Arm is a chip architecture company that licenses its designs to others, and its customers have shipped more than 100 billion chips in the past five years. The new architecture has processing that balances economics, design freedom, and accessibility advantages of general-purpose computing devices with specialized processors that handle tasks like digital signal processing and machine learning. At the current rate, 100% of the world's shared data will soon be processed on Arm; either at the endpoint, in the data networks or the cloud, Segars said. Back in 2011, Arm launched its 64-bit processing architecture, enabling Arm devices to make the leap from low-power mobile devices to high-end supercomputers. To address the greatest technology challenge today -- securing the world's data -- the Armv9 roadmap introduces the Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA).

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently hosted yet another spring GTC event that drew more than 200,000 participants. And while he didn't succeed in acquiring Arm for $80 billion, he did have a lot of things to show off to those gathering at the big event. He gave an update on Nvidia's plans for Earth-2, a digital twin of our planet that -- with enough supercomputing simulation capability within the Omniverse –could enable scientists to predict climate change for our planet. The Earth 2 simulation will require the best technology -- like Nvidia's newly announced graphics processing unit (GPU) Hopper and its upcoming central processing unit (CPU) Grade. Huang fielded questions about the ongoing semiconductor shortage, the possibility of investing in manufacturing, competition with rivals, and Nvidia's plans in the wake of the collapse of the Arm deal. He conveyed a sense of calm that Nvidia's business is still strong (Nvidia reported revenues of $7.64 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter ended January 30, up 53% from a year earlier). Gaming, datacenter, and professional visualization market platforms each achieved record revenue for the quarter and year. He also talked about Nvidia's continuing commitment to the self-driving vehicle market, which has been slower to take off than expected. Huang held a Q&A with the press during GTC and I asked him the question about Earth-2 and the Omniverse (I also moderated a panel on the industrial metaverse as well at GTC). I was part of a large group of reporters asking questions. Question: With the war in Ukraine and continuing worries about chip supplies and inflation in many countries, how do you feel about the timeline for all the things you've announced? For example, in 2026 you want to do DRIVE Hyperion. With all the things going into that, is there even a slight amount of worry? Jensen Huang: There's plenty to worry about. I have to observe, though, that in the last couple of years, the facts are that Nvidia has moved faster in the last couple of years than potentially its last 10 years combined. It's quite possible that we work better, actually, when we allow our employees to choose when they're most productive and let them optimize, let mature people optimize their work environment, their work time frame, their work style around what best fits for them and their families. It's very possible that all of that is happening. It's also true, absolutely true, that it has forced us to put a lot more energy into the virtual work that we do. For example, the work around OmniVerse went into light speed in the last couple of years because we needed it. Instead of being able to come into our labs to work on our robots, or go to the streets and test our cars, we had to test in virtual worlds, in digital twins.

SoftBank's planned sale of the British semiconductor and software design company Arm to US chipmaker Nvidia has fallen through, but the Japanese technology investor immediately turned bullish on taking it public. SoftBank Group Corp said on Tuesday it plans an initial public offering of Arm after the intended sale to Nvidia failed due to regulatory problems. It said the IPO would come sometime in the fiscal year ending in March 2023. Chief Executive Masayoshi Son acknowledged he was disappointed but wasted no time in shifting to an aggressive sales pitch for Arm in its preparation to go public in the United States, likely on the Nasdaq exchange. Rather just being back, it's really going to grow explosively," Son told reporters. He said "a golden time" was coming because of Arm's "architecture", or technology for semiconductors, already widely used in mobile phones and adapted by internet giants like Amazon. Son said even bigger growth will come as the world shifts to electric vehicles because Arm products are energy-efficient. Earlier faltering results at Arm were merely because of a hefty investment in hiring engineers needed to keep such innovations going, Son said. Son said he was tapping new leadership to give Arm a fresh start, with Rene Haas, a semiconductor industry veteran, as chief executive, replacing Simon Segars. "With the uncertainty of the past several months behind us, we are emboldened by a renewed energy to move into a growth strategy and change lives around the world again," Haas said. Arm, which SoftBank acquired in 2016, is a leader in artificial intelligence, IoT, cloud, the metaverse and autonomous driving, with sales and profit growing in recent years. Its semiconductor design is widely licensed and used in virtually all smartphones, the majority of tablets and digital TVs. The company's business centres on designing chips and licensing the intellectual property to customers, rather than chip manufacturing, for which it relies on partners. Nvidia also confirmed the merger was no longer on, although it still had its 20-year licensing agreement with Arm. "Arm is at the centre of the important dynamics in computing.

US firm Nvidia is scrapping its $40 billion bid to buy UK mobile chip technology powerhouse Arm from SoftBank after persistent objections from regulators, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. Nvidia and SoftBank Group both declined to comment on the report, which cited three unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the deal. But the collapse would be no surprise, after recent speculation that the deal was on the verge of failure following pressure from US, UK and EU regulators concerned it would undermine competition. In December, US regulators filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger, while British and European regulators had ordered probes into the deal. Japan's SoftBank Group announced in 2020 that it was selling Arm for up to $40 billion in a deal it hoped to complete in early 2022, subject to regulatory approvals. The value of the cash-and-shares deal has risen since as stock markets have rallied, with Nvidia's shares soaring.

After listening to early adopters, Boston Dynamics gave its robot dog a hardware boost and extended WiFi capabilities. It can be controlled remotely using the company's new web browser-based interface, Scout. It's the first Boston Dynamics device equipped with self-charging capabilities and a dock, which means it can be deployed for longer-term missions "with little to no human interaction," Boston Dynamics said. The previous version of Spot had around 90 minutes of battery life before requiring a manual charge.

CHIP's highest-level goals were programmed C and runs on board. The RAP system is designed to deal with achieving goals in a dynamic environment. Each RAP task description encodes a set of methods for carrying out the task in different situations, a success check to tell when the task has accomplished its purpose, and notations that describe when things are not going as expected. At run time, a RAP task examines its methods and selects one that is appropriate in the current situation. By doing method selection at run time, RAPs are more likely to select the best method, even if the world is changing or contains details that cannot be predicted in advance.

Robots that can be physically reconfigured to do lots of different things are, in theory, a great way to maximize versatility while saving time and effort. Okay, yeah, that may not sound super exciting, but it means you can teach a dodecapod robot to transition into a septapod robot that can carry stuff with two arms while using a third to point a camera. Programmed in advance, that is, which is fine, except that as robots get more modular and easier to physically reconfigure, it becomes more and more useful to have a generalized system that can dynamically generate gaits (and transitions between gaits) on the fly no matter what the leg configuration of your robot happens to be. The researchers are planning on extending their method to include dynamic gaits, which means things like (we hope) running and jumping, and they're also going to generalize to other morphologies like bipeds and tripeds.