Tech Newsround – Nvidia and Apple

Nvidia – Window dressing Nvidia is signing up to make products in the USA which is a move I suspect that it was already executing but it will have done itself no harm by being seen to fall in with the patriotic agenda. Following a catch-up with the President of the United States, Nvidia has said that it will produce...

Autonomous Driving – Causality Debate

I don’t think Wayve is going to make it. Wayve’s deal with Nissan is a big shot in the arm for the “brute force” approach to autonomous driving, but Nissan has made no promises to use it beyond level 2 leading me to think that a somewhat reluctant Nissan has been coaxed into giving it a try by SoftBank. Wayve...

China vs. USA – Yield Debate

Yield is everything. Relative newcomer to the semiconductor game SiCarrier made a splash at Semicon China 2025 by launching a lot of new equipment and claiming that non-optical methods may enable China to start producing 5nm chips on homemade equipment. This has underpinned a lot of chatter with some of the commentariat now confidently predicting that China will produce 5nm...

Tech Newsround – MediaTek & OpenAI

MediaTek – PC next? Mediatek’s new chip for Chromebooks sets a new standard for the high end of the Chromebook market and looks to me to be merely a stone’s throw from Intel and AMD facing another newcomer in the PC Market. MediaTek’s Kompanio Ultra has an NPU that runs at 50 TOPS, 8 Big Arm v9.2 cores(Cortex-X925), 2 x...

Tech Newsround – Samsung & Microsoft

Samsung Q1 25 – Welcome relief Samsung reported good results as smartphones and legacy DRAM fared better than expected, but the key catalyst for recovery which is the qualification of Samsung’s HBM4 at Nvidia, remains a hurdle yet to be cleared. Preliminary Q1 25 revenues and operating profits came in at KRW79tn / KRW6.6tn ahead of estimates of KRW76.6tn /...

Meta Platforms – Llama-Seek

The fightback begins. Meta is demonstrating what RFM Research and Alavan Independent have suspected which is that DeepSeek’s methods are not that hard to replicate and that we are seeing the start of a race to the bottom in open source that will soon be replicated elsewhere. Meta has released Llama 4 which does not show any sudden jump in...

Gone Camel Racing – Back April 7th

RFM has taken a short break for the end of the camel racing season and will return on April 7th.    

Autonomous Autos – Hard Economics

Economics will decide this market. WeRide thinks that it is mostly governments and regulations that will impact its path to profitability, but I suspect that it will be the market which decides who wins and who loses. The world of autonomous driving is chugging along with slow progress from the pure plays and where the vehicle makers have effectively given...

OpenAI – Binary decision

Another $40bn found down the back of the sofa. Another $40bn to spend on compute will ensure that OpenAI does not have to become efficient like its Chinese competitors meaning that when the money runs out, it is likely to be caught out resulting in it being forced to sell itself to a rich competitor or one of its backers....

China vs. USA – Foundation Collapse

China will only accelerate what is already in progress. It appears that it is now Chinese government policy to flood the open-source community with AI models which to me looks like an attempt to turn foundation models into solar panels which China can then dominate by making them cheaper than anyone else. In solar panels, China undercut everyone else on...