A newly established center under the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) plans to form an R&D consortium and to launch the first version of an advanced container computer system by the end of next year, the center’s head said yesterday.
Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Cloud Computing Research Center for Mobile Application (CCMA), Chiueh Tzi-cker (闕志克) said the center would develop software talent and assist the government in implementing a country-wide program for maintaining electronic medical records.
Chiueh said the CCMA plans to form the R&D consortium with four or five local partners to develop the “container computer 1.0” — a 12m preconfigured shipping container that can hold up to 1,000 servers — and to launch the product by the end of next year.
This would make Taiwan the first country in Asia to develop a container computer, Chiueh said, adding that the product, at an average cost of about US$5 million, would become a building block for any container-based data center.
He said developing the container computer would provide great business opportunities for Taiwanese hardware manufacturers.
Cloud computing is a Web-enabled software solution that uses the Internet as a platform for performing computer tasks and delivers a range of inter-operable applications.
ITRI president Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙) described it as a resource-sharing concept, and said that cloud computing would not only affect software and hardware manufacturers in the information and communication industries, but would also help local small and medium-sized companies and the service industry to transform and upgrade, which could change the economic structure of the country.
Chiueh said the CCMA has 40 employees employed in hardware equipment, software services and applications and that the number of employees is expected to increase to 80 in the first quarter of next year and to 150 in 2011.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to