro and non Pro revenue growth now Microsoft isn't exactly pointing fingers or naming names but we can read between the lines pretty well here there are only two players in the x86 processor space delivering cpus to OEMs one of them has had a very public struggle with in demand and the other one hasn't so probably Intel and that's it for this week's news roundup as always you can subscribe for more go to store documents access net to pick up the GPU artifact in church and I'll see you all next time