Small development boards have become a key enabler of a recent wave of hardware startups. The most popular boards such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi have inspired many projects and many knock-offs. These boards are great to kick start a project like a beer brewing machine, but they are limited in compute power. When your project needs real compute power, and possibly some local machine learning, where do you go? One popular choice is the NVIDIA Jetson boards.

Artificial intelligence has held a place in our imagination from the beginning of the XX century. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, the pioneers of computing such as Alan Turing began formulating the basic techniques like neural networks that make today's AI possible. Today, AI is already all around us. Google uses Machine Learning to filter out spam messages from Gmail. Facebook trained computers to identify specific human faces nearly as accurately as humans do.

ARM, which designs the chips that power virtually every smartphone in the world, is anticipating a world where artificial intelligence will be running on every device. Devices are requiring more and more computing power, but AI software is expected to push those demands even further. To address this shift, ARM is launching a major update to its chip architecture with what it calls DynamIQ. ARM's new central processing unit (or CPU) architecture will cluster multiple different processing cores together with each one tailored for right software, including a dedicated processor for handling AI algorithms. Chipmakers will be able to develop CPUs with up to eight cores.

Morrisons is using artificial intelligence to stock its stores in a bid to improve efficiency and customer service. The supermarket is rolling out a system from tech firm Blue Yonder that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict exactly what is needed in each of Morrisons' 491 stores. Morrisons has been trialling the technology in select stores for around 18 months, and is now introducing it across its store portfolio. To build its stocking algorithm, Morrisons gave Blue Yonder three years of sales data for every single store, and the exact weather around every store over the same period. This means the algorithm knows which stores sells more pies, and when, but it can also learn.

ARM, which designs the chips that power virtually every smartphone in the world, is anticipating a world where artificial intelligence will be running on every device.

In the Human to Robots Lab, led by Stephanie Tellex, the researchers created an algorithm that let Iorek receive speech commands and process information from human gestures. This is how humans communicate, if we want something we point to it. As with most learning situations, Iorek experienced some problems. If there were similiar items next to each other, it was hard for Iorek to tell which exact object the human was asking for. According to Tellex, in ambiguous situations like these, they want Iorek to ask a question which shows it's confused versus just picking up the wrong object.

ARM tipped its hand today with the announcement of DynamIQ, a new technology it says will lay the groundwork for its next generation of mobile processors. Like other mobile chip makers, the company's got a lot to contend with when it comes to future-proofing its offerings, and certainly ARM's making some pretty big claims for what it's calling its "biggest micro-architectural shift since […] 2011" Central to the company's speed boasts are its focus on future artificial intelligence, an aspect of technology that will continue to grow more central to mobile computing over the next several years, both through the proliferation of smart-assistants, autonomous vehicles and beyond. The chipmaker certainly isn't being modest in its AI claims, with a stated 50x boost in performance for the technology over the next three to five years, a number it says is potentially "conservative […] as its only building out projections based on AI algorithms they know about or have access to." Nor is ARM understated in its planned ubiquity for the technology. As with offerings from other mobile chip makers, the company is targeting a wide range of different computing platforms that move well beyond mobile.

ARM processor technology already powers many of the devices you use every day, and now the company is showing off its plans for the future with DynamIQ. Aimed squarely at pushing the artificial intelligence and machine learning systems we're expecting to see in cars, phones, gaming consoles and everything else, it's what the company claims is an evolution on the existing "big.Little" technology. Originally unveiled in 2011, that design allowed for multicore CPU designs with powerful, power-hungry chips to do the heavy lifting tethered to smaller, low-power chips that could handle background processing when a device is idle. It's why your phone can edit HD or even 4K video at one moment before sleeping throughout the night without losing all of the battery's charge. DynamIQ lays out a strategy for processors that combine cores specifically designed for whatever task is needed.

Samsung has finally announced its artificial intelligence-based voice assistant, Bixby on Monday. The assistant is expected to be one of the features of the Samsung Galaxy S8, when it is announced on March 29. "Bixby will be our first step on a journey to completely open up new ways of interacting with your phone. At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time. Our plan is to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily," InJong Rhee, executive vice-president, head of research and development, software and services said in the official press release.

Can ARM chips compete neck-and-neck with Intel and AMD on benchmarks? That could be happening sooner than you think. Starting next year, ARM processors will get significantly faster thanks to big changes in the company's Cortex-A chip designs. ARM is taking a page from rivals like AMD that have focused on raising the performance threshold in chips. ARM isn't known for superfast chips; it is instead mainly associated with power-efficient chips that give long battery life to devices.